TONO-BUNGAY by H.G Wells

TONO-BUNGAY
by H.G Wells
BOOK THE FIRST
THE DAYS BEFORE TONO-BUNGAY WAS INVENTED
CHAPTER THE FIRST
OF BLADESOVER HOUSE, AND MY MOTHER; AND THE CONSTITUTION OF
SOCIETY
I
Most people in this world seem to live "in character"; they have
a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one
with another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak
of them as being of this sort of people or that. They are, as
theatrical people say, no more (and no less) than "character
actors." They have a class, they have a place, they know what is
becoming in them and what is due to them, and their proper size
of tombstone tells at last how properly they have played the
part. But there is also another kind of life that is not so much
living as a miscellaneous tasting of life. One gets hit by some
unusual transverse force, one is jerked out of one's stratum and
lives crosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a
succession of samples. That has been my lot, and that is what
has set me at last writing something in the nature of a novel. I
have got an unusual series of impressions that I want very
urgently to tell. I have seen life at very different levels, and
at all these levels I have seen it with a sort of intimacy and in
good faith. I have been a native in many social countries. I
have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker, my cousin, who
has since died in the Chatham infirmary; I have eaten illegal
snacks--the unjustifiable gifts of footmen--in pantries, and been
despised for my want of style (and subsequently married and
divorced) by the daughter of a gasworks clerk; and--to go to my
other extreme--I was once--oh, glittering days!--an item in the
house-party of a countess. She was, I admit, a countess with a
financial aspect, but still, you know, a countess. I've seen
these people at various angles. At the dinner-table I've met not
simply the titled but the great. On one occasion--it is my
brightest memory--I upset my champagne over the trousers of the
greatest statesman in the empire--Heaven forbid I should be so
invidious as to name him!--in the warmth of our mutual
admiration.
And once (though it is the most incidental thing in my life) I
murdered a man....
Yes, I've seen a curious variety of people and ways of living
altogether. Odd people they all are great and small, very much
alike at bottom and curiously different on their surfaces. I
wish I had ranged just a little further both up and down, seeing
I have ranged so far. Royalty must be worth knowing and very
great fun. But my contacts with princes have been limited to
quite public occasions, nor at the other end of the scale have I
had what I should call an inside acquaintance with that dusty but
attractive class of people who go about on the high-roads drunk
but enfamille (so redeeming the minor lapse), in the summertime,
with a perambulator, lavender to sell, sun-brown children, a
smell, and ambiguous bundles that fire the imagination. Navvies,
farm-labourers, sailormen and stokers, all such as sit in 1834
beer-houses, are beyond me also, and I suppose must remain so now
for ever. My intercourse with the ducal rank too has been
negligible; I once went shooting with a duke, and in an outburst
of what was no doubt snobbishness, did my best to get him in the
legs. But that failed.
I'm sorry I haven't done the whole lot though....
You will ask by what merit I achieved this remarkable social
range, this extensive cross-section of the British social
organism. It was the Accident of Birth. It always is in
England.
Indeed, if I may make the remark so cosmic, everything is. But
that is by the way. I was my uncle's nephew, and my uncle was no
less a person than Edward Ponderevo, whose comet-like transit of
the financial heavens happened--it is now ten years ago! Do you
remember the days of Ponderevo, the great days, I mean, of
Ponderevo? Perhaps you had a trifle in some world-shaking
enterprise! Then you know him only too well. Astraddle on
Tono-Bungay, he flashed athwart the empty heavens--like a
comet--rather, like a stupendous rocket!--and overawed investors
spoke of his star. At his zenith he burst into a cloud of the
most magnificent promotions. What a time that was! The Napoleon
of domestic conveniences!
I was his nephew, his peculiar and intimate nephew. I was hanging
on to his coat-tails all the way through. I made pills with him
in the chemist's shop at Wimblehurst before he began. I was,
you might say, the stick of his rocket; and after our tremendous
soar, after he had played with millions, a golden rain in the
sky, after my bird's-eye view of the modern world, I fell again,
a little scarred and blistered perhaps, two and twenty years
older, with my youth gone, my manhood eaten in upon, but greatly
edified, into this Thames-side yard, into these white heats and
hammerings, amidst the fine realites of steel--to think it all
over in my leisure and jot down the notes and inconsecutive
observations that make this book. It was more, you know, than a
figurative soar. The zenith of that career was surely our flight
across the channel in the Lord Roberts B....
I warn you this book is going to be something of an
agglomeration. I want to trace my social trajectory (and my
uncle's) as the main line of my story, but as this is my first
novel and almost certainly my last, I want to get in, too, all
sorts of things that struck me, things that amused me and
impressions I got--even although they don't minister directly to
my narrative at all. I want to set out my own queer love
experiences too, such as they are, for they troubled and
distressed and swayed me hugely, and they still seem to me to
contain all sorts of irrational and debatable elements that I
shall be the clearer-headed for getting on paper. And possibly I
may even flow into descriptions of people who are really no more
than people seen in transit, just because it amuses me to recall
what they said and did to us, and more particularly how they
behaved in the brief but splendid glare of Tono-Bungay and its
still more glaring offspring. It lit some of them up, I can
assure you! Indeed, I want to get in all sorts of things. My
ideas of a novel all through are comprehensive rather than
austere....
Tono-Bungay still figures on the hoardings, it stands in rows in
every chemist's storeroom, it still assuages the coughs of age
and brightens the elderly eye and loosens the elderly tongue; but
its social glory, its financial illumination, have faded from the
world for ever. And I, sole scorched survivor from the blaze,
sit writing of it here in an air that is never still for the
clang and thunder of machines, on a table littered with working
drawings, and amid fragments of models and notes about velocities
and air and water pressures and trajectories--of an altogether
different sort from that of Tono-Bungay.
II
I write that much and look at it, and wonder whether, after all,
this is any fair statement of what I am attempting in this book.
I've given, I see, an impression that I want to make simply a
hotch-potch of anecdotes and experiences with my uncle swimming
in the middle as the largest lump of victual. I'll own that
here, with the pen already started, I realise what a fermenting
mass of things learnt and emotions experienced and theories
formed I've got to deal with, and how, in a sense, hopeless my
book must be from the very outset. I suppose what I'm really
trying to render is nothing more nor less than Life--as one man
has found it. I want to tell--MYSELF, and my impressions of the
thing as a whole, to say things I have come to feel intensely of
the laws, traditions, usages, and ideas we call society, and how
we poor individuals get driven and lured and stranded among these
windy, perplexing shoals and channels. I've got, I suppose, to a
time of life when things begin to take on shapes that have an air
of reality, and become no longer material for dreaming, but
interesting in themselves. I've reached the criticising,
novel-writing age, and here I am writing mine--my one
novel--without having any of the discipline to refrain and omit
that I suppose the regular novel-writer acquires.
I've read an average share of novels and made some starts before
this beginning, and I've found the restraints and rules of the
art (as I made them out) impossible for me. I like to write, I
am keenly interested in writing, but it is not my technique.
I'm an engineer with a patent or two and a set of ideas; most of
whatever artist there is in me has been given to turbine machines
and boat building and the problem of flying, and do what I will I
fail to see how I can be other than a lax, undisciplined
story-teller. I must sprawl and flounder, comment and theorise,
if I am to get the thing out I have in mind. And it isn't a
constructed tale I have to tell, but unmanageable realities. My
love-story--and if only I can keep up the spirit of truth-telling
all through as strongly as I have now, you shall have it
all--falls into no sort of neat scheme of telling. It involves
three separate feminine persons. It's all mixed up with the
other things....
But I've said enough, I hope, to excuse myself for the method or
want of method in what follows, and I think I had better tell
without further delay of my boyhood and my early impressions in
the shadow of Bladesover House.
III
There came a time when I realised that Bladesover House was not
all it seemed, but when I was a little boy I took the place with
the entirest faith as a complete authentic microcosm. I
believed that the Bladesover system was a little
working-model--and not so very little either--of the whole world.
Let me try and give you the effect of it.
Bladesover lies up on the Kentish Downs, eight miles perhaps from
Ashborough; and its old pavilion, a little wooden parody of the
temple of Vesta at Tibur, upon the hill crest behind the house,
commands in theory at least a view of either sea, of the Channel
southward and the Thames to the northeast. The park is the
second largest in Kent, finely wooded with well-placed beeches,
many elms and some sweet chestnuts, abounding in little valleys
and hollows of bracken, with springs and a stream and three fine
ponds and multitudes of fallow deer. The house was built in the
eighteenth century, it is of pale red brick in the style of a
French chateau, and save for one pass among the crests which
opens to blue distances, to minute, remote, oast-set farm-houses
and copses and wheat fields and the occasional gleam of water,
its hundred and seventeen windows look on nothing but its own
wide and handsome territories. A semi-circular screen of great
beeches masks the church and village, which cluster picturesquely
about the high road along the skirts of the great park.
Northward, at the remotest corner of that enclosure, is a second
dependent village, Ropedean, less fortunate in its greater
distance and also on account of a rector. This divine was indeed
rich, but he was vindictively economical because of some
shrinkage of his tithes; and by reason of his use of the word
Eucharist for the Lord's Supper he had become altogether
estranged from the great ladies of Bladesover. So that Ropedean
was in the shadows through all that youthful time.
Now the unavoidable suggestion of that wide park and that fair
large house, dominating church, village and the country side, was
that they represented the thing that mattered supremely in the
world, and that all other things had significance only in
relation to them. They represented the Gentry, the Quality, by
and through and for whom the rest of the world, the farming folk
and the labouring folk, the trades-people of Ashborough, and the
upper servants and the lower servants and the servants of the
estate, breathed and lived and were permitted. And the Quality
did it so quietly and thoroughly, the great house mingled so
solidly and effectually earth and sky, the contrast of its
spacious hall and saloon and galleries, its airy housekeeper's
room and warren of offices with the meagre dignities of the
vicar, and the pinched and stuffy rooms of even the post-office
people and the grocer, so enforced these suggestions, that it was
only when I was a boy of thirteen or fourteen and some queer
inherited strain of scepticism had set me doubting whether Mr.
Bartlett, the vicar, did really know with certainty all about
God, that as a further and deeper step in doubting I began to
question the final rightness of the gentlefolks, their primary
necessity in the scheme of things. But once that scepticism had
awakened it took me fast and far. By fourteen I had achieved
terrible blasphemies and sacrilege; I had resolved to marry a
viscount's daughter, and I had blacked the left eye--I think it
was the left--of her half-brother, in open and declared
rebellion.
But of that in its place.
The great house, the church, the village, and the labourers and
the servants in their stations and degrees, seemed to me, I say,
to be a closed and complete social system. About us were other
villages and great estates, and from house to house, interlacing,
correlated, the Gentry, the fine Olympians, came and went. The
country towns seemed mere collections of ships, marketing places
for the tenantry, centres for such education as they needed, as
entirely dependent on the gentry as the village and scarcely less
directly so. I thought this was the order of the whole world. I
thought London was only a greater country town where the
gentle-folk kept town-houses and did their greater shopping under
the magnificent shadow of the greatest of all fine gentlewomen,
the Queen. It seemed to be in the divine order. That all this
fine appearance was already sapped, that there were forces at
work that might presently carry all this elaborate social system
in which my mother instructed me so carefully that I might
understand my "place," to Limbo, had scarcely dawned upon me even
by the time that Tono-Bungay was fairly launched upon the world.
There are many people in England to-day upon whom it has not yet
dawned. There are times when I doubt whether any but a very
inconsiderable minority of English people realise how extensively
this ostensible order has even now passed away. The great houses
stand in the parks still, the cottages cluster respectfully on
their borders, touching their eaves with their creepers, the
English countryside--you can range through Kent from Bladesover
northward and see persists obstinately in looking what it was.
It is like an early day in a fine October. The hand of change
rests on it all, unfelt, unseen; resting for awhile, as it were
half reluctantly, before it grips and ends the thing for ever.
One frost and the whole face of things will be bare, links snap,
patience end, our fine foliage of pretences lie glowing in the
mire.
For that we have still to wait a little while. The new order may
have gone far towards shaping itself, but just as in that sort of
lantern show that used to be known in the village as the
"Dissolving Views," the scene that is going remains upon the
mind, traceable and evident, and the newer picture is yet
enigmatical long after the lines that are to replace those former
ones have grown bright and strong, so that the new England of our
children's children is still a riddle to me. The ideas of
democracy, of equality, and above all of promiscuous fraternity
have certainly never really entered into the English mind. But
what IS coming into it? All this book, I hope, will bear a
little on that. Our people never formulates; it keeps words for
jests and ironies. In the meanwhile the old shapes, the old
attitudes remain, subtly changed and changing still, sheltering
strange tenants. Bladesover House is now let furnished to Sir
Reuben Lichtenstein, and has been since old Lady Drew died; it
was my odd experience to visit there, in the house of which my
mother had been housekeeper, when my uncle was at the climax of
Tono-Bungay. It was curious to notice then the little
differences that had come to things with this substitution. To
borrow an image from my mineralogical days, these Jews were not
so much a new British gentry as "pseudomorphous" after the
gentry. They are a very clever people, the Jews, but not clever
enough to suppress their cleverness. I wished I could have gone
downstairs to savour the tone of the pantry. It would have been
very different I know. Hawksnest, over beyond, I noted, had its
pseudomorph too; a newspaper proprietor of the type that hustles
along with stolen ideas from one loud sink-or-swim enterprise to
another, had bought the place outright; Redgrave was in the hands
of brewers.
But the people in the villages, so far as I could detect, saw no
difference in their world. Two little girls bobbed and an old
labourer touched his hat convulsively as I walked through the
village. He still thought he knew his place--and mine. I did
not know him, but I would have liked dearly to have asked him if
he remembered my mother, if either my uncle or old Lichtenstein
had been man enough to stand being given away like that.
In that English countryside of my boyhood every human being had a
"place." It belonged to you from your birth like the colour of
your eyes, it was inextricably your destiny. Above you were
your betters, below you were your inferiors, and there were even
an unstable questionable few, cases so disputable that you might
for the rough purposes of every day at least, regard them as your
equals. Head and centre of our system was Lady Drew, her
"leddyship," shrivelled, garrulous, with a wonderful memory for
genealogies and very, very old, and beside her and nearly as old,
Miss Somerville, her cousin and companion. These two old souls
lived like dried-up kernels in the great shell of Bladesover
House, the shell that had once been gaily full of fops, of fine
ladies in powder and patches and courtly gentlemen with swords;
and when there was no company they spent whole days in the corner
parlour just over the housekeeper's room, between reading and
slumber and caressing their two pet dogs. When I was a boy I
used always to think of these two poor old creatures as superior
beings living, like God, somewhere through the ceiling.
Occasionally they bumped about a bit and one even heard them
overhead, which gave them a greater effect of reality without
mitigating their vertical predominance. Sometimes too I saw
them. Of course if I came upon them in the park or in the
shrubbery (where I was a trespasser) I hid or fled in pious
horror, but I was upon due occasion taken into the Presence by
request. I remember her "leddyship" then as a thing of black
silks and a golden chain, a quavering injunction to me to be a
good boy, a very shrunken loose-skinned face and neck, and a ropy
hand that trembled a halfcrown into mine. Miss Somerville
hovered behind, a paler thing of broken lavender and white and
black, with screwed up, sandy-lashed eyes. Her hair was yellow
and her colour bright, and when we sat in the housekeeper's room
of a winter's night warming our toes and sipping elder wine, her
maid would tell us the simple secrets of that belated flush....
After my fight with young Garvell I was of course banished, and I
never saw those poor old painted goddesses again.
Then there came and went on these floors over our respectful
heads, the Company; people I rarely saw, but whose tricks and
manners were imitated and discussed by their maids and valets in
the housekeeper's room and the steward's room--so that I had them
through a medium at second hand. I gathered that none of the
company were really Lady Drew's equals, they were greater and
lesser after the manner of all things in our world. Once I
remember there was a Prince, with a real live gentleman in
attendance, and that was a little above our customary levels and
excited us all, and perhaps raised our expectations unduly.
Afterwards, Rabbits, the butler, came into my mother's room
downstairs, red with indignation and with tears in his eyes.
"Look at that!" gasped Rabbits. My mother was speechless with
horror. That was a sovereign, a mere sovereign, such as you
might get from any commoner!
After Company, I remember, came anxious days, for the poor old
women upstairs were left tired and cross and vindictive, and in a
state of physical and emotional indigestion after their social
efforts....
On the lowest fringe of these real Olympians hung the vicarage
people, and next to them came those ambiguous beings who are
neither quality nor subjects. The vicarage people certainly hold
a place by themselves in the typical English scheme; nothing is
more remarkable than the progress the Church has
made--socially--in the last two hundred years. In the early
eighteenth century the vicar was rather under than over the
house-steward, and was deemed a fitting match for the housekeeper
or any not too morally discredited discard. The eighteenth
century literature is full of his complaints that he might not
remain at table to share the pie. He rose above these
indignities because of the abundance of younger sons. When I
meet the large assumptions of the contemporary cleric, I am apt
to think of these things. It is curious to note that to-day that
down-trodden, organ-playing creature, the Church of England
village Schoolmaster, holds much the same position as the
seventeenth century parson. The doctor in Bladesover ranked
below the vicar but above the "vet," artists and summer visitors
squeezed in above or below this point according to their
appearance and expenditure, and then in a carefully arranged
scale came the tenantry, the butler and housekeeper, the village
shopkeeper, the head keeper, the cook, the publican, the second
keeper, the blacksmith (whose status was complicated by his
daughter keeping the post-office--and a fine hash she used to
make of telegrams too!) the village shopkeeper's eldest son, the
first footman, younger sons of the village shopkeeper, his first
assistant, and so forth.
All these conceptions and applications of a universal precedence
and much else I drank in at Bladesover, as I listened to the talk
of valets, ladies'-maids, Rabbits the butler and my mother in the
much-cupboarded, white-painted, chintz-brightened housekeeper's
room where the upper servants assembled, or of footmen and
Rabbits and estate men of all sorts among the green baize and
Windsor chairs of the pantry--where Rabbits, being above the law,
sold beer without a license or any compunction--or of housemaids
and still-room maids in the bleak, matting-carpeted still-room or
of the cook and her kitchen maids and casual friends among the
bright copper and hot glow of the kitchens.
Of course their own ranks and places came by implication to
these people, and it was with the ranks and places of the
Olympians that the talk mainly concerned itself. There was an
old peerage and a Crockford together with the books of recipes,
the Whitaker's Almanack, the Old Moore's Almanack, and the
eighteenth century dictionary, on the little dresser that broke
the cupboards on one side of my mother's room; there was another
peerage, with the covers off, in the pantry; there was a new
peerage in the billiard-room, and I seem to remember another in
the anomalous apartment that held the upper servants' bagatelle
board and in which, after the Hall dinner, they partook of the
luxury of sweets. And if you had asked any of those upper
servants how such and such a Prince of Battenberg was related
to, let us say, Mr. Cunninghame Graham or the Duke of Argyle, you
would have been told upon the nail. As a boy, I heard a great
deal of that sort of thing, and if to this day I am still a
little vague about courtesy titles and the exact application of
honorifics, it is, I can assure you, because I hardened my heart,
and not from any lack of adequate opportunity of mastering these
succulent particulars.
Dominating all these memories is the figure of my mother--my
mother who did not love me because I grew liker my father every
day--and who knew with inflexible decision her place and the
place of every one in the world--except the place that concealed
my father--and in some details mine. Subtle points were put to
her. I can see and hear her saying now, "No, Miss Fison, peers
of England go in before peers of the United Kingdom, and he is
merely a peer of the United Kingdom." She had much exercise in
placing people's servants about her tea-table, where the
etiquette was very strict. I wonder sometimes if the etiquette
of housekeepers' rooms is as strict to-day, and what my mother
would have made of a chauffeur....
On the whole I am glad that I saw so much as I did of
Bladesover--if for no other reason than because seeing it when I
did, quite naively, believing in it thoroughly, and then coming
to analyse it, has enabled me to understand much that would be
absolutely incomprehensible in the structure of English society.
Bladesover is, I am convinced, the clue to almost all that is
distinctively British and perplexing to the foreign inquirer in
England and the English-speaking peoples. Grasp firmly that
England was all Bladesover two hundred years ago; that it has had
Reform Acts indeed, and such--like changes of formula, but no
essential revolution since then; that all that is modern and
different has come in as a thing intruded or as a gloss upon
this predominant formula, either impertinently or apologetically;
and you will perceive at once the reasonableness, the necessity,
of that snobbishness which is the distinctive quality of English
thought. Everybody who is not actually in the shadow of a
Bladesover is as it were perpetually seeking after lost
orientations. We have never broken with our tradition, never
even symbolically hewed it to pieces, as the French did in
quivering fact in the Terror. But all the organizing ideas have
slackened, the old habitual bonds have relaxed or altogether
come undone. And America too, is, as it were, a detached,
outlying part of that estate which has expanded in queer ways.
George Washington, Esquire, was of the gentlefolk, and he came
near being a King. It was Plutarch, you know, and nothing
intrinsically American that prevented George Washington being a
King....
IV
I hated teatime in the housekeeper's room more than anything else
at Bladesover. And more particularly I hated it when Mrs.
Mackridge and Mrs. Booch and Mrs. Latude-Fernay were staying in
the house. They were, all three of them, pensioned-off servants.
Old friends of Lady Drew's had rewarded them posthumously for a
prolonged devotion to their minor comforts, and Mrs. Booch was
also trustee for a favourite Skye terrier. Every year Lady Drew
gave them an invitation--a reward and encouragement of virtue
with especial reference to my mother and Miss Fison, the maid.
They sat about in black and shiny and flouncey clothing adorned
with gimp and beads, eating great quantities of cake, drinking
much tea in a stately manner and reverberating remarks.
I remember these women as immense. No doubt they were of
negotiable size, but I was only a very little chap and they have
assumed nightmare proportions in my mind. They loomed, they
bulged, they impended. Mrs. Mackridge was large and dark; there
was a marvel about her head, inasmuch as she was bald. She wore
a dignified cap, and in front of that upon her brow, hair was
PAINTED. I have never seen the like since. She had been maid to
the widow of Sir Roderick Blenderhasset Impey, some sort of
governor or such-like portent in the East Indies, and from her
remains--in Mrs. Mackridge--I judge Lady Impey was a very
stupendous and crushing creature indeed. Lady Impey had been of
the Juno type, haughty, unapproachable, given to irony and a
caustic wit. Mrs. Mackridge had no wit, but she had acquired the
caustic voice and gestures along with the old satins and
trimmings of the great lady. When she told you it was a fine
morning, she seemed also to be telling you you were a fool and
a low fool to boot; when she was spoken to, she had a way of
acknowledging your poor tinkle of utterance with a voluminous,
scornful "Haw!" that made you want to burn her alive. She also
had a way of saying "Indade!" with a droop of the eyelids.
Mrs. Booch was a smaller woman, brown haired, with queer little
curls on either side of her face, large blue eyes and a small set
of stereotyped remarks that constituted her entire mental range.
Mrs. Latude-Fernay has left, oddly enough, no memory at all
except her name and the effect of a green-grey silk dress, all
set with gold and blue buttons. I fancy she was a large blonde.
Then there was Miss Fison, the maid who served both Lady Drew and
Miss Somerville, and at the end of the table opposite my mother,
sat Rabbits the butler. Rabbits, for a butler, was an unassuming
man, and at tea he was not as you know butlers, but in a morning
coat and a black tie with blue spots. Still, he was large, with
side whiskers, even if his clean-shaven mouth was weak and
little. I sat among these people on a high, hard, early
Gregorian chair, trying to exist, like a feeble seedling amidst
great rocks, and my mother sat with an eye upon me, resolute to
suppress the slightest manifestation of vitality. It was hard on
me, but perhaps it was also hard upon these rather over-fed,
ageing, pretending people, that my youthful restlessness and
rebellious unbelieving eyes should be thrust in among their
dignities.
Tea lasted for nearly three-quarters of an hour, and I sat it out
perforce; and day after day the talk was exactly the same.
"Sugar, Mrs. Mackridge?" my mother used to ask.
"Sugar, Mrs. Latude-Fernay?"
The word sugar would stir the mind of Mrs. Mackridge. "They
say," she would begin, issuing her proclamation--at least half
her sentences began "they say"--"sugar is fatt-an-ing, nowadays.
Many of the best people do not take it at all."
"Not with their tea, ma'am," said Rabbits intelligently.
"Not with anything," said Mrs. Mackridge, with an air of crushing
repartee, and drank.
"What won't they say next?" said Miss Fison.
"They do say such things!" said Mrs. Booch.
"They say," said Mrs. Mackridge, inflexibly, "the doctors are not
recomm-an-ding it now."
My Mother: "No, ma'am?"
Mrs. Mackridge: "No, ma'am."
Then, to the table at large: "Poor Sir Roderick, before he died,
consumed great quan-ta-ties of sugar. I have sometimes fancied
it may have hastened his end."
This ended the first skirmish. A certain gloom of manner and a
pause was considered due to the sacred memory of Sir Roderick.
"George," said my mother, "don't kick the chair!"
Then, perhaps, Mrs. Booch would produce a favourite piece from
her repertoire. "The evenings are drawing out nicely," she would
say, or if the season was decadent, "How the evenings draw in!"
It was an invaluable remark to her; I do not know how she would
have got along without it.
My mother, who sat with her back to the window, would always
consider it due to Mrs. Booch to turn about and regard the
evening in the act of elongation or contraction, whichever phase
it might be.
A brisk discussion of how long we were to the longest or shortest
day would ensue, and die away at last exhausted.
Mrs. Mackridge, perhaps, would reopen. She had many intelligent
habits; among others she read the paper--The Morning Post. The
other ladies would at times tackle that sheet, but only to read
the births, marriages, and deaths on the front page. It was, of
course, the old Morning Post that cost threepence, not the brisk
coruscating young thing of to-day. "They say," she would open,
"that Lord Tweedums is to go to Canada."
"Ah!" said Mr. Rabbits; "dew they?"
"Isn't he," said my mother, "the Earl of Slumgold's cousin?" She
knew he was; it was an entirely irrelevant and unnecessary
remark, but still, something to say.
"The same, ma'am," said Mrs. Mackridge. "They say he was
extremelay popular in New South Wales. They looked up to him
greatlay. I knew him, ma'am, as a young man. A very nice
pleasant young fella."
Interlude of respect.
"'Is predecessor," said Rabbits, who had acquired from some
clerical model a precise emphatic articulation without acquiring
at the same time the aspirates that would have graced it, "got
into trouble at Sydney."
"Haw!" said Mrs. Mackridge, scornfully, "so am tawled."
"'E came to Templemorton after 'e came back, and I remember them
talking 'im over after 'e'd gone again."
"Haw?" said Mrs. Mackridge, interrogatively.
"'Is fuss was quotin' poetry, ma'am. 'E said--what was it 'e
said--'They lef' their country for their country's good,'--which
in some way was took to remind them of their being originally
convic's, though now reformed. Every one I 'eard speak, agreed
it was takless of 'im."
"Sir Roderick used to say," said Mrs. Mackridge, "that the First
Thing,"--here Mrs. Mackridge paused and looked dreadfully at
me--"and the Second Thing"--here she fixed me again--"and the
Third Thing"--now I was released--"needed in a colonial governor
is Tact." She became aware of my doubts again, and added
predominantly, "It has always struck me that that was a
Singularly True Remark."
I resolved that if ever I found this polypus of Tact growing up
in my soul, I would tear it out by the roots, throw it forth and
stamp on it.
"They're queer people--colonials," said Rabbits, "very queer.
When I was at Templemorton I see something of 'em. Queer
fellows, some of 'em. Very respectful of course, free with their
money in a spasammy sort of way, but-- Some of 'em, I must
confess, make me nervous. They have an eye on you. They watch
you--as you wait. They let themselves appear to be lookin' at
you..."
My mother said nothing in that discussion. The word colonies
always upset her. She was afraid, I think, that if she turned
her mind in that direction my errant father might suddenly and
shockingly be discovered, no doubt conspicuously bigamic and
altogether offensive and revolutionary. She did not want to
rediscover my father at all.
It is curious that when I was a little listening boy I had such
an idea of our colonies that I jeered in my heart at Mrs.
Mackridge's colonial ascendancy. These brave emancipated
sunburnt English of the open, I thought, suffer these
aristocratic invaders as a quaint anachronism, but as for being
gratified--!
I don't jeer now. I'm not so sure.
V
It is a little difficult to explain why I did not come to do what
was the natural thing for any one in my circumstances to do, and
take my world for granted. A certain innate scepticism, I think,
explains it and a certain inaptitude for sympathetic
assimilation. My father, I believe, was a sceptic; my mother was
certainly a hard woman.
I was an only child, and to this day I do not know whether my
father is living or dead. He fled my mother's virtues before my
distincter memories began. He left no traces in his flight, and
she, in her indignation, destroyed every vestige that she could
of him. Never a photograph nor a scrap of his handwriting have I
seen; and it was, I know, only the accepted code of virtue and
discretion that prevented her destroying her marriage
certificate and me, and so making a clean sweep of her
matrimonial humiliation. I suppose I must inherit something of
the moral stupidity that would enable her to make a holocaust of
every little personal thing she had of him. There must have been
presents made by him as a lover, for example--books with kindly
inscriptions, letters perhaps, a flattened flower, a ring, or
such-like gage. She kept her wedding-ring, of course, but all
the others she destroyed. She never told me his christian name
or indeed spoke a word to me of him; though at times I came near
daring to ask her: add what I have of him--it isn't much--I got
from his brother, my hero, my uncle Ponderevo. She wore her
ring; her marriage certificate she kept in a sealed envelope in
the very bottom of her largest trunk, and me she sustained at a
private school among the Kentish hills. You must not think I was
always at Bladesover--even in my holidays. If at the time these
came round, Lady Drew was vexed by recent Company, or for any
other reason wished to take it out of my mother, then she used to
ignore the customary reminder my mother gave her, and I "stayed
on" at the school.
But such occasions were rare, and I suppose that between ten and
fourteen I averaged fifty days a year at Bladesover.
Don't imagine I deny that was a fine thing for me. Bladesover, in
absorbing the whole countryside, had not altogether missed
greatness. The Bladesover system has at least done one good
thing for England, it has abolished the peasant habit of mind.
If many of us still live and breathe pantry and housekeeper's
room, we are quit of the dream of living by economising
parasitically on hens and pigs.... About that park there were
some elements of a liberal education; there was a great space of
greensward not given over to manure and food grubbing; there was
mystery, there was matter for the imagination. It was still a
park of deer. I saw something of the life of these dappled
creatures, heard the belling of stags, came upon young fawns
among the bracken, found bones, skulls, and antlers in lonely
places. There were corners that gave a gleam of meaning to the
word forest, glimpses of unstudied natural splendour. There was
a slope of bluebells in the broken sunlight under the newly green
beeches in the west wood that is now precious sapphire in my
memory; it was the first time that I knowingly met Beauty.
And in the house there were books. The rubbish old Lady Drew
read I never saw; stuff of the Maria Monk type, I have since
gathered, had a fascination for her; but back in the past there
had been a Drew of intellectual enterprise, Sir Cuthbert, the son
of Sir Matthew who built the house; and thrust away, neglected
and despised, in an old room upstairs, were books and treasures
of his that my mother let me rout among during a spell of wintry
wet. Sitting under a dormer window on a shelf above great stores
of tea and spices, I became familiar with much of Hogarth in a
big portfolio, with Raphael, there was a great book of
engravings from the stanzas of Raphael in the Vatican--and with
most of the capitals of Europe as they had looked about 1780, by
means of several pig iron-moulded books of views. There was also
a broad eighteenth century atlas with huge wandering maps that
instructed me mightily. It had splendid adornments about each
map title; Holland showed a fisherman and his boat; Russia a
Cossack; Japan, remarkable people attired in pagodas--I say it
deliberately, "pagodas." There were Terrae Incognitae in every
continent then, Poland, Sarmatia, lands since lost; and many a
voyage I made with a blunted pin about that large, incorrect and
dignified world. The books in that little old closet had been
banished, I suppose, from the saloon during the Victorian revival
of good taste and emasculated orthodoxy, but my mother had no
suspicion of their character. So I read and understood the good
sound rhetoric of Tom Paine's "Rights of Man," and his "Common
Sense," excellent books, once praised by bishops and since
sedulously lied about. Gulliver was there unexpurgated, strong
meat for a boy perhaps but not too strong I hold--I have never
regretted that I escaped niceness in these affairs. The satire
of Traldragdubh made my blood boil as it was meant to do, but I
hated Swift for the Houyhnhnms and never quite liked a horse
afterwards. Then I remember also a translation of Voltaire's
"Candide," and "Rasselas;" and, vast book though it was, I really
believe I read, in a muzzy sort of way of course, from end to
end, and even with some reference now and then to the Atlas,
Gibbon--in twelve volumes.
These readings whetted my taste for more, and surreptitiously I
raided the bookcases in the big saloon. I got through quite a
number of books before my sacrilegious temerity was discovered by
Ann, the old head-housemaid. I remember that among others I
tried a translation of Plato's "Republic" then, and found
extraordinarily little interest in it; I was much too young for
that; but "Vathek"--"Vathek" was glorious stuff. That kicking
affair! When everybody HAD to kick!
The thought of "Vathek" always brings back with it my boyish
memory of the big saloon at Bladesover.
It was a huge long room with many windows opening upon the park,
and each window--there were a dozen or more reaching from the
floor up--had its elaborate silk or satin curtains, heavily
fringed, a canopy (is it?) above, its completely white shutters
folding into the deep thickness of the wall. At either end of
that great still place was an immense marble chimney-piece; the
end by the bookcase showed the wolf and Romulus and Remus, with
Homer and Virgil for supporters; the design of the other end I
have forgotten. Frederick, Prince of Wales, swaggered flatly
over the one, twice life-size, but mellowed by the surface gleam
of oil; and over the other was an equally colossal group of
departed Drews as sylvan deities, scantily clad, against a
storm-rent sky. Down the centre of the elaborate ceiling were
three chandeliers, each bearing some hundreds of dangling glass
lustres, and over the interminable carpet--it impressed me as
about as big as Sarmatia in the store-room Atlas--were islands
and archipelagoes of chintz-covered chairs and couches, tables,
great Sevres vases on pedestals, a bronze man and horse.
Somewhere in this wilderness one came, I remember, upon--a big
harp beside a lyre-shaped music stand, and a grand piano....
The book-borrowing raid was one of extraordinary dash and danger.
One came down the main service stairs--that was legal, and
illegality began in a little landing when, very cautiously, one
went through a red baize door. A little passage led to the hall,
and here one reconnoitered for Ann, the old head-housemaid--the
younger housemaids were friendly and did not count. Ann located,
came a dash across the open space at the foot of that great
staircase that has never been properly descended since powder
went out of fashion, and so to the saloon door. A beast of an
oscillating Chinaman in china, as large as life, grimaced and
quivered to one's lightest steps. That door was the perilous
place; it was double with the thickness of the wall between, so
that one could not listen beforehand for the whisk of the
feather-brush on the other side. Oddly rat-like, is it not, this
darting into enormous places in pursuit of the abandoned crumbs
of thought?
And I found Langhorne's "Plutarch" too, I remember, on those
shelves. It seems queer to me now to think that I acquired pride
and self-respect, the idea of a state and the germ of public
spirit, in such a furtive fashion; queer, too, that it should
rest with an old Greek, dead these eighteen hundred years to
teach that.
VI
The school I went to was the sort of school the Bladesover system
permitted. The public schools that add comic into existence in
the brief glow of the Renascence had been taken possession of by
the ruling class; the lower classes were not supposed to stand in
need of schools, and our middle stratum got the schools it
deserved, private schools, schools any unqualified pretender was
free to establish. Mine was kept by a man who had had the energy
to get himself a College of Preceptors diploma, and considering
how cheap his charges were, I will readily admit the place might
have been worse. The building was a dingy yellow-brick residence
outside the village, with the schoolroom as an outbuilding of
lath and plaster.
I do not remember that my school-days were unhappy--indeed I
recall a good lot of fine mixed fun in them--but I cannot without
grave risk of misinterpretation declare that we were at all nice
and refined. We fought much, not sound formal fighting, but
"scrapping" of a sincere and murderous kind, into which one might
bring one's boots--it made us tough at any rate--and several of
us were the sons of London publicans, who distinguished "scraps"
where one meant to hurt from ordered pugilism, practising both
arts, and having, moreover, precocious linguistic gifts. Our
cricket-field was bald about the wickets, and we played without
style and disputed with the umpire; and the teaching was chiefly
in the hands of a lout of nineteen, who wore ready-made clothes
and taught despicably. The head-master and proprietor taught us
arithmetic, algebra, and Euclid, and to the older boys even
trigonometry, himself; he had a strong mathematical bias, and I
think now that by the standard of a British public school he did
rather well by us.
We had one inestimable privilege at that school, and that was
spiritual neglect. We dealt with one another with the forcible
simplicity of natural boys, we "cheeked," and "punched" and
"clouted"; we thought ourselves Red Indians and cowboys and
such-like honourable things, and not young English gentlemen; we
never felt the strain of "Onward Christian soldiers," nor were
swayed by any premature piety in the cold oak pew of our Sunday
devotions. All that was good. We spent our rare pennies in the
uncensored reading matter of the village dame's shop, on the Boys
of England, and honest penny dreadfuls--ripping stuff, stuff
that anticipated Haggard and Stevenson, badly printed and queerly
illustrated, and very very good for us. On our half-holidays we
were allowed the unusual freedom of rambling in twos and threes
wide and far about the land, talking experimentally, dreaming
wildly. There was much in those walks! To this day the
landscape of the Kentish world, with its low broad distances, its
hop gardens and golden stretches of wheat, its oasts and square
church towers, its background of downland and hangers, has for me
a faint sense of adventure added to the pleasure of its beauty.
We smoked on occasion, but nobody put us up to the proper
"boyish" things to do; we never "robbed an orchard" for example,
though there were orchards all about us, we thought stealing was
sinful, we stole incidental apples and turnips and strawberries
from the fields indeed, but in a criminal inglorious fashion, and
afterwards we were ashamed. We had our days of adventure, but
they were natural accidents, our own adventures. There was one
hot day when several of us, walking out towards Maidstone, were
incited by the devil to despise ginger beer, and we fuddled
ourselves dreadfully with ale; and a time when our young minds
were infected to the pitch of buying pistols, by the legend of
the Wild West. Young Roots from Highbury came back with a
revolver and cartridges, and we went off six strong to live a
free wild life one holiday afternoon. We fired our first shot
deep in the old flint mine at Chiselstead, and nearly burst our
ear drums; then we fired in a primrose studded wood by Pickthorn
Green, and I gave a false alarm of "keeper," and we fled in
disorder for a mile. After which Roots suddenly shot at a
pheasant in the high road by Chiselstead, and then young Barker
told lies about the severity of the game laws and made Roots sore
afraid, and we hid the pistol in a dry ditch outside the school
field. A day or so after we got in again, and ignoring a certain
fouling and rusting of the barrel, tried for a rabbit at three
hundred yards. Young Roots blew a molehill at twenty paces into
a dust cloud, burnt his fingers, and scorched his face; and the
weapon having once displayed this strange disposition to flame
back upon the shooter, was not subsequently fired.
One main source of excitement for us was "cheeking" people in
vans and carts upon the Goudhurst road; and getting myself into a
monstrous white mess in the chalk pits beyond the village, and
catching yellow jaundice as a sequel to bathing stark naked with
three other Adamites, old Ewart leading that function, in the
rivulet across Hickson's meadows, are among my memorabilia.
Those free imaginative afternoons! how much they were for us! how
much they did for us! All streams came from the then
undiscovered "sources of the Nile" in those days, all thickets
were Indian jungles, and our best game, I say it with pride, I
invented. I got it out of the Bladesover saloon. We found a
wood where "Trespassing" was forbidden, and did the "Retreat of
the Ten Thousand" through it from end to end, cutting our way
bravely through a host of nettle beds that barred our path, and
not forgetting to weep and kneel when at last we emerged within
sight of the High Road Sea. So we have burst at times, weeping
and rejoicing, upon startled wayfarers. Usually I took the part
of that distinguished general Xenophen--and please note the
quantity of the o. I have all my classical names like
that,--Socrates rhymes with Bates for me, and except when the
bleak eye of some scholar warns me of his standards of judgment,
I use those dear old mispronunciations still. The little splash
into Latin made during my days as a chemist washed off nothing of
the habit. Well,--if I met those great gentlemen of the past
with their accents carelessly adjusted I did at least meet them
alive, as an equal, and in a living tongue. Altogether my school
might easily have been worse for me, and among other good things
it gave me a friend who has lasted my life out.
This was Ewart, who is now a monumental artist at Woking, after
many vicissitudes. Dear chap, how he did stick out of his
clothes to be sure! He was a longlimbed lout, ridiculously tall
beside my more youth full compactness, and, except that there was
no black moustache under his nose blob, he had the same round
knobby face as he has to-day, the same bright and active hazel
brown eyes, the stare, the meditative moment, the insinuating
reply. Surely no boy ever played the fool as Bob Ewart used to
play it, no boy had a readier knack of mantling the world with
wonder. Commonness vanished before Ewart, at his expository
touch all things became memorable and rare. From him I first
heard tell of love, but only after its barbs were already
sticking in my heart. He was, I know now the bastard of that
great improvident artist, Rickmann Ewart; he brought the light of
a lax world that at least had not turned its back upon beauty,
into the growing fermentation of my mind.
I won his heart by a version of Vathek, and after that we were
inseparable yarning friends. We merged our intellectual stock so
completely that I wonder sometimes how much I did not become
Ewart, how much Ewart is not vicariously and derivatively me.
VII
And then when I had newly passed my fourteenth birthday, came my
tragic disgrace.
It was in my midsummer holidays that the thing happened, and it
was through the Honourable Beatrice Normandy. She had "come into
my life," as they say, before I was twelve.
She descended unexpectedly into a peaceful interlude that
followed the annual going of those Three Great Women. She came
into the old nursery upstairs, and every day she had tea with us
in the housekeeper's room. She was eight, and she came with a
nurse called Nannie; and to begin with, I did not like her at
all.
Nobody liked this irruption into the downstairs rooms; the two
"gave trouble,"--a dire offence; Nannie's sense of duty to her
charge led to requests and demands that took my mother's breath
away. Eggs at unusual times, the reboiling of milk, the
rejection of an excellent milk pudding--not negotiated
respectfully but dictated as of right. Nannie was a dark,
longfeatured, taciturn woman in a grey dress; she had a furtive
inflexibility of manner that finally dismayed and crushed and
overcame. She conveyed she was "under orders"--like a Greek
tragedy. She was that strange product of the old time, a
devoted, trusted servant; she had, as it were, banked all her
pride and will with the greater, more powerful people who
employed her, in return for a life-long security of
servitude--the bargain was nonetheless binding for being
implicit. Finally they were to pension her, and she would die
the hated treasure of a boarding-house. She had built up in
herself an enormous habit of reference to these upstairs people,
she had curbed down all discordant murmurings of her soul, her
very instincts were perverted or surrendered. She was sexless,
her personal pride was all transferred, she mothered another
woman's child with a hard, joyless devotion that was at least
entirely compatible with a stoical separation. She treated us
all as things that counted for nothing save to fetch and carry
for her charge. But the Honourable Beatrice could condescend.
The queer chances of later years come between me and a distinctly
separated memory of that childish face. When I think of Beatrice,
I think of her as I came to know her at a later time, when at
last I came to know her so well that indeed now I could draw her,
and show a hundred little delicate things you would miss in
looking at her. But even then I remember how I noted the
infinite delicacy of her childish skin and the fine eyebrow,
finer than the finest feather that ever one felt on the breast of
a bird. She was one of those elfin, rather precocious little
girls, quick coloured, with dark hair, naturally curling dusky
hair that was sometimes astray over her eyes, and eyes that were
sometimes impishly dark, and sometimes a clear brown yellow. And
from the very outset, after a most cursory attention to Rabbits,
she decided that the only really interesting thing at the
tea-table was myself.
The elders talked in their formal dull way--telling Nannie the
trite old things about the park and the village that they told
every one, and Beatrice watched me across the table with a
pitiless little curiosity that made me uncomfortable.
"Nannie," she said, pointing, and Nannie left a question of my
mother's disregarded to attend to her; "is he a servant boy? "
"S-s-sh," said Nannie. "He's Master Ponderevo."
"Is he a servant boy?" repeated Beatrice.
"He's a schoolboy," said my mother.
"Then may I talk to him, Nannie?"
Nannie surveyed me with brutal inhumanity. "You mustn't talk too
much," she said to her charge, and cut cake into fingers for her.
"No," she added decisively, as Beatrice made to speak.
Beatrice became malignant. Her eyes explored me with
unjustifiable hostility. "He's got dirty hands," she said,
stabbing at the forbidden fruit. "And there's a fray to his
collar."
Then she gave herself up to cake with an appearance of entire
forgetfulness of me that filled me with hate and a passionate
desire to compel her to admire me.... And the next day before
tea, I did for the first time in my life, freely, without command
or any compulsion, wash my hands.
So our acquaintance began, and presently was deepened by a whim
of hers. She had a cold and was kept indoors, and confronted
Nannie suddenly with the alternative of being hopelessly naughty,
which in her case involved a generous amount of screaming
unsuitable for the ears of an elderly, shaky, rich aunt, or
having me up to the nursery to play with her all the afternoon.
Nannie came downstairs and borrowed me in a careworn manner; and
I was handed over to the little creature as if I was some large
variety of kitten. I had never had anything to do with a little
girl before, I thought she was more beautiful and wonderful and
bright than anything else could possibly be in life, and she
found me the gentlest of slaves--though at the same time, as I
made evident, fairly strong. And Nannie was amazed to find the
afternoon slip cheerfully and rapidly away. She praised my
manners to Lady Drew and to my mother, who said she was glad to
hear well of me, and after that I played with Beatrice several
times. The toys she had remain in my memory still as great
splendid things, gigantic to all my previous experience of toys,
and we even went to the great doll's house on the nursery landing
to play discreetly with that, the great doll's house that the
Prince Regent had given Sir Harry Drew's first-born (who died at
five, that was a not ineffectual model of Bladesover itself, and
contained eighty-five dolls and had cost hundreds of pounds. I
played under imperious direction with that toy of glory.
I went back to school when that holiday was over, dreaming of
beautiful things, and got Ewart to talk to me of love; and I made
a great story out of the doll's house, a story that, taken over
into Ewart's hands, speedily grew to an island doll's city all
our own.
One of the dolls, I privately decided, was like Beatrice.
One other holiday there was when I saw something of her--oddly
enough my memory of that second holiday in which she played a
part is vague--and then came a gap of a year, and then my
disgrace.
VIII
Now I sit down to write my story and tell over again things in
their order, I find for the first time how inconsecutive and
irrational a thing the memory can be. One recalls acts and cannot
recall motives; one recalls quite vividly moments that stand out
inexplicably-- things adrift, joining on to nothing, leading
nowhere. I think I must have seen Beatrice and her half-brother
quite a number of times in my last holiday at Bladesover, but I
really cannot recall more than a little of the quality of the
circumstances. That great crisis of my boyhood stands out very
vividly as an effect, as a sort of cardinal thing for me, but
when I look for details, particularly details that led up to the
crisis--I cannot find them in any developing order at all. This
halfbrother, Archie Garvell, was a new factor in the affair. I
remember him clearly as a fair-haired, supercilious looking,
weedily-lank boy, much taller than I, but I should imagine very
little heavier, and that we hated each other by a sort of
instinct from the beginning; and yet I cannot remember my first
meeting with him at all.
Looking back into these past things--it is like rummaging in a
neglected attic that has experienced the attentions of some
whimsical robber--I cannot even account for the presence of
these children at Bladesover. They were, I know, among the
innumerable cousins of Lady Drew, and according to the theories
of downstairs candidates for the ultimate possession of
Bladesover. If they were, their candidature was unsuccessful.
But that great place, with all its faded splendour, its fine
furniture, its large traditions, was entirely at the old lady's
disposition; and I am inclined to think it is true that she used
this fact to torment and dominate a number of eligible people.
Lord Osprey was among the number of these, and she showed these
hospitalities to his motherless child and step-child, partly, no
doubt, because he was poor, but quite as much, I nowadays
imagine, in the dim hope of finding some affectionate or
imaginative outcome of contact with them. Nannie had dropped out
of the world this second time, and Beatrice was in the charge of
an extremely amiable and ineffectual poor army-class young woman
whose name I never knew. They were, I think, two remarkably
illmanaged and enterprising children. I seem to remember too,
that it was understood that I was not a fit companion for them,
and that our meetings had to be as unostentatious as possible.
It was Beatrice who insisted upon our meeting.
I am certain I knew quite a lot about love at fourteen and that I
was quite as much in love with Beatrice then as any impassioned
adult could be, and that Beatrice was, in her way, in love with
me. It is part of the decent and useful pretences of our world
that children of the age at which we were, think nothing, feel
nothing, know nothing of love. It is wonderful what people the
English are for keeping up pretences. But indeed I cannot avoid
telling that Beatrice and I talked of love and kissed and
embraced one another.
I recall something of one talk under the overhanging bushes of
the shrubbery--I on the park side of the stone wall, and the lady
of my worship a little inelegantly astride thereon. Inelegantly
do I say? you should have seen the sweet imp as I remember her.
Just her poise on the wall comes suddenly clear before me, and
behind her the light various branches of the bushes of the
shrubbery that my feet might not profane, and far away and high
behind her, dim and stately, the cornice of the great facade of
Bladesover rose against the dappled sky. Our talk must have been
serious and business-like, for we were discussing my social
position.
"I don't love Archie," she had said, apropos of nothing; and then
in a whisper, leaning forward with the hair about her face, "I
love YOU!"
But she had been a little pressing to have it clear that I was
not and could not be a servant.
"You'll never be a servant--ever!"
I swore that very readily, and it is a vow I have kept by nature.
"What will you be?" said she.
I ran my mind hastily over the professions.
"Will you be a soldier?" she asked.
"And be bawled at by duffers? No fear!" said I. "Leave that to
the plough-boys."
"But an officer? "
"I don't know," I said, evading a shameful difficulty.
"I'd rather go into the navy."
"Wouldn't you like to fight?"
"I'd like to fight," I said. "But a common soldier it's no
honour to have to be told to fight and to be looked down upon
while you do it, and how could I be an officer?"
"Couldn't you be?" she said, and looked at me doubtfully; and the
spaces of the social system opened between us.
Then, as became a male of spirit, I took upon myself to brag and
lie my way through this trouble. I said I was a poor man, and
poor men went into the navy; that I "knew" mathematics, which no
army officer did; and I claimed Nelson for an exemplar, and spoke
very highly of my outlook upon blue water. "He loved Lady
Hamilton," I said, "although she was a lady--and I will love
you."
We were somewhere near that when the egregious governess became
audible, calling "Beeee-atrice! Beeee-e-atrice!"
"Snifty beast!" said my lady, and tried to get on with the
conversation; but that governess made things impossible.
"Come here!" said my lady suddenly, holding out a grubby hand;
and I went very close to her, and she put her little head down
upon the wall until her black fog of hair tickled my cheek.
"You are my humble, faithful lover," she demanded in a whisper,
her warm flushed face near touching mine, and her eyes very dark
and lustrous.
"I am your humble, faithful lover," I whispered back.
And she put her arm about my head and put out her lips and we
kissed, and boy though I was, I was all atremble. So we two
kissed for the first time.
"Beeee-e-e-a-trice!" fearfully close.
My lady had vanished, with one wild kick of her black-stocking
leg. A moment after, I heard her sustaining the reproaches of
her governess, and explaining her failure to answer with an
admirable lucidity and disingenuousness.
I felt it was unnecessary for me to be seen just then, and I
vanished guiltily round the corner into the West Wood, and so to
love-dreams and single-handed play, wandering along one of those
meandering bracken valleys that varied Bladesover park. And
that day and for many days that kiss upon my lips was a seal, and
by night the seed of dreams.
Then I remember an expedition we made--she, I, and her
half-brother--into those West Woods--they two were supposed to be
playing in the shrubbery--and how we were Indians there, and made
a wigwam out of a pile of beech logs, and how we stalked deer,
crept near and watched rabbits feeding in a glade, and almost got
a squirrel. It was play seasoned with plentiful disputing
between me and young Garvell, for each firmly insisted upon the
leading roles, and only my wider reading--I had read ten stories
to his one--gave me the ascendency over him. Also I scored over
him by knowing how to find the eagle in a bracken stem. And
somehow--I don't remember what led to it at all--I and Beatrice,
two hot and ruffled creatures, crept in among the tall bracken
and hid from him. The great fronds rose above us, five feet or
more, and as I had learnt how to wriggle through that undergrowth
with the minimum of betrayal by tossing greenery above, I led the
way. The ground under bracken is beautifully clear and faintly
scented in warm weather; the stems come up black and then green;
if you crawl flat, it is a tropical forest in miniature. I led
the way and Beatrice crawled behind, and then as the green of the
further glade opened before us, stopped. She crawled up to me,
her hot little face came close to mine; once more she looked and
breathed close to me, and suddenly she flung her arm about my
neck and dragged me to earth beside her, and kissed me and kissed
me again. We kissed, we embraced and kissed again, all without a
word; we desisted, we stared and hesitated--then in a suddenly
damped mood and a little perplexed at ourselves, crawled out, to
be presently run down and caught in the tamest way by Archie.
That comes back very clearly to me, and other vague memories--I
know old Hall and his gun, out shooting at jackdaws, came into
our common experiences, but I don't remember how; and then at
last, abruptly, our fight in the Warren stands out. The Warren,
like most places in England that have that name, was not
particularly a warren, it was a long slope of thorns and beeches
through which a path ran, and made an alternative route to the
downhill carriage road between Bladesover and Ropedean. I don't
know how we three got there, but I have an uncertain fancy it was
connected with a visit paid by the governess to the Ropedean
vicarage people. But suddenly Archie and I, in discussing a
game, fell into a dispute for Beatrice. I had made him the
fairest offer: I was to be a Spanish nobleman, she was to be my
wife, and he was to be a tribe of Indians trying to carry her
off. It seems to me a fairly attractive offer to a boy to be a
whole tribe of Indians with a chance of such a booty. But Archie
suddenly took offence.
"No," he said; "we can't have that!"
"Can't have what?"
"You can't be a gentleman, because you aren't. And you can't
play Beatrice is your wife. It's--it's impertinent."
"But" I said, and looked at her.
Some earlier grudge in the day's affairs must have been in
Archie's mind. "We let you play with us," said Archie; "but we
can't have things like that."
"What rot!" said Beatrice. "He can if he likes."
But he carried his point. I let him carry it, and only began to
grow angry three or four minutes later. Then we were still
discussing play and disputing about another game. Nothing seemed
right for all of us.
"We don't want you to play with us at all," said Archie.
"Yes, we do," said Beatrice.
"He drops his aitches like anything."
"No, 'e doesn't," said I, in the heat of the moment.
"There you go!" he cried. "E, he says. E! E! E!"
He pointed a finger at me. He had struck to the heart of my
shame. I made the only possible reply by a rush at him.
"Hello!" he cried, at my blackavised attack. He dropped back
into an attitude that had some style in it, parried my blow, got
back at my cheek, and laughed with surprise and relief at his own
success. Whereupon I became a thing of murderous rage. He could
box as well or better than I--he had yet to realise I knew
anything of that at all--but I had fought once or twice to a
finish with bare fists. I was used to inflicting and enduring
savage hurting, and I doubt if he had ever fought. I hadn't
fought ten seconds before I felt this softness in him, realised
all that quality of modern upper-class England that never goes to
the quick, that hedges about rules and those petty points of
honour that are the ultimate comminution of honour, that claims
credit for things demonstrably half done. He seemed to think
that first hit of his and one or two others were going to matter,
that I ought to give in when presently my lip bled and dripped
blood upon my clothes. So before we had been at it a minute he
had ceased to be aggressive except in momentary spurts, and I was
knocking him about almost as I wanted to do; and demanding
breathlessly and fiercely, after our school manner, whether he
had had enough, not knowing that by his high code and his soft
training it was equally impossible for him to either buck-up and
beat me, or give in.
I have a very distinct impression of Beatrice dancing about us
during the affair in a state of unladylike appreciation, but I
was too preoccupied to hear much of what she was saying. But she
certainly backed us both, and I am inclined to think now--it may
be the disillusionment of my ripened years--whichever she
thought was winning.
Then young Garvell, giving way before my slogging, stumbled and
fell over a big flint, and I, still following the tradition of my
class and school, promptly flung myself on him to finish him. We
were busy with each other on the ground when we became aware of a
dreadful interruption.
"Shut up, you FOOL!" said Archie.
"Oh, Lady Drew!" I heard Beatrice cry. "They're fighting!
They're fighting something awful!"
I looked over my shoulder. Archie's wish to get up became
irresistible, and my resolve to go on with him vanished
altogether.
I became aware of the two old ladies, presences of black and
purple silk and fur and shining dark things; they had walked up
through the Warren, while the horses took the hill easily, and so
had come upon us. Beatrice had gone to them at once with an air
of taking refuge, and stood beside and a little behind them. We
both rose dejectedly. The two old ladies were evidently quite
dreadfully shocked, and peering at us with their poor old eyes;
and never had I seen such a tremblement in Lady Drew's
lorgnettes.
"You've never been fighting? " said Lady Drew.
"You have been fighting."
"It wasn't proper fighting," snapped Archie, with accusing eyes
on me.
"It's Mrs. Ponderevo's George!" said Miss Somerville, so adding
a conviction for ingratitude to my evident sacrilege.
"How could he DARE?" cried Lady Drew, becoming very awful.
"He broke the rules" said Archie, sobbing for breath. "I
slipped, and--he hit me while I was down. He knelt on me."
"How could you DARE?" said Lady Drew.
I produced an experienced handkerchief rolled up into a tight
ball, and wiped the blood from my chin, but I offered no
explanation of my daring. Among other things that prevented
that, I was too short of breath.
"He didn't fight fair," sobbed Archie.
Beatrice, from behind the old ladies, regarded me intently and
without hostility. I am inclined to think the modification of my
face through the damage to my lip interested her. It became
dimly apparent to my confused intelligence that I must not say
these two had been playing with me. That would not be after the
rules of their game. I resolved in this difficult situation upon
a sulky silence, and to take whatever consequences might follow.
IX
The powers of justice in Bladesover made an extraordinary mess
of my case.
I have regretfully to admit that the Honourable Beatrice Normandy
did, at the age of ten, betray me, abandon me, and lie most
abominably about me. She was, as a matter of fact,
panic-stricken about me, conscience stricken too; she bolted from
the very thought of my being her affianced lover and so forth,
from the faintest memory of kissing; she was indeed altogether
disgraceful and human in her betrayal. She and her half-brother
lied in perfect concord, and I was presented as a wanton
assailant of my social betters. They were waiting about in the
Warren, when I came up and spoke to them, etc.
On the whole, I now perceive Lady Drew's decisions were, in the
light of the evidence, reasonable and merciful.
They were conveyed to me by my mother, who was, I really believe,
even more shocked by the grossness of my social insubordination
than Lady Drew. She dilated on her ladyship's kindnesses to me,
on the effrontery and wickedness of my procedure, and so came at
last to the terms of my penance. "You must go up to young Mr.
Garvell, and beg his pardon."
"I won't beg his pardon," I said, speaking for the first time.
My mother paused, incredulous.
I folded my arms on her table-cloth, and delivered my wicked
little ultimatum. "I won't beg his pardon nohow," I said.
"See?"
"Then you will have to go off to your uncle Frapp at Chatham."
"I don't care where I have to go or what I have to do, I won't
beg his pardon," I said.
And I didn't.
After that I was one against the world. Perhaps in my mother's
heart there lurked some pity for me, but she did not show it.
She took the side of the young gentleman; she tried hard, she
tried very hard, to make me say I was sorry I had struck him.
Sorry!
I couldn't explain.
So I went into exile in the dog-cart to Redwood station, with
Jukes the coachman, coldly silent, driving me, and all my
personal belongings in a small American cloth portmanteau behind.
I felt I had much to embitter me; the game had and the beginnings
of fairness by any standards I knew.... But the thing that
embittered me most was that the Honourable Beatrice Normandy
should have repudiated and fled from me as though I was some
sort of leper, and not even have taken a chance or so, to give me
a good-bye. She might have done that anyhow! Supposing I had
told on her! But the son of a servant counts as a servant. She
had forgotten and now remembered.
I solaced myself with some extraordinary dream of coming back to
Bladesover, stern, powerful, after the fashion of Coriolanus. I
do not recall the details, but I have no doubt I displayed great
magnanimity...
Well, anyhow I never said I was sorry for pounding young Garvell,
and I am not sorry to this day.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
OF MY LAUNCH INTO THE WORLD AND THE LAST I SAW OF BLADESOVER
I
When I was thus banished from Bladesover House, as it was then
thought for good and all, I was sent by my mother in a vindictive
spirit, first to her cousin Nicodemus Frapp, and then, as a
fully indentured apprentice, to my uncle Ponderevo.
I ran away from the care of my cousin Nicodemus back to
Bladesover House.
My cousin Nicodemus Frapp was a baker in a back street--a slum
rather--just off that miserable narrow mean high road that
threads those exquisite beads, Rochester and Chatham. He was, I
must admit, a shock to me, much dominated by a young, plump,
prolific, malingering wife; a bent, slow-moving, unwilling dark
man with flour in his hair and eyelashes, in the lines of his
face and the seams of his coat. I've never had a chance to
correct my early impression of him, and he still remains an
almost dreadful memory, a sort of caricature of incompetent
simplicity. As I remember him, indeed, he presented the servile
tradition perfected. He had no pride in his person; fine clothes
and dressing up wasn't "for the likes of" him, so that he got his
wife, who was no artist at it, to cut his black hair at irregular
intervals, and let his nails become disagreeable to the
fastidious eye; he had no pride in his business nor any
initiative; his only virtues were not doing certain things and
hard work. "Your uncle," said my mother--all grown-up cousins
were uncles by courtesy among the Victorian middle-class-- "isn't
much to look at or talk to, but he's a Good Hard-Working Man."
There was a sort of base honourableness about toil, however
needless, in that system of inversion. Another point of honour
was to rise at or before dawn, and then laboriously muddle about.
It was very distinctly impressed on my mind that the Good
Hard-Working Man would have thought it "fal-lallish" to own a
pocket handkerchief. Poor old Frapp--dirty and crushed by,
product of, Bladesover's magnificence! He made no fight against
the world at all, he was floundering in small debts that were not
so small but that finally they overwhelmed him, whenever there
was occasion for any exertion his wife fell back upon pains and
her "condition," and God sent them many children, most of whom
died, and so, by their coming and going, gave a double exercise
in the virtues of submission.
Resignation to God's will was the common device of these people
in the face of every duty and every emergency. There were no
books in the house; I doubt if either of them had retained the
capacity for reading consecutively for more than a minute or so,
and it was with amazement that day after day, over and above
stale bread, one beheld food and again more food amidst the
litter that held permanent session on the living-room table.
One might have doubted if either of them felt discomfort in this
dusty darkness of existence, if it was not that they did visibly
seek consolation. They sought this and found it of a Sunday, not
in strong drink and raving, but in imaginary draughts of blood.
They met with twenty or thirty other darkened and unclean people,
all dressed in dingy colours that would not show the dirt, in a
little brick-built chapel equipped with a spavined roarer of a
harmonium, and there solaced their minds on the thought that all
that was fair and free in life, all that struggled, all that
planned and made, all pride and beauty and honour, all fine and
enjoyable things, were irrevocably damned to everlasting
torments. They were the self-appointed confidants of God's
mockery of his own creation. So at any rate they stick in my
mind. Vaguer, and yet hardly less agreeable than this cosmic
jest, this coming "Yah, clever!" and general serving out and
"showing up" of the lucky, the bold, and the cheerful, was their
own predestination to Glory.
"There is a Fountain, filled with Blood
Drawn from Emmanuel's Veins,"
so they sang. I hear the drone and wheeze of that hymn now. I
hated them with the bitter uncharitable condemnation of boyhood,
and a twinge of that hate comes back to me. As I write the
words, the sounds and then the scene return, these obscure,
undignified people, a fat woman with asthma, an old Welsh
milk-seller with a tumour on his bald head, who was the
intellectual leader of the sect, a huge-voiced haberdasher with a
big black beard, a white-faced, extraordinarily pregnant woman,
his wife, a spectacled rate collector with a bent back.... I
hear the talk about souls, the strange battered old phrases that
were coined ages ago in the seaports of the sun-dry Levant, of
balm of Gilead and manna in the desert, of gourds that give shade
and water in a thirsty land; I recall again the way in which at
the conclusion of the service the talk remained pious in form but
became medical in substance, and how the women got together for
obstetric whisperings. I, as a boy, did not matter, and might
overhear.
If Bladesover is my key for the explanation of England, I think
my invincible persuasion that I understand Russia was engendered
by the circle of Uncle Frapp.
I slept in a dingy sheeted bed with the two elder survivors of
Frapp fecundity, and spent my week days in helping in the
laborious disorder of the shop and bakehouse, in incidental
deliveries of bread and so forth, and in parrying the probings of
my uncle into my relations with the Blood, and his confidential
explanations that ten shillings a week--which was what my mother
paid him--was not enough to cover my accommodation. He was very
anxious to keep that, but also he wanted more. There were
neither books nor any seat nor corner in that house where reading
was possible, no newspaper ever brought the clash of worldly
things into its heavenward seclusion; horror of it all grew in me
daily, and whenever I could I escaped into the streets and
tramped about Chatham. The news shops appealed to me
particularly. One saw there smudgy illustrated sheets, the
Police News in particular, in which vilely drawn pictures brought
home to the dullest intelligence an interminable succession of
squalid crimes, women murdered and put into boxes, buried under
floors, old men bludgeoned at midnight by robbers, people thrust
suddenly out of trains, happy lovers shot, vitrioled and so forth
by rivals. I got my first glimpse of the life of pleasure in
foully drawn pictures of "police raids" on this and that.
Interspersed with these sheets were others in which Sloper, the
urban John Bull, had his fling with gin bottle and obese
umbrella, or the kindly empty faces of the Royal Family appeared
and reappeared, visiting this, opening that, getting married,
getting offspring, lying in state, doing everything but anything,
a wonderful, good-meaning, impenetrable race apart.
I have never revisited Chatham; the impression it has left on my
mind is one of squalid compression, unlit by any gleam of a
maturer charity. All its effects arranged themselves as
antithetical to the Bladesover effects. They confirmed and
intensified all that Bladesover suggested. Bladesover declared
itself to be the land, to be essentially England; I have already
told how its airy spaciousness, its wide dignity, seemed to
thrust village, church, and vicarage into corners, into a
secondary and conditional significance. Here one gathered the
corollary of that. Since the whole wide country of Kent was
made up of contiguous Bladesovers and for the gentlefolk, the
surplus of population, all who were not good tenants nor good
labourers, Church of England, submissive and respectful, were
necessarily thrust together, jostled out of sight, to fester as
they might in this place that had the colours and even the smells
of a well-packed dustbin. They should be grateful even for
that; that, one felt, was the theory of it all.
And I loafed about this wilderness of crowded dinginess, with
young, receptive, wide-open eyes, and through the blessing (or
curse) of some fairy godmother of mine, asking and asking again:
"But after all, WHY--"
I wandered up through Rochester once, and had a glimpse of the
Stour valley above the town, all horrible with cement works and
foully smoking chimneys and rows of workmen's cottages, minute,
ugly, uncomfortable, and grimy. So I had my first intimation of
how industrialism must live in a landlord's land. I spent some
hours, too, in the streets that give upon the river, drawn by the
spell of the sea. But I saw barges and ships stripped of magic
and mostly devoted to cement, ice, timber, and coal. The sailors
looked to me gross and slovenly men, and the shipping struck me
as clumsy, ugly, old, and dirty. I discovered that most sails
don't fit the ships that hoist them, and that there may be as
pitiful and squalid a display of poverty with a vessel as with a
man. When I saw colliers unloading, watched the workers in the
hold filling up silly little sacks and the succession of
blackened, half-naked men that ran to and fro with these along a
plank over a thirty-foot drop into filth and mud, I was first
seized with admiration of their courage and toughness and then,
"But after all, WHY--?" and the stupid ugliness of all this waste
of muscle and endurance came home to me. Among other things it
obviously wasted and deteriorated the coal.... And I had
imagined great things of the sea!
Well, anyhow, for a time that vocation was stilled.
But such impressions came into my leisure, and of that I had no
excess. Most of my time was spent doing things for Uncle Frapp,
and my evenings and nights perforce in the company of the two
eldest of my cousins. He was errand boy at an oil shop and
fervently pious, and of him I saw nothing until the evening
except at meals; the other was enjoying the midsummer holidays
without any great elation; a singularly thin and abject, stunted
creature he was, whose chief liveliness was to pretend to be a
monkey, and who I am now convinced had some secret disease that
drained his vitality away. If I met him now I should think him a
pitiful little creature and be extremely sorry for him. Then I
felt only a wondering aversion. He sniffed horribly, he was
tired out by a couple of miles of loafing, he never started any
conversation, and he seemed to prefer his own company to mine.
His mother, poor woman, said he was the "thoughtful one."
Serious trouble came suddenly out of a conversation we held in
bed one night. Some particularly pious phrase of my elder
cousin's irritated me extremely, and I avowed outright my entire
disbelief in the whole scheme of revealed religion. I had never
said a word about my doubts to any one before, except to Ewart
who had first evolved them. I had never settled my doubts until
at this moment when I spoke. But it came to me then that the
whole scheme of salvation of the Frappes was not simply doubtful,
but impossible. I fired this discovery out into the darkness
with the greatest promptitude.
My abrupt denials certainly scared my cousin amazingly.
At first they could not understand what I was saying, and when
they did I fully believe they expected an instant answer in
thunderbolts and flames. They gave me more room in the bed
forthwith, and then the elder sat up and expressed his sense of
my awfulness. I was already a little frightened at my temerity,
but when he asked me categorically to unsay what I had said, what
could I do but confirm my repudiation?
"There's no hell," I said, "and no eternal punishment. No God
would be such a fool as that."
My elder cousin cried aloud in horror, and the younger lay
scared, but listening. "Then you mean," said my elder cousin,
when at last he could bring himself to argue, "you might do just
as you liked?"
"If you were cad enough," said I.
Our little voices went on interminably, and at one stage my
cousin got out of bed and made his brother do likewise, and knelt
in the night dimness and prayed at me. That I found trying, but
I held out valiantly. "Forgive him, "said my cousin, "he knows
not what he sayeth."
"You can pray if you like," I said, "but if you're going to cheek
me in your prayers I draw the line."
The last I remember of that great discussion was my cousin
deploring the fact that he "should ever sleep in the same bed
with an Infidel!"
The next day he astonished me by telling the whole business to
his father. This was quite outside all my codes. Uncle
Nicodemus sprang it upon me at the midday meal.
"You been sayin' queer things, George," he said abruptly. "You
better mind what you're saying."
"What did he say, father?" said Mrs. Frapp.
"Things I couldn't' repeat," said he.
"What things?" I asked hotly.
"Ask 'IM," said my uncle, pointing with his knife to his
informant, and making me realise the nature of my offence. My
aunt looked at the witness. "Not--?" she framed a question.
"Wuss," said my uncle. "Blarsphemy."
My aunt couldn't touch another mouthful. I was already a little
troubled in my conscience by my daring, and now I began to feel
the black enormity of the course upon which I had embarked.
"I was only talking sense," I said.
I had a still more dreadful moment when presently I met my cousin
in the brick alley behind the yard, that led back to his grocer's
shop.
"You sneak!" I said, and smacked his face hard forthwith. "Now
then," said I.
He started back, astonished and alarmed. His eyes met mine, and
I saw a sudden gleam of resolution. He turned his other cheek to
me.
"'It 'it," he said."'It 'it. I'LL forgive you."
I felt I had never encountered a more detestable way of evading a
licking. I shoved him against the wall and left him there,
forgiving me, and went back into the house.
"You better not speak to your cousins, George," said my aunt,
"till you're in a better state of mind."
I became an outcast forthwith. At supper that night a gloomy
silence was broken by my cousin saying
"'E 'it me for telling you, and I turned the other cheek,
muvver."
"'E's got the evil one be'ind 'im now, a ridin' on 'is back,"
said my aunt, to the grave discomfort of the eldest girl, who sat
beside me.
After supper my uncle, in a few ill-chosen words, prayed me to
repent before I slept.
"Suppose you was took in your sleep, George," he said; "where'd
you be then? You jest think of that me boy." By this time I was
thoroughly miserable and frightened, and this suggestion unnerved
me dreadfully but I kept up an impenitent front. "To wake in
'ell," said Uncle Nicodemus, in gentle tones. "You don't want to
wake in 'ell, George, burnin' and screamin' for ever, do you?
You wouldn't like that?"
He tried very hard to get me to "jest 'ave a look at the
bake'ouse fire" before I retired. "It might move you," he said.
I was awake longest that night. My cousins slept, the sleep of
faith on either side of me. I decided I would whisper my
prayers, and stopped midway because I was ashamed, and perhaps
also because I had an idea one didn't square God like that.
"No," I said, with a sudden confidence, "damn me if you're coward
enough.... But you're not. No! You couldn't be!"
I woke my cousins up with emphatic digs, and told them as much,
triumphantly, and went very peacefully to sleep with my act of
faith accomplished.
I slept not only through that night, but for all my nights since
then. So far as any fear of Divine injustice goes, I sleep
soundly, and shall, I know, to the end of things. That
declaration was an epoch in my spiritual life.
II
But I didn't expect to have the whole meeting on Sunday turned on
to me.
It was. It all comes back to me, that convergence of attention,
even the faint leathery smell of its atmosphere returns, and the
coarse feel of my aunt's black dress beside me in contact with my
hand. I see again the old Welsh milkman "wrestling" with me,
they all wrestled with me, by prayer or exhortation. And I was
holding out stoutly, though convinced now by the contagion of
their universal conviction that by doing so I was certainly and
hopelessly damned. I felt that they were right, that God was
probably like them, and that on the whole it didn't matter. And
to simplify the business thoroughly I had declared I didn't
believe anything at all. They confuted me by texts from
Scripture which I now perceive was an illegitimate method of
reply. When I got home, still impenitent and eternally lost and
secretly very lonely and miserable and alarmed, Uncle Nicodemus
docked my Sunday pudding.
One person only spoke to me like a human being on that day of
wrath, and that was the younger Frapp. He came up to me in the
afternoon while I was confined upstairs with a Bible and my own
thoughts.
"'Ello," he said, and fretted about.
"D'you mean to say there isn't--no one," he said, funking the
word.
"No one?"
"No one watching yer--always."
"Why should there be?" I asked.
"You can't 'elp thoughts," said my cousin, "anyhow. You mean--"
He stopped hovering. "I s'pose I oughtn't to be talking to you."
He hesitated and flitted away with a guilty back glance over his
shoulder....
The following week made life quite intolerable for me; these
people forced me at last into an Atheism that terrified me. When
I learnt that next Sunday the wrestling was to be resumed, my
courage failed me altogether.
I happened upon a map of Kent in a stationer's window on
Saturday, and that set me thinking of one form of release. I
studied it intently for half an hour perhaps, on Saturday night,
got a route list of villages well fixed in my memory, and got up
and started for Bladesover about five on Sunday morning while my
two bed mates were still fast asleep.
III
I remember something, but not so much of it as I should like to
recall, of my long tramp to Bladesover House. The distance from
Chatham is almost exactly seventeen miles, and it took me until
nearly one. It was very interesting and I do not think I was
very fatigued, though I got rather pinched by one boot.
The morning must have been very clear, because I remember that
near Itchinstow Hall I looked back and saw the estuary of the
Thames, that river that has since played so large a part in my
life. But at the time I did not know it was the Thames, I
thought this great expanse of mud flats and water was the sea,
which I had never yet seen nearly. And out upon it stood ships,
sailing ships and a steamer or so, going up to London or down out
into the great seas of the world. I stood for a long time
watching these and thinking whether after all I should not have
done better to have run away to sea.
The nearer I drew to Bladesover, the more doubtful I grew of the
duality of my reception, and the more I regretted that
alternative. I suppose it was the dirty clumsiness of the
shipping I had seen nearly, that put me out of mind of that. I
took a short cut through the Warren across the corner of the main
park to intercept the people from the church. I wanted to avoid
meeting any one before I met my mother, and so I went to a place
where the path passed between banks, and without exactly hiding,
stood up among the bushes. This place among other advantages
eliminated any chance of seeing Lady Drew, who would drive round
by the carriage road.
Standing up to waylay in this fashion I had a queer feeling of
brigandage, as though I was some intrusive sort of bandit among
these orderly things. It is the first time I remember having
that outlaw feeling distinctly, a feeling that has played a
large part in my subsequent life. I felt there existed no place
for me that I had to drive myself in.
Presently, down the hill, the servants appeared, straggling by
twos and threes, first some of the garden people and the butler's
wife with them, then the two laundry maids, odd inseparable old
creatures, then the first footman talking to the butler's little
girl, and at last, walking grave and breathless beside old Ann
and Miss Fison, the black figure of my mother.
My boyish mind suggested the adoption of a playful form of
appearance. "Coo-ee, mother" said I, coming out against the
sky,"Coo-ee!"
My mother looked up, went very white, and put her hand to her
bosom.
I suppose there was a fearful fuss about me. And of course I was
quite unable to explain my reappearance. But I held out
stoutly, "I won't go back to Chatham; I'll drown myself first."
The next day my mother carried me off to Wimblehurst, took me
fiercely and aggressively to an uncle I had never heard of
before, near though the place was to us. She gave me no word
as to what was to happen, and I was too subdued by her manifest
wrath and humiliation at my last misdemeanour to demand
information. I don't for one moment think Lady Drew was "nice"
about me. The finality of my banishment was endorsed and
underlined and stamped home. I wished very much now that I had
run away to sea, in spite of the coal dust and squalour Rochester
had revealed to me. Perhaps over seas one came to different
lands.
IV
I do not remember much of my journey to Wimblehurst with my
mother except the image of her as sitting bolt upright, as rather
disdaining the third-class carriage in which we traveled, and
how she looked away from me out of the window when she spoke of
my uncle. "I have not seen your uncle," she said, "since he was
a boy...." She added grudgingly, "Then he was supposed to be
clever."
She took little interest in such qualities as cleverness.
"He married about three years ago, and set up for himself in
Wimblehurst.... So I suppose she had some money."
She mused on scenes she had long dismissed from her mind.
"Teddy," she said at last in the tone of one who has been feeling
in the dark and finds. "He was called Teddy... about your
age.... Now he must be twenty-six or seven."
I thought of my uncle as Teddy directly I saw him; there was
something in his personal appearance that in the light of that
memory phrased itself at once as Teddiness--a certain Teddidity.
To describe it in and other terms is more difficult. It is
nimbleness without grace, and alertness without intelligence. He
whisked out of his shop upon the pavement, a short figure in grey
and wearing grey carpet slippers; one had a sense of a young
fattish face behind gilt glasses, wiry hair that stuck up and
forward over the forehead, an irregular nose that had its
aquiline moments, and that the body betrayed an equatorial
laxity, an incipient "bow window" as the image goes. He jerked
out of the shop, came to a stand on the pavement outside,
regarded something in the window with infinite appreciation,
stroked his chin, and, as abruptly, shot sideways into the door
again, charging through it as it were behind an extended hand.
"That must be him," said my mother, catching at her breath.
We came past the window whose contents I was presently to know by
heart, a very ordinary chemist's window except that there was a
frictional electrical machine, an air pump and two or three
tripods and retorts replacing the customary blue, yellow, and red
bottles above. There was a plaster of Paris horse to indicate
veterinary medicines among these breakables, and below were scent
packets and diffusers and sponges and soda-water syphons and
such-like things. Only in the middle there was a rubricated
card, very neatly painted by hand, with these words--
Buy Ponderevo's Cough Linctus NOW.
NOW!
WHY?
Twopence Cheaper than in Winter.
You Store apples! why not the Medicine
You are Bound to Need?
in which appeal I was to recognise presently my uncle's
distinctive note.
My uncle's face appeared above a card of infant's comforters in
the glass pane of the door. I perceived his eyes were brown, and
that his glasses creased his nose. It was manifest he did not
know us from Adam. A stare of scrutiny allowed an expression of
commercial deference to appear in front of it, and my uncle flung
open the door.
"You don't know me?" panted my mother.
My uncle would not own he did not, but his curiosity was
manifest. My mother sat down on one of the little chairs before
the soap and patent medicine-piled counter, and her lips opened
and closed.
"A glass of water, madam," said my uncle, waved his hand in a
sort of curve and shot away.
My mother drank the water and spoke. "That boy," she said,
"takes after his father. He grows more like him every day....
And so I have brought him to you."
"His father, madam?"
"George."
For a moment the chemist was still at a loss. He stood behind
the counter with the glass my mother had returned to him in his
hand. Then comprehension grew.
"By Gosh!" he said. "Lord!" he cried. His glasses fell off. He
disappeared replacing them, behind a pile of boxed-up bottles of
blood mixture. "Eleven thousand virgins!" I heard him cry. The
glass was banged down. "O-ri-ental Gums!"
He shot away out of the shop through some masked door. One heard
his voice. "Susan! Susan!"
Then he reappeared with an extended hand. "Well, how are you?"
he said. "I was never so surprised in my life. Fancy!... You!"
He shook my mother's impassive hand and then mine very warmly
holding his glasses on with his left forefinger.
"Come right in!" he cried--"come right in! Better late than
never!" and led the way into the parlour behind the shop.
After Bladesover that apartment struck me as stuffy and petty,
but it was very comfortable in comparison with the Frapp
living-room. It had a faint, disintegrating smell of meals
about it, and my most immediate impression was of the remarkable
fact that something was hung about or wrapped round or draped
over everything. There was bright-patterned muslin round the
gas-bracket in the middle of the room, round the mirror over the
mantel, stuff with ball-fringe along the mantel and casing in the
fireplace,--I first saw ball-fringe here--and even the lamp on
the little bureau wore a shade like a large muslin hat. The
table-cloth had ball-fringe and so had the window curtains, and
the carpet was a bed of roses. There were little cupboards on
either side of the fireplace, and in the recesses, ill-made
shelves packed with books, and enriched with pinked American
cloth. There was a dictionary lying face downward on the table,
and the open bureau was littered with foolscap paper and the
evidences of recently abandoned toil. My eye caught "The
Ponderevo Patent Flat, a Machine you can Live in," written in
large firm letters. My uncle opened a little door like a
cupboard door in the corner of this room, and revealed the
narrowest twist of staircase I had ever set eyes upon. "Susan!"
he bawled again. "Wantje. Some one to see you. Surprisin'."
There came an inaudible reply, and a sudden loud bump over our
heads as of some article of domestic utility pettishly flung
aside, then the cautious steps of someone descending the twist,
and then my aunt appeared in the doorway with her hand upon the
jamb.
"It's Aunt Ponderevo," cried my uncle. "George's wife--and she's
brought over her son!" His eye roamed about the room. He darted
to the bureau with a sudden impulse, and turned the sheet about
the patent flat face down. Then he waved his glasses at us, "You
know, Susan, my elder brother George. I told you about 'im lots
of times."
He fretted across to the hearthrug and took up a position there,
replaced his glasses and coughed.
My aunt Susan seemed to be taking it in. She was then rather a
pretty slender woman of twenty-three or four, I suppose, and I
remember being struck by the blueness of her eyes and the clear
freshness of her complexion. She had little features, a button
nose, a pretty chin and a long graceful neck that stuck out of
her pale blue cotton morning dress. There was a look of
half-assumed perplexity on her face, a little quizzical wrinkle
of the brow that suggested a faintly amused attempt to follow my
uncle's mental operations, a vain attempt and a certain
hopelessness that had in succession become habitual. She seemed
to be saying, "Oh Lord! What's he giving me THIS time?" And as
came to know her better I detected, as a complication of her
effort of apprehension, a subsidiary riddle to "What's he giving
me?" and that was--to borrow a phrase from my schoolboy language
"Is it keeps?" She looked at my mother and me, and back to her
husband again.
"You know," he said. "George."
"Well," she said to my mother, descending the last three steps of
the staircase and holding out her hand! "you're welcome. Though
it's a surprise.... I can't ask you to HAVE anything, I'm
afraid, for there isn't anything in the house." She smiled, and
looked at her husband banteringly. "Unless he makes up something
with his old chemicals, which he's quite equal to doing."
My mother shook hands stiffly, and told me to kiss my aunt....
"Well, let's all sit down," said my uncle, suddenly whistling
through his clenched teeth, and briskly rubbing his hands
together. He put up a chair for my mother, raised the blind of
the little window, lowered it again, and returned to his
hearthrug. "I'm sure," he said, as one who decides, "I'm very
glad to see you."
V
As they talked I gave my attention pretty exclusively to my
uncle.
I noted him in great detail. I remember now his partially
unbuttoned waistcoat, as though something had occurred to
distract him as he did it up, and a little cut upon his chin. I
liked a certain humour in his eyes. I watched, too, with the
fascination that things have for an observant boy, the play of
his lips--they were a little oblique, and there was something
"slipshod," if one may strain a word so far, about his mouth, so
that he lisped and sibilated ever and again and the coming and
going of a curious expression, triumphant in quality it was, upon
his face as he talked. He fingered his glasses, which did not
seem to fit his nose, fretted with things in his waistcoat
pockets or put his hands behind him, looked over our heads, and
ever and again rose to his toes and dropped back on his heels.
He had a way of drawing air in at times through his teeth that
gave a whispering zest to his speech It's a sound I can only
represent as a soft Zzzz.
He did most of the talking. My mother repeated what she had
already said in the shop, "I have brought George over to you,"
and then desisted for a time from the real business in hand.
"You find this a comfortable house?" she asked; and this being
affirmed: "It looks--very convenient.... Not too big to be a
trouble--no. You like Wimblehurst, I suppose?"
My uncle retorted with some inquiries about the great people of
Bladesover, and my mother answered in the character of a personal
friend of Lady Drew's. The talk hung for a time, and then my
uncle embarked upon a dissertation upon Wimblehurst.
"This place," he began, "isn't of course quite the place I ought
to be in."
My mother nodded as though she had expected that.
"It gives me no Scope," he went on. "It's dead-and-alive.
Nothing happens."
"He's always wanting something to happen," said my aunt Susan.
"Some day he'll get a shower of things and they'll be too much
for him."
"Not they," said my uncle, buoyantly.
"Do you find business--slack?" asked my mother.
"Oh! one rubs along. But there's no Development--no growth.
They just come along here and buy pills when they want 'em--and a
horseball or such. They've got to be ill before there's a
prescription. That sort they are. You can't get 'em to launch
out, you can't get 'em to take up anything new. For instance,
I've been trying lately--induce them to buy their medicines in
advance, and in larger quantities. But they won't look for it!
Then I tried to float a little notion of mine, sort of an
insurance scheme for colds; you pay so much a week, and when
you've got a cold you get a bottle of Cough Linctus so long as
you can produce a substantial sniff. See? But Lord! they've no
capacity for ideas, they don't catch on; no Jump about the place,
no Life. Live!--they trickle, and what one has to do here is to
trickle too-- Zzzz."
"Ah!" said my mother.
"It doesn't suit me," said my uncle. "I'm the cascading sort."
"George was that," said my mother after a pondering moment.
My aunt Susan took up the parable with an affectionate glance at
her husband.
"He's always trying to make his old business jump," she said.
"Always putting fresh cards in the window, or getting up to
something. You'd hardly believe. It makes ME jump sometimes."
"But it does no good," said my uncle.
"It does no good," said his wife. "It's not his miloo..."
Presently they came upon a wide pause.
From the beginning of their conversation there had been the
promise of this pause, and I pricked my ears. I knew perfectly
what was bound to come; they were going to talk of my father. I
was enormously strengthened in my persuasion when I found my
mother's eyes resting thoughtfully upon me in the silence, and
than my uncle looked at me and then my aunt. I struggled
unavailingly to produce an expression of meek stupidity.
"I think," said my uncle, "that George will find it more amusing
to have a turn in the market-place than to sit here talking with
us. There's a pair of stocks there, George--very interesting.
Old-fashioned stocks."
"I don't mind sitting here," I said.
My uncle rose and in the most friendly way led me through the
shop. He stood on his doorstep and jerked amiable directions to
me.
"Ain't it sleepy, George, eh? There's the butcher's dog over
there, asleep in the road-half an hour from midday! If the last
Trump sounded I don't believe it would wake. Nobody would wake!
The chaps up there in the churchyard--they'd just turn over and
say: 'Naar--you don't catch us, you don't! See?'.... Well,
you'll find the stocks just round that corner."
He watched me out of sight.
So I never heard what they said about my father after all.
VI
When I returned, my uncle had in some remarkable way become
larger and central. "Tha'chu, George?" he cried, when the
shop-door bell sounded. "Come right through"; and I found him,
as it were, in the chairman's place before the draped grate.
The three of them regarded me.
"We have been talking of making you a chemist, George," said my
uncle.
My mother looked at me. "I had hoped," she said, "that Lady Drew
would have done something for him--" She stopped.
"In what way?" said my uncle.
"She might have spoken to some one, got him into something
perhaps...." She had the servant's invincible persuasion that
all good things are done by patronage.
"He is not the sort of boy for whom things are done," she added,
dismissing these dreams. "He doesn't accommodate himself. When
he thinks Lady Drew wishes a thing, he seems not to wish it.
Towards Mr. Redgrave, too, he has been--disrespectful--he is like
his father."
"Who's Mr. Redgrave?"
"The Vicar."
"A bit independent?" said my uncle, briskly.
"Disobedient," said my mother. "He has no idea of his place. He
seems to think he can get on by slighting people and flouting
them. He'll learn perhaps before it is too late."
My uncle stroked his cut chin and me. "Have you learnt any
Latin?" he asked abruptly.
I said I had not.
"He'll have to learn a little Latin," he explained to my mother,
"to qualify. H'm. He could go down to the chap at the grammar
school here--it's just been routed into existence again by the
Charity Commissioners and have lessons."
"What, me learn Latin!" I cried, with emotion.
"A little," he said.
"I've always wanted" I said and; "LATIN!"
I had long been obsessed by the idea that having no Latin was a
disadvantage in the world, and Archie Garvell had driven the
point of this pretty earnestly home. The literature I had read
at Bladesover had all tended that way. Latin had had a quality
of emancipation for me that I find it difficult to convey. And
suddenly, when I had supposed all learning was at an end for me,
I heard this!
"It's no good to you, of course," said my uncle, "except to pass
exams with, but there you are!"
"You'll have to learn Latin because you have to learn Latin,"
said my mother, "not because you want to. And afterwards you
will have to learn all sorts of other things...."
The idea that I was to go on learning, that to read and master
the contents of books was still to be justifiable as a duty,
overwhelmed all other facts. I had had it rather clear in my
mind for some weeks that all that kind of opportunity might close
to me for ever. I began to take a lively interest in this new
project.
"Then shall I live here?" I asked, "with you, and study... as
well as work in the shop?"
"That's the way of it," said my uncle.
I parted from my mother that day in a dream, so sudden and
important was this new aspect of things to me. I was to learn
Latin! Now that the humiliation of my failure at Bladesover was
past for her, now that she had a little got over her first
intense repugnance at this resort to my uncle and contrived
something that seemed like a possible provision for my future,
the tenderness natural to a parting far more significant than any
of our previous partings crept into her manner.
She sat in the train to return, I remember, and I stood at the
open door of her compartment, and neither of us knew how soon we
should cease for ever to be a trouble to one another.
"You must be a good boy, George," she said. "You must learn....
And you mustn't set yourself up against those who are above you
and better than you.... Or envy them."
"No, mother," I said.
I promised carelessly. Her eyes were fixed upon me. I was
wondering whether I could by any means begin Latin that night.
Something touched her heart then, some thought, some memory;
perhaps some premonition.... The solitary porter began slamming
carriage doors.
"George" she said hastily, almost shamefully, "kiss me!"
I stepped up into her compartment as she bent downward.
She caught me in her arms quite eagerly, she pressed me to her--a
strange thing for her to do. I perceived her eyes were
extraordinarily bright, and then this brightness burst along the
lower lids and rolled down her cheeks.
For the first and last time in my life I saw my mother's tears.
Then she had gone, leaving me discomforted and perplexed,
forgetting for a time even that I was to learn Latin, thinking of
my mother as of something new and strange.
The thing recurred though I sought to dismiss it, it stuck itself
into my memory against the day of fuller understanding. Poor,
proud, habitual, sternly narrow soul! poor difficult and
misunderstanding son! it was the first time that ever it dawned
upon me that my mother also might perhaps feel.
VII
My mother died suddenly and, it was thought by Lady Drew,
inconsiderately, the following spring. Her ladyship instantly
fled to Folkestone with Miss Somerville and Fison, until the
funeral should be over and my mother's successor installed.
My uncle took me over to the funeral. I remember there was a
sort of prolonged crisis in the days preceding this because,
directly he heard of my loss, he had sent a pair of check
trousers to the Judkins people in London to be dyed black, and
they did not come back in time. He became very excited on the
third day, and sent a number of increasingly fiery telegrams
without any result whatever, and succumbed next morning with a
very ill grace to my aunt Susan's insistence upon the resources
of his dress-suit. In my memory those black legs of his, in a
particularly thin and shiny black cloth--for evidently his
dress-suit dated from adolescent and slenderer days--straddle
like the Colossus of Rhodes over my approach to my mother's
funeral. Moreover, I was inconvenienced and distracted by a silk
hat he had bought me, my first silk hat, much ennobled, as his
was also, by a deep mourning band.
I remember, but rather indistinctly, my mother's white paneled
housekeeper's room and the touch of oddness about it that she was
not there, and the various familiar faces made strange by black,
and I seem to recall the exaggerated self-consciousness that
arose out of their focussed attention. No doubt the sense of the
new silk hat came and went and came again in my emotional chaos.
Then something comes out clear and sorrowful, rises out clear and
sheer from among all these rather base and inconsequent things,
and once again I walk before all the other mourners close behind
her coffin as it is carried along the churchyard path to her
grave, with the old vicar's slow voice saying regretfully and
unconvincingly above me, triumphant solemn things.
"I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that
believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and
whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."
Never die! The day was a high and glorious morning in spring,
and all the trees were budding and bursting into green.
Everywhere there were blossoms and flowers; the pear trees and
cherry trees in the sexton's garden were sunlit snow, there were
nodding daffodils and early tulips in the graveyard beds, great
multitudes of daisies, and everywhere the birds seemed singing.
And in the middle was the brown coffin end, tilting on men's
shoulders and half occluded by the vicar's Oxford hood.
And so we came to my mother's waiting grave.
For a time I was very observant, watching the coffin lowered,
hearing the words of the ritual. It seemed a very curious
business altogether.
Suddenly as the service drew to its end, I felt something had
still to be said which had not been said, realised that she had
withdrawn in silence, neither forgiving me nor hearing from
me--those now lost assurances. Suddenly I knew I had not
understood. Suddenly I saw her tenderly; remembered not so much
tender or kindly things of her as her crossed wishes and the ways
in which I had thwarted her. Surprisingly I realised that
behind all her hardness and severity she had loved me, that I was
the only thing she had ever loved and that until this moment I
had never loved her. And now she was there and deaf and blind to
me, pitifully defeated in her designs for me, covered from me so
that she could not know....
I dug my nails into the palms of my hands, I set my teeth, but
tears blinded me, sobs would have choked me had speech been
required of me. The old vicar read on, there came a mumbled
response--and so on to the end. I wept as it were internally,
and only when we had come out of the churchyard could I think and
speak calmly again.
Stamped across this memory are the little black figures of my
uncle and Rabbits, telling Avebury, the sexton and undertaker,
that "it had all passed off very well--very well indeed."
VIII
That is the last I shall tell of Bladesover. The dropscene
falls on that, and it comes no more as an actual presence into
this novel. I did indeed go back there once again, but under
circumstances quite immaterial to my story. But in a sense
Bladesover has never left me; it is, as I said at the outset, one
of those dominant explanatory impressions that make the framework
of my mind. Bladesover illuminates England; it has become all
that is spacious, dignified pretentious, and truly conservative
in English life. It is my social datum. That is why I have
drawn it here on so large a scale.
When I came back at last to the real Bladesover on an
inconsequent visit, everything was far smaller than I could have
supposed possible. It was as though everything had shivered and
shrivelled a little at the Lichtenstein touch. The harp was
still in the saloon, but there was a different grand piano with a
painted lid and a metrostyle pianola, and an extraordinary
quantity of artistic litter and bric-a-brac scattered about.
There was the trail of the Bond Street showroom over it all. The
furniture was still under chintz, but it wasn't the same sort of
chintz although it pretended to be, and the lustre-dangling
chandeliers had passed away. Lady Lichtenstein's books replaced
the brown volumes I had browsed among--they were mostly
presentation copies of contemporary novels and the National
Review and the Empire Review, and the Nineteenth Century and
after jostled current books on the tables--English new books in
gaudy catchpenny "artistic" covers, French and Italian novels in
yellow, German art handbooks of almost incredible ugliness.
There were abundant evidences that her ladyship was playing with
the Keltic renascence, and a great number of ugly cats made of
china--she "collected" china and stoneware cats--stood about
everywhere--in all colours, in all kinds of deliberately comic,
highly glazed distortion.
It is nonsense to pretend that finance makes any better
aristocrats than rent. Nothing can make an aristocrat but pride,
knowledge, training, and the sword. These people were no
improvement on the Drews, none whatever. There was no effect of
a beneficial replacement of passive unintelligent people by
active intelligent ones. One felt that a smaller but more
enterprising and intensely undignified variety of stupidity had
replaced the large dullness of the old gentry, and that was all.
Bladesover, I thought, had undergone just the same change between
the seventies and the new century that had overtaken the dear old
Times, and heaven knows how much more of the decorous British
fabric. These Lichtensteins and their like seem to have no
promise in them at all of any fresh vitality for the kingdom. I
do not believe in their intelligence or their power--they have
nothing new about them at all, nothing creative nor
rejuvenescent, no more than a disorderly instinct of acquisition;
and the prevalence of them and their kind is but a phase in the
broad slow decay of the great social organism of England. They
could not have made Bladesover they cannot replace it; they just
happen to break out over it--saprophytically.
Well--that was my last impression of Bladesover.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE WIMBLEHURST APPRENTICESHIP
I
So far as I can remember now, except for that one emotional phase
by the graveside, I passed through all these experiences rather
callously. I had already, with the facility of youth, changed my
world, ceased to think at all of the old school routine and put
Bladesover aside for digestion at a latter stage. I took up my
new world in Wimblehurst with the chemist's shop as its hub, set
to work at Latin and materia medica, and concentrated upon the
present with all my heart. Wimblehurst is an exceptionally
quiet and grey Sussex town rare among south of England towns in
being largely built of stone. I found something very agreeable
and picturesque in its clean cobbled streets, its odd turnings
and abrupt corners; and in the pleasant park that crowds up one
side of the town. The whole place is under the Eastry dominion
and it was the Eastry influence and dignity that kept its
railway station a mile and three-quarters away. Eastry House is
so close that it dominates the whole; one goes across the
marketplace (with its old lock-up and stocks), past the great
pre-reformation church, a fine grey shell, like some empty skull
from which the life has fled, and there at once are the huge
wrought-iron gates, and one peeps through them to see the facade
of this place, very white and large and fine, down a long avenue
of yews. Eastry was far greater than Bladesover and an
altogether completer example of the eighteenth century system.
It ruled not two villages, but a borough, that had sent its sons
and cousins to parliament almost as a matter of right so long as
its franchise endured. Every one was in the system, every
one--except my uncle. He stood out and complained.
My uncle was the first real breach I found in the great front of
Bladesover the world had presented me, for Chatham was not so
much a breach as a confirmation. But my uncle had no respect
for Bladesover and Eastry--none whatever. He did not believe in
them. He was blind even to what they were. He propounded
strange phrases about them, he exfoliated and wagged about novel
and incredible ideas.
"This place," said my uncle, surveying it from his open doorway
in the dignified stillness of a summer afternoon, "wants Waking
Up!"
I was sorting up patent medicines in the corner.
"I'd like to let a dozen young Americans loose into it," said my
uncle. "Then we'd see."
I made a tick against Mother Shipton's Sleeping Syrup. We had
cleared our forward stock.
"Things must be happening SOMEWHERE, George," he broke out in a
querulously rising note as he came back into the little shop. He
fiddled with the piled dummy boxes of fancy soap and scent and so
forth that adorned the end of the counter, then turned about
petulantly, stuck his hands deeply into his pockets and withdrew
one to scratch his head. "I must do SOMETHING," he said. "I
can't stand it.
"I must invent something. And shove it.... I could.
"Or a play. There's a deal of money in a play, George. What
would you think of me writing a play eh?... There's all sorts of
things to be done.
"Or the stog-igschange."
He fell into that meditative whistling of his.
"Sac-ramental wine!" he swore, "this isn't the world--it's Cold
Mutton Fat! That's what Wimblehurst is! Cold Mutton Fat!--dead
and stiff! And I'm buried in it up to the arm pits. Nothing
ever happens, nobody wants things to happen 'scept me! Up in
London, George, things happen. America! I wish to Heaven,
George, I'd been born American--where things hum.
"What can one do here? How can one grow? While we're sleepin'
here with our Capital oozing away into Lord Eastry's pockets for
rent-men are up there...." He indicated London as remotely over
the top of the dispensing counter, and then as a scene of great
activity by a whirl of the hand and a wink and a meaning smile at
me.
"What sort of things do they do?" I asked.
"Rush about," he said. "Do things! Somethin' glorious. There's
cover gambling. Ever heard of that, George?" He drew the air in
through his teeth. "You put down a hundred say, and buy ten
thousand pounds worth. See? That's a cover of one per cent.
Things go up one, you sell, realise cent per cent; down, whiff,
it's gone! Try again! Cent per cent, George, every day. Men are
made or done for in an hour. And the shoutin'! Zzzz.... Well,
that's one way, George. Then another way--there's Corners!"
"They're rather big things, aren't they?" I ventured.
"Oh, if you go in for wheat or steel--yes. But suppose you
tackled a little thing, George. Just some little thing that only
needed a few thousands. Drugs for example. Shoved all you had
into it--staked your liver on it, so to speak. Take a drug--take
ipecac, for example. Take a lot of ipecac. Take all there is!
See? There you are! There aren't unlimited supplies of
ipecacuanha--can't be!--and it's a thing people must have. Then
quinine again! You watch your chance, wait for a tropical war
breaking out, let's say, and collar all the quinine. Where ARE
they? Must have quinine, you know. Eh? Zzzz.
"Lord! there's no end of things--no end of little things.
Dill-water--all the suffering babes yowling for it. Eucalyptus
again--cascara--witch hazel--menthol--all the toothache things.
Then there's antiseptics, and curare, cocaine...."
"Rather a nuisance to the doctors," I reflected.
"They got to look out for themselves. By Jove, yes. They'll do
you if they can, and you do them. Like brigands. That makes it
romantic. That's the Romance of Commerce, George. You're in the
mountains there! Think of having all the quinine in the world,
and some millionaire's pampered wife gone ill with malaria, eh?
That's a squeeze, George, eh? Eh? Millionaire on his motor car
outside, offering you any price you liked. That 'ud wake up
Wimblehurst.... Lord! You haven't an Idea down here. Not an
idea. Zzzz."
He passed into a rapt dream, from which escaped such fragments
as: "Fifty per cent. advance sir; security--to-morrow. Zzzz."
The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a sort
of irresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever be
permitted to do in reality. It was the sort of nonsense one
would talk to make Ewart laugh and set him going on to still
odder possibilities. I thought it was part of my uncle's way of
talking. But I've learnt differently since. The whole trend of
modern money-making is to foresee something that will presently
be needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself
wealthy. You buy up land upon which people will presently want
to build houses, you secure rights that will bar vitally
important developments, and so on, and so on. Of course the
naive intelligence of a boy does not grasp the subtler
developments of human inadequacy. He begins life with a
disposition to believe in the wisdom of grown-up people, he does
not realise how casual and disingenuous has been the development
of law and custom, and he thinks that somewhere in the state
there is a power as irresistible as a head master's to check
mischievous and foolish enterprises of every sort. I will
confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I had a
clear impression that any one who contrived to do that would
pretty certainly go to jail. Now I know that any one who could
really bring it off would be much more likely to go to the House
of Lords!
My uncle ranged over the gilt labels of his bottles and drawers
for a while, dreaming of corners in this and that. But at last
he reverted to Wimblehurst again.
"You got to be in London when these things are in hand. Down
here--!
"Jee-rusalem!" he cried. "Why did I plant myself here?
Everything's done. The game's over. Here's Lord Eastry, and
he's got everything, except what his lawyers get, and before you
get any more change this way you'll have to dynamite him--and
them. HE doesn't want anything more to happen. Why should he?
Any chance 'ud be a loss to him. He wants everything to burble
along and burble along and go on as it's going for the next ten
thousand years, Eastry after Eastry, one parson down another
come, one grocer dead, get another! Any one with any ideas
better go away. They HAVE gone away! Look at all these blessed
people in this place! Look at 'em! All fast asleep, doing their
business out of habit--in a sort of dream, Stuffed men would do
just as well--just. They've all shook down into their places.
THEY don't want anything to happen either. They're all broken
in. There you are! Only what are they all alive for?...
"Why can't they get a clockwork chemist?"
He concluded as he often concluded these talks. "I must invent
something,--that's about what I must do. Zzzz. Some convenience.
Something people want.... Strike out.... You can't think, George,
of anything everybody wants and hasn't got? I mean something you
could turn out retail under a shilling, say? Well, YOU think,
whenever you haven't got anything better to do. See?"
II
So I remember my uncle in that first phase, young, but already a
little fat, restless, fretful, garrulous, putting in my
fermenting head all sorts of discrepant ideas. Certainly he was
educational....
For me the years at Wimblehurst were years of pretty active
growth. Most of my leisure and much of my time in the shop I
spent in study. I speedily mastered the modicum of Latin
necessary for my qualifying examinations, and--a little assisted
by the Government Science and Art Department classes that were
held in the Grammar School--went on with my mathematics. There
were classes in physics, in chemistry, in mathematics and machine
drawing, and I took up these subjects with considerable
avidity. Exercise I got chiefly in the form of walks. There was
some cricket in the summer and football in the winter sustained
by young men's clubs that levied a parasitic blackmail of the big
people and the sitting member, but I was never very keen at these
games. I didn't find any very close companions among the youths
of Wimblehurst. They struck me, after my cockney schoolmates, as
loutish and slow, servile and furtive, spiteful and mean. WE
used to swagger, but these countrymen dragged their feet and
hated an equal who didn't; we talked loud, but you only got the
real thoughts of Wimblehurst in a knowing undertone behind its
hand. And even then they weren't much in the way of thoughts.
No, I didn't like those young countrymen, and I'm no believer in
the English countryside under the Bladesover system as a
breeding ground for honourable men. One hears a frightful lot of
nonsense about the Rural Exodus and the degeneration wrought by
town life upon our population. To my mind, the English townsman,
even in the slums, is infinitely better spiritually, more
courageous, more imaginative and cleaner, than his agricultural
cousin. I've seen them both when they didn't think they were
being observed, and I know. There was something about my
Wimblehurst companions that disgusted me. It's hard to define.
Heaven knows that at that cockney boarding-school at Goudhurst we
were coarse enough; the Wimblehurst youngsters had neither words
nor courage for the sort of thing we used to do--for our bad
language, for example; but, on the other hand, they displayed a
sort of sluggish, real lewdness, lewdness is the word--a baseness
of attitude. Whatever we exiled urbans did at Goudhurst was
touched with something, however coarse, of romantic imagination.
We had read the Boys of England, and told each other stories. In
the English countryside there are no books at all, no songs, no
drama, no valiant sin even; all these things have never come or
they were taken away and hidden generations ago, and the
imagination aborts and bestialises. That, I think, is where the
real difference against the English rural man lies. It is
because I know this that I do not share in the common repinings
because our countryside is being depopulated, because our
population is passing through the furnace of the towns. They
starve, they suffer, no doubt, but they come out of it hardened,
they come out of it with souls.
Of an evening the Wimblehurst blade, shiny-faced from a wash and
with some loud finery, a coloured waistcoat or a vivid tie, would
betake himself to the Eastry Arms billiard-room, or to the bar
parlour of some minor pub where nap could be played. One soon
sickened of his slow knowingness, the cunning observation of his
deadened eyes, his idea of a "good story," always, always told in
undertones, poor dirty worm! his shrewd, elaborate maneuvers for
some petty advantage, a drink to the good or such-like deal.
There rises before my eyes as I write, young Hopley Dodd, the son
of the Wimblehurst auctioneer, the pride of Wimblehurst, its
finest flower, with his fur waistcoat and his bulldog pipe, his
riding breeches--he had no horse--and his gaiters, as he used to
sit, leaning forward and watching the billiard-table from under
the brim of his artfully tilted hat. A half-dozen phrases
constituted his conversation: "hard lines!" he used to say, and
"Good baazness," in a bass bleat. Moreover, he had a long slow
whistle that was esteemed the very cream of humorous comment.
Night after night he was there.
Also you knew he would not understand that _I_ could play
billiards, and regarded every stroke I made as a fluke. For a
beginner I didn't play so badly, I thought. I'm not so sure now;
that was my opinion at the time. But young Dodd's scepticism and
the "good baazness" finally cured me of my disposition to
frequent the Eastry Arms, and so these noises had their value in
my world.
I made no friends among the young men of the place at all, and
though I was entering upon adolescence I have no love-affair to
tell of here. Not that I was not waking up to that aspect of
life in my middle teens I did, indeed, in various slightly
informal ways scrape acquaintance with casual Wimblehurst girls;
with a little dressmaker's apprentice I got upon shyly speaking
terms, and a pupil teacher in the National School went further
and was "talked about" in connection with me but I was not by any
means touched by any reality of passion for either of these young
people; love--love as yet came to me only in my dreams. I only
kissed these girls once or twice. They rather disconcerted than
developed those dreams. They were so clearly not "it." I shall
have much to say of love in this story, but I may break it to the
reader now that it is my role to be a rather ineffectual lover.
Desire I knew well enough--indeed, too well; but love I have been
shy of. In all my early enterprises in the war of the sexes, I
was torn between the urgency of the body and a habit of romantic
fantasy that wanted every phase of the adventure to be generous
and beautiful. And I had a curiously haunting memory of
Beatrice, of her kisses in the bracken and her kiss upon the
wall, that somehow pitched the standard too high for
Wimblehurst's opportunities. I will not deny I did in a boyish
way attempt a shy, rude adventure or so in love-making at
Wimblehurst; but through these various influences, I didn't
bring things off to any extent at all. I left behind me no
devastating memories, no splendid reputation. I came away at
last, still inexperienced and a little thwarted, with only a
natural growth of interest and desire in sexual things.
If I fell in love with any one in Wimblehurst it was with my
aunt. She treated me with a kindliness that was only half
maternal--she petted my books, she knew about my certificates,
she made fun of me in a way that stirred my heart to her. Quite
unconsciously I grew fond of her....
My adolescent years at Wimblehurst were on the whole laborious,
uneventful years that began in short jackets and left me in many
ways nearly a man, years so uneventful that the Calculus of
Variations is associated with one winter, and an examination in
Physics for Science and Art department Honours marks an epoch.
Many divergent impulses stirred within me, but the master impulse
was a grave young disposition to work and learn and thereby in
some not very clearly defined way get out of the Wimblehurst
world into which I had fallen. I wrote with some frequency to
Ewart, self-conscious, but, as I remember them, not intelligent
letters, dated in Latin and with lapses into Latin quotation that
roused Ewart to parody. There was something about me in those
days more than a little priggish. But it was, to do myself
justice, something more than the petty pride of learning. I had
a very grave sense of discipline and preparation that I am not
ashamed at all to remember. I was serious. More serious than I
am at the present time. More serious, indeed, than any adult
seems to be. I was capable then of efforts--of nobilities....
They are beyond me now. I don't see why, at forty, I shouldn't
confess I respect my own youth. I had dropped being a boy quite
abruptly. I thought I was presently to go out into a larger and
quite important world and do significant things there. I thought
I was destined to do something definite to a world that had a
definite purpose. I did not understand then, as I do now, that
life was to consist largely in the world's doing things to me.
Young people never do seem to understand that aspect of things.
And, as I say, among my educational influences my uncle, all
unsuspected, played a leading part, and perhaps among other
things gave my discontent with Wimblehurst, my desire to get away
from that clean and picturesque emptiness, a form and expression
that helped to emphasise it. In a way that definition made me
patient. "Presently I shall get to London," I said, echoing him.
I remember him now as talking, always talking, in those days. He
talked to me of theology, he talked of politics, of the wonders
of science and the marvels of art, of the passions and the
affections, of the immortality of the soul and the peculiar
actions of drugs; but predominantly and constantly he talked of
getting on, of enterprises, of inventions and great fortunes, of
Rothschilds, silver kings, Vanderbilts, Goulds, flotations,
realisations and the marvelous ways of Chance with men--in all
localities, that is to say, that are not absolutely sunken to the
level of Cold Mutton Fat.
When I think of those early talks, I figure him always in one of
three positions. Either we were in the dispensing lair behind a
high barrier, he pounding up things in a mortar perhaps, and I
rolling pill-stuff into long rolls and cutting it up with a sort
of broad, fluted knife, or he stood looking out of the shop door
against the case of sponges and spray-diffusers, while I surveyed
him from behind the counter, or he leant against the little
drawers behind the counter, and I hovered dusting in front. The
thought of those early days brings back to my nostrils the faint
smell of scent that was always in the air, marbled now with
streaks of this drug and now of that, and to my eyes the rows of
jejune glass bottles with gold labels, mirror-reflected, that
stood behind him. My aunt, I remember, used sometimes to come
into the shop in a state of aggressive sprightliness, a sort of
connubial ragging expedition, and get much fun over the
abbreviated Latinity of those gilt inscriptions. "Ol Amjig,
George," she would read derisively, "and he pretends it's almond
oil! Snap!--and that's mustard. Did you ever, George?
"Look at him, George, looking dignified. I'd like to put an old
label on to him round the middle like his bottles are, with Ol
Pondo on it. That's Latin for Impostor, George MUST be. He'd
look lovely with a stopper."
"YOU want a stopper," said my uncle, projecting his face....
My aunt, dear soul, was in those days quite thin and slender,
with a delicate rosebud completion and a disposition to connubial
badinage, to a sort of gentle skylarking. There was a silvery
ghost of lisping in her speech. She was a great humourist, and
as the constraint of my presence at meals wore off, I became more
and more aware of a filmy but extensive net of nonsense she had
woven about her domestic relations until it had become the
reality of her life. She affected a derisive attitude to the
world at large and applied the epithet "old" to more things than
I have ever heard linked to it before or since. "Here's the old
news-paper," she used to say--to my uncle. "Now don't go and get
it in the butter, you silly old Sardine!"
"What's the day of the week, Susan?" my uncle would ask.
"Old Monday, Sossidge," she would say, and add, "I got all my Old
Washing to do. Don't I KNOW it!"...
She had evidently been the wit and joy of a large circle of
schoolfellows, and this style had become a second nature with
her. It made her very delightful to me in that quiet place. Her
customary walk even had a sort of hello! in it. Her chief
preoccupation in life was, I believe, to make my uncle laugh, and
when by some new nickname, some new quaintness or absurdity, she
achieved that end, she was, behind a mask of sober amazement, the
happiest woman on earth. My uncle's laugh when it did come, I
must admit was, as Baedeker says, "rewarding." It began with
gusty blowings and snortings, and opened into a clear "Ha ha!"
but in fullest development it included, in those youthful
days, falling about anyhow and doubling up tightly, and whackings
of the stomach, and tears and cries of anguish. I never in my
life heard my uncle laugh to his maximum except at her; he was
commonly too much in earnest for that, and he didn't laugh much
at all, to my knowledge, after those early years. Also she threw
things at him to an enormous extent in her resolve to keep things
lively in spite of Wimblehurst; sponges out of stock she threw,
cushions, balls of paper, clean washing, bread; and once up the
yard when they thought that I and the errand boy and the
diminutive maid of all work were safely out of the way, she
smashed a boxful of eight-ounce bottles I had left to drain,
assaulting my uncle with a new soft broom. Sometimes she would
shy things at me--but not often. There seemed always laughter
round and about her--all three of us would share hysterics at
times--and on one occasion the two of them came home from church
shockingly ashamed of themselves, because of a storm of mirth
during the sermon. The vicar, it seems, had tried to blow his
nose with a black glove as well as the customary
pocket-handkerchief. And afterwards she had picked up her own
glove by the finger, and looking innocently but intently
sideways, had suddenly by this simple expedient exploded my uncle
altogether. We had it all over again at dinner.
"But it shows you," cried my uncle, suddenly becoming grave,
"what Wimblehurst is, to have us all laughing at a little thing
like that! We weren't the only ones that giggled. Not by any
means! And, Lord! it was funny!"
Socially, my uncle and aunt were almost completely isolated. In
places like Wimblehurst the tradesmen's lives always are isolated
socially, all of them, unless they have a sister or a bosom
friend among the other wives, but the husbands met in various
bar-parlours or in the billiard-room of the Eastry Arms. But my
uncle, for the most part, spent his evenings at home. When first
he arrived in Wimblehurst I think he had spread his effect of
abounding ideas and enterprise rather too aggressively; and
Wimblehurst, after a temporary subjugation, had rebelled and
done its best to make a butt of him. His appearance in a
public-house led to a pause in any conversation that was going
on.
"Come to tell us about everything, Mr. Pond'revo?" some one would
say politely.
"You wait," my uncle used to answer, disconcerted, and sulk for
the rest of his visit.
Or some one with an immense air of innocence would remark to the
world generally, "They're talkin' of rebuildin' Wimblehurst all
over again, I'm told. Anybody heard anything of it? Going to
make it a reg'lar smartgoin', enterprisin' place--kind of
Crystal Pallas."
"Earthquake and a pestilence before you get that," my uncle would
mutter, to the infinite delight of every one, and add something
inaudible about "Cold Mutton Fat."...
III
We were torn apart by a financial accident to my uncle of which I
did not at first grasp the full bearings. He had developed what
I regarded as an innocent intellectual recreation which he called
stock-market meteorology. I think he got the idea from one use
of curves in the graphic presentation of associated variations
that he saw me plotting. He secured some of my squared paper
and, having cast about for a time, decided to trace the rise and
fall of certain lines and railways. "There's something in this,
George," he said, and I little dreamt that among other things
that were in it, was the whole of his spare money and most of
what my mother had left to him in trust for me.
"It's as plain as can be," he said. "See, here's one system of
waves and here's another! These are prices for Union
Pacifics--extending over a month. Now next week, mark my words,
they'll be down one whole point. We're getting near the steep
part of the curve again. See? It's absolutely scientific. It's
verifiable. Well, and apply it! You buy in the hollow and sell
on the crest, and there you are!"
I was so convinced of the triviality of this amusement that to
find at last that he had taken it in the most disastrous earnest
overwhelmed me.
He took me for a long walk to break it to me, over the hills
towards Yare and across the great gorse commons by Hazelbrow.
"There are ups and downs in life, George," he said--halfway
across that great open space, and paused against the sky...."I
left out one factor in the Union Pacific analysis."
"DID you?" I said, struck by the sudden chance in his voice.
"But you don't mean?"
I stopped and turned on him in the narrow sandy rut of pathway
and he stopped likewise.
"I do, George. I DO mean. It's bust me! I'm a bankrupt here
and now."
"Then--?"
"The shop's bust too. I shall have to get out of that."
"And me?"
"Oh, you!--YOU'RE all right. You can transfer your
apprenticeship, and--er--well, I'm not the sort of man to be
careless with trust funds, you can be sure. I kept that aspect
in mind. There's some of it left George--trust me!--quite a
decent little sum."
"But you and aunt?"
"It isn't QUITE the way we meant to leave Wimblehurst, George;
but we shall have to go. Sale; all the things shoved about and
ticketed--lot a hundred and one. Ugh!... It's been a larky
little house in some ways. The first we had. Furnishing--a
spree in its way.... Very happy..." His face winced at some
memory. "Let's go on, George," he said shortly, near choking, I
could see.
I turned my back on him, and did not look round again for a
little while.
"That's how it is, you see, George." I heard him after a time.
When we were back in the high road again he came alongside, and
for a time we walked in silence.
"Don't say anything home yet," he said presently. "Fortunes of
War. I got to pick the proper time with Susan--else she'll get
depressed. Not that she isn't a first-rate brick whatever comes
along."
"All right," I said, "I'll be careful"; and it seemed to me for
the time altogether too selfish to bother him with any further
inquiries about his responsibility as my trustee. He gave a
little sigh of relief at my note of assent, and was presently
talking quite cheerfully of his plans.... But he had, I
remember, one lapse into moodiness that came and went suddenly.
"Those others!" he said, as though the thought had stung him for
the first time.
"What others?" I asked.
"Damn them!" said he.
"But what others?"
"All those damned stick-in-the-mud-and-die-slowly tradespeople:
Ruck, the butcher, Marbel, the grocer. Snape! Gord! George,
HOW they'll grin!"
I thought him over in the next few weeks, and I remember now in
great detail the last talk we had together before he handed over
the shop and me to his successor. For he had the good luck to
sell his business, "lock, stock, and barrel"--in which expression
I found myself and my indentures included. The horrors of a sale
by auction of the furniture even were avoided.
I remember that either coming or going on that occasion, Ruck,
the butcher, stood in his doorway and regarded us with a grin
that showed his long teeth.
"You half-witted hog!" said my uncle. "You grinning hyaena"; and
then, "Pleasant day, Mr. Ruck."
"Goin' to make your fortun' in London, then?" said Mr. Ruck, with
slow enjoyment.
That last excursion took us along the causeway to Beeching, and
so up the downs and round almost as far as Steadhurst, home. My
moods, as we went, made a mingled web. By this time I had really
grasped the fact that my uncle had, in plain English, robbed me;
the little accumulations of my mother, six hundred pounds and
more, that would have educated me and started me in business, had
been eaten into and was mostly gone into the unexpected hollow
that ought to have been a crest of the Union Pacific curve, and
of the remainder he still gave no account. I was too young and
inexperienced to insist on this or know how to get it, but the
thought of it all made streaks of decidedly black anger in that
scheme of interwoven feelings. And you know, I was also acutely
sorry for him--almost as sorry as I was for my aunt Susan. Even
then I had quite found him out. I knew him to be weaker than
myself; his incurable, irresponsible childishness was as clear
to me then as it was on his deathbed, his redeeming and excusing
imaginative silliness. Through some odd mental twist perhaps I
was disposed to exonerate him even at the cost of blaming my poor
old mother who had left things in his untrustworthy hands.
I should have forgiven him altogether, I believe, if he had been
in any manner apologetic to me; but he wasn't that. He kept
reassuring me in a way I found irritating. Mostly, however, his
solicitude was for Aunt Susan and himself.
"It's these Crises, George," he said, "try Character. Your aunt's
come out well, my boy."
He made meditative noises for a space.
"Had her cry of course,"--the thing had been only too painfully
evident to me in her eyes and swollen face--"who wouldn't? But
now--buoyant again!... She's a Corker.
"We'll be sorry to leave the little house of course. It's a bit
like Adam and Eve, you know. Lord! what a chap old Milton was!
"'The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.'
It sounds, George.... Providence their guide!... Well--thank
goodness there's no imeedgit prospect of either Cain or Abel!
"After all, it won't be so bad up there. Not the scenery,
perhaps, or the air we get here, but--LIFE! We've got very
comfortable little rooms, very comfortable considering, and I
shall rise. We're not done yet, we're not beaten; don't think
that, George. I shall pay twenty shillings in the pound before
I've done--you mark my words, George,--twenty--five to you.... I
got this situation within twenty-four hours--others offered.
It's an important firm--one of the best in London. I looked to
that. I might have got four or five shillings a week
more--elsewhere. Quarters I could name. But I said to them
plainly, wages to go on with, but opportunity's my
game--development. We understood each other."
He threw out his chest, and the little round eyes behind his
glasses rested valiantly on imaginary employers.
We would go on in silence for a space while he revised and
restated that encounter. Then he would break out abruptly with
some banal phrase.
"The Battle of Life, George, my boy," he would cry, or "Ups and
Downs!"
He ignored or waived the poor little attempts I made to ascertain
my own position. "That's all right," he would say; or, "Leave
all that to me. I'LL look after them." And he would drift away
towards the philosophy and moral of the situation. What was I to
do?
"Never put all your resources into one chance, George; that's the
lesson I draw from this. Have forces in reserve. It was a
hundred to one, George, that I was right--a hundred to one. I
worked it out afterwards. And here we are spiked on the
off-chance. If I'd have only kept back a little, I'd have had it
on U.P. next day, like a shot, and come out on the rise. There
you are!"
His thoughts took a graver turn.
"It's where you'll bump up against Chance like this, George, that
you feel the need of religion. Your hard-and-fast scientific
men--your Spencers and Huxleys--they don't understand that. I
do. I've thought of it a lot lately--in bed and about. I was
thinking of it this morning while I shaved. It's not irreverent
for me to say it, I hope--but God comes in on the off-chance,
George. See? Don't you be too cocksure of anything, good or
bad. That's what I make out of it. I could have sworn. Well,
do you think I--particular as I am--would have touched those
Union Pacifics with trust money at all, if I hadn't thought it a
thoroughly good thing--good without spot or blemish?... And it
was bad!
"It's a lesson to me. You start in to get a hundred percent.
and you come out with that. It means, in a way, a reproof for
Pride. I've thought of that, George--in the Night Watches. I
was thinking this morning when I was shaving, that that's where
the good of it all comes in. At the bottom I'm a mystic in these
affairs. You calculate you're going to do this or that, but at
bottom who knows at all WHAT he's doing? When you most think
you're doing things, they're being done right over your head.
YOU'RE being done--in a sense. Take a hundred-to one chance, or
one to a hundred--what does it matter? You're being Led."
It's odd that I heard this at the time with unutterable contempt,
and now that I recall it--well, I ask myself, what have I got
better?
"I wish," said I, becoming for a moment outrageous, "YOU were
being Led to give me some account of my money, uncle."
"Not without a bit of paper to figure on, George, I can't. But
you trust me about that never fear. You trust me."
And in the end I had to.
I think the bankruptcy hit my aunt pretty hard. There was, so
far as I can remember now, a complete cessation of all those
cheerful outbreaks of elasticity, no more skylarking in the shop
nor scampering about the house. But there was no fuss that I
saw, and only little signs in her complexion of the fits of
weeping that must have taken her. She didn't cry at the end,
though to me her face with its strain of self-possession was more
pathetic than any weeping. "Well" she said to me as she came
through the shop to the cab, "Here's old orf, George! Orf to
Mome number two! Good-bye!" And she took me in her arms and
kissed me and pressed me to her. Then she dived straight for the
cab before I could answer her.
My uncle followed, and he seemed to me a trifle too valiant and
confident in his bearing for reality. He was unusually white in
the face. He spoke to his successor at the counter. "Here we
go!" he said. "One down, the other up. You'll find it a quiet
little business so long as you run it on quiet lines--a nice
quiet little business. There's nothing more? No? Well, if you
want to know anything write to me. I'll always explain fully.
Anything--business, place or people. You'll find Pil Antibil. a
little overstocked by-the-by, I found it soothed my mind the day
before yesterday making 'em, and I made 'em all day. Thousands!
And where's George? Ah! there you are! I'll write to you,
George, FULLY, about all that affair. Fully!"
It became clear to me as if for the first time, that I was really
parting from my aunt Susan. I went out on to the pavement and
saw her head craned forward, her wide-open blue eyes and her
little face intent on the shop that had combined for her all the
charms of a big doll's house and a little home of her very own.
"Good-bye!" she said to it and to me. Our eyes met for a
moment--perplexed. My uncle bustled out and gave a few totally
unnecessary directions to the cabman and got in beside her. "All
right?" asked the driver. "Right," said I; and he woke up the
horse with a flick of his whip. My aunt's eyes surveyed me
again. "Stick to your old science and things, George, and write
and tell me when they make you a Professor," she said cheerfully.
She stared at me for a second longer with eyes growing wider and
brighter and a smile that had become fixed, glanced again at the
bright little shop still saying "Ponderevo" with all the emphasis
of its fascia, and then flopped back hastily out of sight of me
into the recesses of the cab. Then it had gone from before me
and I beheld Mr. Snape, the hairdresser, inside his store
regarding its departure with a quiet satisfaction and exchanging
smiles and significant headshakes with Mr. Marbel.
IV
I was left, I say, as part of the lock, stock, and barrel, at
Wimblehurst with my new master, a Mr. Mantell; who plays no part
in the progress of this story except in so far as he effaced my
uncle's traces. So soon as the freshness of this new personality
faded, I began to find Wimblehurst not only a dull but a lonely
place, and to miss my aunt Susan immensely. The advertisements
of the summer terms for Cough Linctus were removed; the bottles
of coloured water--red, green, and yellow--restored to their
places; the horse announcing veterinary medicine, which my uncle,
sizzling all the while, had coloured in careful portraiture of a
Goodwood favourite, rewhitened; and I turned myself even more
resolutely than before to Latin (until the passing of my
preliminary examination enabled me to drop that), and then to
mathematics and science.
There were classes in Electricity and Magnetism at the Grammar
School. I took a little "elementary" prize in that in my first
year and a medal in my third; and in Chemistry and Human
Physiology and Sound, Light and Heat, I did well. There was also
a lighter, more discursive subject called Physiography, in which
one ranged among the sciences and encountered Geology as a
process of evolution from Eozoon to Eastry House, and Astronomy
as a record of celestial movements of the most austere and
invariable integrity. I learnt out of badly-written, condensed
little text-books, and with the minimum of experiment, but still
I learnt. Only thirty years ago it was, and I remember I learnt
of the electric light as an expensive, impracticable toy, the
telephone as a curiosity, electric traction as a practical
absurdity. There was no argon, no radium, no phagocytes--at
least to my knowledge, and aluminium was a dear, infrequent
metal. The fastest ships in the world went then at nineteen
knots, and no one but a lunatic here and there ever thought it
possible that men might fly.
Many things have happened since then, but the last glance I had
of Wimblehurst two years ago remarked no change whatever in its
pleasant tranquillity. They had not even built any fresh
houses--at least not actually in the town, though about the
station there had been some building. But it was a good place to
do work in, for all its quiescence. I was soon beyond the small
requirements of the Pharmaceutical Society's examination, and as
they do not permit candidates to sit for that until one and
twenty, I was presently filling up my time and preventing my
studies becoming too desultory by making an attack upon the
London University degree of Bachelor of Science, which impressed
me then as a very splendid but almost impossible achievement.
The degree in mathematics and chemistry appealed to me as
particularly congenial--albeit giddily inaccessible. I set to
work. I had presently to arrange a holiday and go to London to
matriculate, and so it was I came upon my aunt and uncle again.
In many ways that visit marked an epoch. It was my first
impression of London at all. I was then nineteen, and by a
conspiracy of chances my nearest approach to that human
wilderness had been my brief visit to Chatham. Chatham too had
been my largest town. So that I got London at last with an
exceptional freshness of effect, as the sudden revelation of a
whole unsuspected other side to life.
I came to it on a dull and smoky day by the South Eastern
Railway, and our train was half an hour late, stopping and going
on and stopping again. I marked beyond Chiselhurst the growing
multitude of villas, and so came stage by stage through
multiplying houses and diminishing interspaces of market garden
and dingy grass to regions of interlacing railway lines, big
factories, gasometers and wide reeking swamps of dingy little
homes, more of them and more and more. The number of these and
their dinginess and poverty increased, and here rose a great
public house and here a Board School and there a gaunt factory;
and away to the east there loomed for a time a queer, incongruous
forest of masts and spars. The congestion of houses intensified
and piled up presently into tenements; I marveled more and more
at this boundless world of dingy people; whiffs of industrial
smell, of leather, of brewing, drifted into the carriage; the sky
darkened, I rumbled thunderously over bridges, van-crowded
streets, peered down on and crossed the Thames with an abrupt
eclat of sound. I got an effect of tall warehouses, of grey
water, barge crowded, of broad banks of indescribable mud, and
then I was in Cannon Street Station--a monstrous dirty cavern
with trains packed across its vast floor and more porters
standing along the platform than I had ever been in my life
before. I alighted with my portmanteau and struggled along,
realising for the first time just how small and weak I could
still upon occasion feel. In this world, I felt, an Honours medal
in Electricity and magnetism counted for nothing at all.
Afterwards I drove in a cab down a canon of rushing street
between high warehouses, and peeped up astonished at the
blackened greys of Saint Paul's. The traffic of Cheapside--it
was mostly in horse omnibuses in those days--seemed stupendous,
its roar was stupendous; I wondered where the money came from to
employ so many cabs, what industry could support the endless
jostling stream of silk-hatted, frock-coated, hurrying men. Down
a turning I found the Temperance Hotel Mr. Mantell had
recommended to me. The porter in a green uniform who took over
my portmanteau, seemed, I thought, to despise me a good deal.
V
Matriculation kept me for four full days and then came an
afternoon to spare, and I sought out Tottenham Court Road
through a perplexing network of various and crowded streets. But
this London was vast! it was endless! it seemed the whole world
had changed into packed frontages and hoardings and street
spaces. I got there at last and made inquiries, and I found my
uncle behind the counter of the pharmacy he managed, an
establishment that did not impress me as doing a particularly
high-class trade. "Lord!" he said at the sight of me, "I was
wanting something to happen!"
He greeted me warmly. I had grown taller, and he, I thought, had
grown shorter and smaller and rounder but otherwise he was
unchanged. He struck me as being rather shabby, and the silk hat
he produced and put on, when, after mysterious negotiations in
the back premises he achieved his freedom to accompany me, was
past its first youth; but he was as buoyant and confident as
ever.
"Come to ask me about all THAT," he cried. "I've never written
yet."
"Oh, among other things," said I, with a sudden regrettable
politeness, and waived the topic of his trusteeship to ask after
my aunt Susan.
"We'll have her out of it," he said suddenly; "we'll go
somewhere. We don't get you in London every day."
"It's my first visit," I said, "I've never seen London before";
and that made him ask me what I thought of it, and the rest of
the talk was London, London, to the exclusion of all smaller
topics. He took me up the Hampstead Road almost to the Cobden
statue, plunged into some back streets to the left, and came at
last to a blistered front door that responded to his latch-key,
one of a long series of blistered front doors with fanlights and
apartment cards above. We found ourselves in a drab-coloured
passage that was not only narrow and dirty but desolatingly
empty, and then he opened a door and revealed my aunt sitting at
the window with a little sewing-machine on a bamboo occasional
table before her, and "work"--a plum-coloured walking dress I
judged at its most analytical stage--scattered over the rest of
the apartment.
At the first glance I judged my aunt was plumper than she had
been, but her complexion was just as fresh and her China blue eye
as bright as in the old days.
"London," she said, didn't "get blacks" on her.
She still "cheeked" my uncle, I was pleased to find. "What are
you old Poking in for at THIS time--Gubbitt?," she said when he
appeared, and she still looked with a practised eye for the
facetious side of things. When she saw me behind him, she gave a
little cry and stood up radiant. Then she became grave.
I was surprised at my own emotion in seeing her. She held me at
arm's length for a moment, a hand on each shoulder, and looked at
me with a sort of glad scrutiny. She seemed to hesitate, and
then pecked little kiss off my cheek.
"You're a man, George," she said, as she released me, and
continued to look at me for a while.
Their menage was one of a very common type in London. They
occupied what is called the dining-room floor of a small house,
and they had the use of a little inconvenient kitchen in the
basement that had once been scullery. The two rooms, bedroom
behind and living room in front, were separated by folding-doors
that were never now thrown back, and indeed, in the presence of a
visitor, not used at all. There was of course no bathroom or
anything of that sort available, and there was no water supply
except to the kitchen below. My aunt did all the domestic work,
though she could have afforded to pay for help if the build of
the place had not rendered that inconvenient to the pitch of
impossibility. There was no sort of help available except that
of indoor servants, for whom she had no accommodation. The
furniture was their own; it was partly secondhand, but on the
whole it seemed cheerful to my eye, and my aunt's bias for cheap,
gay-figured muslin had found ample score. In many ways I should
think it must have been an extremely inconvenient and cramped
sort of home, but at the time I took it, as I was taking
everything, as being there and in the nature of things. I did
not see the oddness of solvent decent people living in a
habitation so clearly neither designed nor adapted for their
needs, so wasteful of labour and so devoid of beauty as this was,
and it is only now as I describe this that I find myself thinking
of the essential absurdity of an intelligent community living in
such makeshift homes. It strikes me now as the next thing to
wearing second-hand clothes.
You see it was a natural growth, part of that system to which
Bladesover, I hold, is the key. There are wide regions of
London, miles of streets of houses, that appear to have been
originally designed for prosperous-middle-class homes of the
early Victorian type. There must have been a perfect fury of
such building in the thirties, forties, and fifties. Street
after street must have been rushed into being, Campden Town way,
Pentonville way, Brompton way, West Kensington way in the
Victoria region and all over the minor suburbs of the south side.
I am doubtful if many of these houses had any long use as the
residences of single families if from the very first almost their
tenants did not makeshift and take lodgers and sublet. They were
built with basements, in which their servants worked and
lived--servants of a more submissive and troglodytic generation
who did not mind stairs. The dining-room (with folding doors)
was a little above the ground level, and in that the wholesome
boiled and roast with damp boiled potatoes and then pie to
follow, was consumed and the numerous family read and worked in
the evening, and above was the drawing-room (also with folding
doors), where the infrequent callers were received. That was
the vision at which those industrious builders aimed. Even while
these houses were being run up, the threads upon the loom of fate
were shaping to abolish altogether the type of household that
would have fitted them. Means of transit were developing to
carry the moderately prosperous middle-class families out of
London, education and factory employment were whittling away at
the supply of rough, hardworking, obedient girls who would stand
the subterranean drudgery of these places, new classes of
hard-up middle-class people such as my uncle, employees of
various types, were coming into existence, for whom no homes were
provided. None of these classes have ideas of what they ought to
be, or fit in any legitimate way into the Bladesover theory that
dominates our minds. It was nobody's concern to see them housed
under civilised conditions, and the beautiful laws of supply and
demand had free play. They had to squeeze in. The landlords
came out financially intact from their blundering enterprise.
More and more these houses fell into the hands of married
artisans, or struggling widows or old servants with savings, who
became responsible for the quarterly rent and tried to sweat a
living by sub-letting furnished or unfurnished apartments.
I remember now that a poor grey-haired old woman who had an air
of having been roused from a nap in the dust bin, came out into
the area and looked up at us as we three went out from the front
door to "see London" under my uncle's direction. She was the
sub-letting occupier; she squeezed out a precarious living by
taking the house whole and sub-letting it in detail and she made
her food and got the shelter of an attic above and a basement
below by the transaction. And if she didn't chance to "let"
steadily, out she went to pauperdom and some other poor, sordid
old adventurer tried in her place....
It is a foolish community that can house whole classes, useful
and helpful, honest and loyal classes, in such squalidly
unsuitable dwellings. It is by no means the social economy it
seems, to use up old women, savings and inexperience in order to
meet the landlord's demands. But any one who doubts this thing
is going on right up to to-day need only spend an afternoon in
hunting for lodgings in any of the regions of London I have
named.
But where has my story got to? My uncle, I say, decided I must
be shown London, and out we three went as soon as my aunt had got
her hat on, to catch all that was left of the day.
VI
It pleased my uncle extremely to find I had never seen London
before. He took possession of the metropolis forthwith.
"London, George," he said, "takes a lot of understanding. It's a
great place. Immense. The richest town in the world, the biggest
port, the greatest manufacturing town, the Imperial city--the
centre of civilisation, the heart of the world! See those
sandwich men down there! That third one's hat! Fair treat! You
don't see poverty like that in Wimblehurst George! And many of
them high Oxford honour men too. Brought down by drink! It's a
wonderful place, George--a whirlpool, a maelstrom! whirls you up
and whirls you down."
I have a very confused memory of that afternoon's inspection of
London. My uncle took us to and fro showing us over his London,
talking erratically, following a route of his own. Sometimes we
were walking, sometimes we were on the tops of great staggering
horse omnibuses in a heaving jumble of traffic, and at one point
we had tea in an Aerated Bread Shop. But I remember very
distinctly how we passed down Park Lane under an overcast sky,
and how my uncle pointed out the house of this child of good
fortune and that with succulent appreciation.
I remember, too, that as he talked I would find my aunt watching
my face as if to check the soundness of his talk by my
expression.
"Been in love yet, George?" she asked suddenly, over a bun in the
tea-shop.
"Too busy, aunt," I told her.
She bit her bun extensively, and gesticulated with the remnant to
indicate that she had more to say.
"How are YOU going to make your fortune?" she said so soon as
she could speak again. "You haven't told us that."
"'Lectricity," said my uncle, taking breath after a deep draught
of tea.
"If I make it at all," I said. "For my part I think shall be
satisfied with something less than a fortune."
"We're going to make ours--suddenly," she said.
"So HE old says." She jerked her head at my uncle.
"He won't tell me when--so I can't get anything ready. But it's
coming. Going to ride in our carriage and have a garden.
Garden--like a bishop's."
She finished her bun and twiddled crumbs from her fingers. "I
shall be glad of the garden," she said. "It's going to be a real
big one with rosaries and things. Fountains in it. Pampas
grass. Hothouses."
"You'll get it all right," said my uncle, who had reddened a
little.
"Grey horses in the carriage, George," she said. "It's nice to
think about when one's dull. And dinners in restaurants often
and often. And theatres--in the stalls. And money and money and
money."
"You may joke," said my uncle, and hummed for a moment.
"Just as though an old Porpoise like him would ever make money,"
she said, turning her eyes upon his profile with a sudden lapse
to affection. "He'll just porpoise about."
"I'll do something," said my uncle, "you bet! Zzzz!" and rapped
with a shilling on the marble table.
"When you do you'll have to buy me a new pair of gloves," she
said, "anyhow. That finger's past mending. Look! you
Cabbage--you." And she held the split under his nose, and pulled
a face of comical fierceness.
My uncle smiled at these sallies at the time, but afterwards,
when I went back with him to the Pharmacy--the low-class business
grew brisker in the evening and they kept open late--he reverted
to it in a low expository tone. "Your aunt's a bit impatient,
George. She gets at me. It's only natural.... A woman doesn't
understand how long it takes to build up a position. No.... In
certain directions now--I am--quietly--building up a position.
Now here.... I get this room. I have my three assistants. Zzzz.
It's a position that, judged by the criterion of imeedjit
income, isn't perhaps so good as I deserve, but
strategically--yes. It's what I want. I make my plans. I rally
my attack."
"What plans," I said, "are you making?"
"Well, George, there's one thing you can rely upon, I'm doing
nothing in a hurry. I turn over this one and that, and I don't
talk--indiscreetly. There's-- No! I don't think I can tell you
that. And yet, why NOT?"
He got up and closed the door into the shop. "I've told no one,"
he remarked, as he sat down again. "I owe you something."
His face flushed slightly, he leant forward over the little table
towards me.
"Listen!" he said.
I listened.
"Tono-Bungay," said my uncle very slowly and distinctly.
I thought he was asking me to hear some remote, strange noise.
"I don't hear anything," I said reluctantly to his expectant
face. He smiled undefeated. "Try again," he said, and
repeated, "Tono-Bungay."
"Oh, THAT!" I said.
"Eh?" said he.
"But what is it?"
"Ah!" said my uncle, rejoicing and expanding. "What IS it?
That's what you got to ask? What won't it be?" He dug me
violently in what he supposed to be my ribs. "George," he
cried--"George, watch this place! There's more to follow."
And that was all I could get from him.
That, I believe, was the very first time that the words
Tono-Bungay ever heard on earth--unless my uncle indulged in
monologues in his chamber--a highly probable thing. Its
utterance certainly did not seem to me at the time to mark any
sort of epoch, and had I been told this word was the Open Sesame
to whatever pride and pleasure the grimy front of London hid from
us that evening, I should have laughed aloud.
"Coming now to business," I said after a pause, and with a chill
sense of effort; and I opened the question of his trust.
My uncle sighed, and leant back in his chair. "I wish I could
make all this business as clear to you as it is to me," he said.
"However--Go on! Say what you have to say."
VII
After I left my uncle that evening I gave way to a feeling of
profound depression. My uncle and aunt seemed to me to be
leading--I have already used the word too often, but I must use
it again--DINGY lives. They seemed to be adrift in a limitless
crowd of dingy people, wearing shabby clothes, living
uncomfortably in shabby second-hand houses, going to and fro on
pavements that had always a thin veneer of greasy, slippery mud,
under grey skies that showed no gleam of hope of anything for
them but dinginess until they died. It seemed absolutely clear
to me that my mother's little savings had been swallowed up and
that my own prospect was all too certainly to drop into and be
swallowed up myself sooner or later by this dingy London ocean.
The London that was to be an adventurous escape from the slumber
of Wimblehurst, had vanished from my dreams. I saw my uncle
pointing to the houses in Park Lane and showing a frayed
shirt-cuff as he did so. I heard my aunt: "I'm to ride in my
carriage then. So he old says."
My feelings towards my uncle were extraordinarily mixed. I was
intensely sorry not only for my aunt Susan but for him--for it
seemed indisputable that as they were living then so they must go
on--and at the same time I was angry with the garrulous vanity
and illness that had elipped all my chance of independent study,
and imprisoned her in those grey apartments. When I got back to
Wimblehurst I allowed myself to write him a boyishly sarcastic
and sincerely bitter letter. He never replied. Then, believing
it to be the only way of escape for me, I set myself far more
grimly and resolutely to my studies than I had ever done before.
After a time I wrote to him in more moderate terms, and he
answered me evasively. And then I tried to dismiss him from my
mind and went on working.
Yes, that first raid upon London under the moist and chilly
depression of January had an immense effect upon me. It was for
me an epoch-making disappointment. I had thought of London as a
large, free, welcoming, adventurous place, and I saw it slovenly
and harsh and irresponsive.
I did not realise at all what human things might be found behind
those grey frontages, what weakness that whole forbidding facade
might presently confess. It is the constant error of youth to
over-estimate the Will in things. I did not see that the dirt,
the discouragement, the discomfort of London could be due simply
to the fact that London was a witless old giantess of a town, too
slack and stupid to keep herself clean and maintain a brave face
to the word. No! I suffered from the sort of illusion that burnt
witches in the seventeenth century. I endued her grubby disorder
with a sinister and magnificent quality of intention.
And my uncle's gestures and promises filled me with doubt and a
sort of fear for him. He seemed to me a lost little creature,
too silly to be silent, in a vast implacable condemnation. I was
full of pity and a sort of tenderness for my aunt Susan, who was
doomed to follow his erratic fortunes mocked by his grandiloquent
promises.
I was to learn better. But I worked with the terror of the grim
underside of London in my soul during all my last year at
Wimblehurst.
BOOK THE SECOND
THE RISE OF TONO-BUNGAY
CHAPTER THE FIRST
HOW I BECAME A LONDON STUDENT AND WENT ASTRAY
I came to live in London, as I shall tell you, when I was nearly
twenty-two. Wimblehurst dwindles in perspective, is now in this
book a little place far off, Bladesover no more than a small
pinkish speck of frontage among the distant Kentish hills; the
scene broadens out, becomes multitudinous and limitless, full of
the sense of vast irrelevant movement. I do not remember my
second coming to London as I do my first, for my early
impressions, save that an October memory of softened amber
sunshine stands out, amber sunshine falling on grey house fronts
I know not where. That, and a sense of a large tranquillity.
I could fill a book, I think, with a more or less imaginary
account of how I came to apprehend London, how first in one
aspect and then in another it grew in my mind. Each day my
accumulating impressions were added to and qualified and brought
into relationship with new ones; they fused inseparably with
others that were purely personal and accidental. I find myself
with a certain comprehensive perception of London, complete
indeed, incurably indistinct in places and yet in some way a
whole that began with my first visit and is still being mellowed
and enriched.
London!
At first, no doubt, it was a chaos of streets and people and
buildings and reasonless going to and fro. I do not remember
that I ever struggled very steadily to understand it, or explored
it with any but a personal and adventurous intention. Yet in
time there has grown up in me a kind of theory of London; I do
think I see lines of an ordered structure out of which it has
grown, detected a process that is something more than a confusion
of casual accidents though indeed it may be no more than a
process of disease.
I said at the outset of my first book that I find in Bladesover
the clue to all England. Well, I certainly imagine it is the
clue to the structure of London. There have been no revolutions
no deliberate restatements or abandonments of opinion in England
since the days of the fine gentry, since 1688 or thereabouts, the
days when Bladesover was built; there have been changes,
dissolving forest replacing forest, if you will; but then it was
that the broad lines of the English system set firmly. And as I
have gone to and fro in London in certain regions constantly the
thought has recurred this is Bladesover House, this answers to
Bladesover House. The fine gentry may have gone; they have
indeed largely gone, I think; rich merchants may have replaced
them, financial adventurers or what not. That does not matter;
the shape is still Bladesover.
I am most reminded of Bladesover and Eastry by all those regions
round about the West End parks; for example, estate parks, each
more or less in relation to a palace or group of great houses.
The roads and back ways of Mayfair and all about St. James's
again, albeit perhaps of a later growth in point of time, were of
the very spirit and architectural texture of the Bladesover
passages and yards; they had the same smells, the space, the
large cleanest and always going to and fro where one met
unmistakable Olympians and even more unmistakable valets,
butlers, footmen in mufti. There were moments when I seemed to
glimpse down areas the white panelling, the very chintz of my
mother's room again.
I could trace out now on a map what I would call the Great-House
region; passing south-westward into Belgravia, becoming diffused
and sporadic westward, finding its last systematic outbreak round
and about Regent's Park. The Duke of Devonshire's place in
Piccadilly, in all its insolent ugliness, pleases me
particularly; it is the quintessence of the thing; Apsley House
is all in the manner of my theory, Park Lane has its quite
typical mansions, and they run along the border of the Green Park
and St. James's. And I struck out a truth one day in Cromwell
Road quite suddenly, as I looked over the Natural History Museum
"By Jove," said I "but this is the little assemblage of cases of
stuffed birds and animals upon the Bladesover staircase grown
enormous, and yonder as the corresponding thing to the
Bladesover curios and porcelain is the Art Museume and there in
the little observatories in Exhibition Road is old Sir Cuthbert's
Gregorian telescope that I hunted out in the storeroom and put
together." And diving into the Art Museum under this
inspiration, I came to a little reading-room and found as I had
inferred, old brown books!
It was really a good piece of social comparative anatomy I did
that day; all these museums and libraries that are dotted over
London between Piccadilly and West Kensington, and indeed the
museum and library movement throughout the world, sprang from the
elegant leisure of the gentlemen of taste. Theirs were the.
first libraries, the first houses of culture; by my rat-like
raids into the Bladesover saloon I became, as it were, the last
dwindled representative of such a man of letters as Swift. But
now these things have escaped out of the Great House altogether,
and taken on a strange independent life of their own.
It is this idea of escaping parts from the seventeenth century
system of Bladesover, of proliferating and overgrowing elements
from the Estates, that to this day seems to me the best
explanation, not simply of London, but of all England. England
is a country of great Renascence landed gentlefolk who have been
unconsciously outgrown and overgrown. The proper shops for
Bladesover custom were still to be found in Regent Street and
Bond Street in my early London days in those days they had been
but lightly touched by the American's profaning hand--and in
Piccadilly. I found the doctor's house of the country village or
country town up and down Harley Street, multiplied but not
otherwise different, and the family solicitor (by the hundred)
further eastward in the abandoned houses of a previous generation
of gentlepeople, and down in Westminster, behind Palladian
fronts, the public offices sheltered in large Bladesoverish rooms
and looked out on St. James's Park. The Parliament Houses of
lords and gentlemen, the parliament house that was horrified when
merchants and brewers came thrusting into it a hundred years ago,
stood out upon its terrace gathering the whole system together
into a head.
And the more I have paralleled these things with my
Bladesover-Eastry model, the more evident it has become to me
that the balance is not the same, and the more evident is the
presence of great new forces, blind forces of invasion, of
growth. The railway termini on the north side of London have
been kept as remote as Eastry had kept the railway-station from
Wimblehurst, they stop on the very outskirts of the estates, but
from the south, the South Eastern railway had butted its great
stupid rusty iron head of Charing Cross station, that great head
that came smashing down in 1905--clean across the river, between
Somerset House and Whitehall. The south side had no protecting
estate. Factory chimneys smoke right over against Westminster
with an air of carelessly not having permission, and the whole
effect of industrial London and of all London east of Temple Bar
and of the huge dingy immensity of London port is to me of
something disproportionately large, something morbidly expanded,
without plan or intention, dark and sinister toward the clean
clear social assurance of the West End. And south of this
central London, south-east, south-west, far west, north-west, all
round the northern hills, are similar disproportionate growths,
endless streets of undistinguished houses, undistinguished
industries, shabby families, second-rate shops, inexplicable
people who in a once fashionable phrase do not "exist." All
these aspects have suggested to my mind at times, do suggest to
this day, the unorganised, abundant substance of some tumorous
growth-process, a process which indeed bursts all the outlines of
the affected carcass and protrudes such masses as ignoble
comfortable Croydon, as tragic impoverished West Ham. To this
day I ask myself will those masses ever become structural, will
they indeed shape into anything new whatever, or is that
cancerous image their true and ultimate diagnosis?...
Moreover, together with this hypertrophy there is an immigration
of elements that have never understood and never will understand
the great tradition, wedges of foreign settlement embedded in the
heart of this yeasty English expansion. One day I remember
wandering eastward out of pure curiosity--it must have been in
my early student days--and discovering a shabbily bright foreign
quarter, shops displaying Hebrew placards and weird, unfamiliar
commodities and a concourse of bright-eyed, eagle-nosed people
talking some incomprehensible gibberish between the shops and
the barrows. And soon I became quite familiar with the devious.
vicious, dirtily-pleasant eroticism of Soho. I found those
crowded streets a vast relief from the dull grey exterior of
Brompton where I lodged and lived my daily life. In Soho,
indeed, I got my first inkling of the factor of replacement that
is so important in both the English and the American process.
Even in the West End, in Mayfair and the square, about Pall Mall,
Ewart was presently to remind me the face of the old aristocratic
dignity was fairer than its substance; here were actors and
actresses, here money lenders and Jews, here bold financial
adventurers, and I thought of my uncle's frayed cuff as he
pointed out this house in Park Lane and that. That was so and
so's who made a corner in borax, and that palace belonged to that
hero among modern adventurers, Barmentrude, who used to be an
I.D.B.,--an illicit diamond buyer that is to say. A city of
Bladesovers, the capital of a kingdom of Bladesovers, all much
shaken and many altogether in decay, parasitically occupied,
insidiously replaced by alien, unsympathetic and irresponsible
elements; and with a ruling an adventitious and miscellaneous
empire of a quarter of this daedal earth complex laws,
intricate social necessities, disturbing insatiable suggestions,
followed from this. Such was the world into which I had come,
into which I had in some way to thrust myself and fit my problem,
my temptations, my efforts, my patriotic instinct, all my moral
instincts, my physical appetites, my dreams and my sanity.
London! I came up to it, young and without advisers, rather
priggish, rather dangerously open-minded and very open-eyed, and
with something--it is, I think, the common gift of imaginative
youth, and I claim it unblushingly--fine in me, finer than the
world and seeking fine responses. I did not want simply to live
or simply to live happily or well; I wanted to serve and do and
make--with some nobility. It was in me. It is in half the youth
of the world.
II
I had come to London as a scholar. I had taken the Vincent
Bradley scholarship of the Pharmaceutical Society, but I threw
this up when I found that my work of the Science and Art
Department in mathematics, physics and chemistry had given me one
of the minor Technical Board Scholarships at the Consolidated
Technical Schools at South Kensington. This latter was in
mechanics and metallurgy; and I hesitated between the two. The
Vincent Bradley gave me L70 a year and quite the best start-off a
pharmaceutical chemist could have; the South Kensington thing was
worth about twenty-two shillings a week, and the prospects it
opened were vague. But it meant far more scientific work than
the former, and I was still under the impulse of that great
intellectual appetite that is part of the adolescence of men of
my type. Moreover it seemed to lead towards engineering, in
which I imagined--I imagine to this day--my particular use is to
be found. I took its greater uncertainty as a fair risk. I came
up very keen, not doubting that the really hard and steady
industry that had carried me through Wimblehurst would go on
still in the new surroundings.
Only from the very first it didn't....
When I look back now at my Wimblehurst days, I still find myself
surprised at the amount of steady grinding study, of strenuous
self-discipline that I maintained throughout my apprenticeship.
In many ways I think that time was the most honourable period in
my life. I wish I could say with a certain mind that my motives
in working so well were large and honourable too. To a certain
extent they were so; there was a fine sincere curiosity, a desire
for the strength and power of scientific knowledge and a passion
for intellectual exercise; but I do not think those forces alone
would have kept me at it so grimly and closely if Wimblehurst
had not been so dull, so limited and so observant. Directly I
came into the London atmosphere, tasting freedom, tasting
irresponsibility and the pull of new forces altogether, my
discipline fell from me like a garment. Wimblehurst to a
youngster in my position offered no temptations worth counting,
no interests to conflict with study, no vices--such vices as it
offered were coarsely stripped of any imaginative glamourfull
drunkenness, clumsy leering shameful lust, no social intercourse
even to waste one's time, and on the other hand it would minister
greatly to the self-esteem of a conspicuously industrious
student. One was marked as "clever," one played up to the part,
and one's little accomplishment stood out finely in one's private
reckoning against the sunlit small ignorance of that agreeable
place. One went with an intent rush across the market square,
one took one's exercise with as dramatic a sense of an ordered
day as an Oxford don, one burnt the midnight oil quite
consciously at the rare respectful, benighted passer-by. And
one stood out finely in the local paper with one's unapproachable
yearly harvest of certificates. Thus I was not only a genuinely
keen student, but also a little of a prig and poseur in those
days--and the latter kept the former at it, as London made clear.
Moreover Wimblehurst had given me no outlet in any other
direction.
But I did not realise all this when I came to London, did not
perceive how the change of atmosphere began at once to warp and
distribute my energies. In the first place I became invisible.
If I idled for a day, no one except my fellow-students (who
evidently had no awe for me) remarked it. No one saw my midnight
taper; no one pointed me out as I crossed the street as an
astonishing intellectual phenomenon. In the next place I became
inconsiderable. In Wimblehurst I felt I stood for Science;
nobody there seemed to have so much as I and to have it so fully
and completely. In London I walked ignorant in an immensity, and
it was clear that among my fellow-students from the midlands and
the north I was ill-equipped and under-trained. With the utmost
exertion I should only take a secondary position among them. And
finally, in the third place, I was distracted by voluminous new
interests; London took hold of me, and Science, which had been
the universe, shrank back to the dimensions of tiresome little
formulae compacted in a book. I came to London in late
September, and it was a very different London from that great
greyly-overcast, smoke-stained house-wilderness of my first
impressions. I reached it by Victoria and not by Cannon Street,
and its centre was now in Exhibition Road. It shone, pale amber,
blue-grey and tenderly spacious and fine under clear autumnal
skies. a London of hugely handsome buildings and vistas and
distances, a London of gardens and labyrinthine tall museums, of
old trees and remote palaces and artificial waters. I lodged
near by in West Brompton at a house in a little square.
So London faced me the second time, making me forget altogether
for a while the grey, drizzling city visage that had first looked
upon me. I settled down and went to and fro to my lectures and
laboratory; in the beginning I worked hard, and only slowly did
the curiosity that presently possessed me to know more of this
huge urban province arise, the desire to find something beyond
mechanism that I could serve, some use other than learning. With
this was a growing sense of loneliness, a desire for adventure
and intercourse. I found myself in the evenings poring over a
map of London I had bought, instead of copying out lecture
notes--and on Sundays I made explorations, taking omnibus rides
east and west and north and south, and to enlarging and
broadening the sense of great swarming hinterlands of humanity
with whom I had no dealings, of whom I knew nothing....
The whole illimitable place teemed with suggestions of indefinite
and sometimes outrageous possibility, of hidden but magnificent
meanings.
It wasn't simply that I received a vast impression of space and
multitude and opportunity; intimate things also were suddenly
dragged from neglected, veiled and darkened corners into an acute
vividness of perception. Close at hand in the big art museum I
came for the first time upon the beauty of nudity, which I had
hitherto held to be a shameful secret, flaunted and gloried in; I
was made aware of beauty as not only permissible, but desirable
and frequent and of a thousand hitherto unsuspected rich aspects
of life. One night in a real rapture, I walked round the upper
gallery of the Albert Hall and listened for the first time to
great music; I believe now that it was a rendering of Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony....
My apprehension of spaces and places was reinforced by a
quickened apprehension of persons. A constant stream of people
passed by me, eyes met and challenged mine and passed--more and
more I wanted then to stay--if I went eastward towards
Piccadilly, women who seemed then to my boyish inexperience
softly splendid and alluring, murmured to me as they passed.
Extraordinarily life unveiled. The very hoardings clamoured
strangely at one's senses and curiosities. One bought pamphlets
and papers full of strange and daring ideas transcending one's
boldest; in the parks one heard men discussing the very existence
of God, denying the rights of property, debating a hundred things
that one dared not think about in Wimblehurst. And after the
ordinary overcast day, after dull mornings, came twilight, and
London lit up and became a thing of white and yellow and red
jewels of light and wonderful floods of golden illumination and
stupendous and unfathomable shadows--and there were no longer
any mean or shabby people--but a great mysterious movement of
unaccountable beings....
Always I was coming on the queerest new aspects. Late one
Saturday night I found myself one of a great slow-moving crowd
between the blazing shops and the flaring barrows in the Harrow
Road; I got into conversation with two bold-eyed girls, bought
them boxes of chocolate, made the acquaintance of father and
mother and various younger brothers and sisters, sat in a
public-house hilariously with them all, standing and being stood
drinks, and left them in the small hours at the door of "home,"
never to see them again. And once I was accosted on the
outskirts of a Salvation Army meeting in one of the parks by a
silk-hatted young man of eager and serious discourse, who argued
against scepticism with me, invited me home to tea into a clean
and cheerful family of brothers and sisters and friends, and
there I spent the evening singing hymns to the harmonium (which
reminded me of half-forgotten Chatham), and wishing all the
sisters were not so obviously engaged....
Then on the remote hill of this boundless city-world I found
Ewart.
III
How well I remember the first morning, a bright Sunday morning in
early October, when I raided in upon Ewart! I found my old
schoolfellow in bed in a room over an oil-shop in a back street
at the foot of Highgate Hill. His landlady, a pleasant, dirty
young woman with soft-brown eyes, brought down his message for me
to come up; and up I went. The room presented itself as ample
and interesting in detail and shabby with a quite commendable
shabbiness. I had an impression of brown walls--they were
papered with brown paper-- of a long shelf along one side of the
room, with dusty plaster casts and a small cheap lay figure of a
horse, of a table and something of grey wax partially covered
with a cloth, and of scattered drawings. There was a gas stove
in one corner, and some enameled ware that had been used for
overnight cooking. The oilcloth on the floor was streaked with a
peculiar white dust. Ewart himself was not in the first instance
visible, but only a fourfold canvas screen at the end of the room
from which shouts proceeded of "Come on!" then his wiry black
hair, very much rumpled, and a staring red-brown eye and his
stump of a nose came round the edge of this at a height of about
three feet from the ground "It's old Ponderevo!" he said, "the
Early bird! And he's caught the worm! By Jove, but it's cold this
morning! Come round here and sit on the bed!"
I walked round, wrung his hand, and we surveyed one another.
He was lying on a small wooden fold-up bed, the scanty covering
of which was supplemented by an overcoat and an elderly but still
cheerful pair of check trousers, and he was wearing pajamas of a
virulent pink and green. His neck seemed longer and more stringy
than it had been even in our schooldays, and his upper lip had a
wiry black moustache. The rest of his ruddy, knobby countenance,
his erratic hair and his general hairy leanness had not even--to
my perceptions grown.
"By Jove!" he said, "you've got quite decent-looking, Ponderevo!
What do you think of me?"
"You're all right. What are you doing here?"
"Art, my son--sculpture! And incidentally--" He hesitated. "I
ply a trade. Will you hand me that pipe and those smoking
things? So! You can't make coffee, eh? Well, try your hand.
Cast down this screen--no--fold it up and so we'll go into the
other room. I'll keep in bed all the same. The fire's a gas
stove. Yes. Don't make it bang too loud as you light it--I
can't stand it this morning. You won't smoke ?... Well, it does
me good to see you again, Ponderevo. Tell me what you're doing,
and how you're getting on."
He directed me in the service of his simple hospitality, and
presently I came back to his bed and sat down and smiled at him
there, smoking comfortably, with his hands under his head,
surveying me.
"How's Life's Morning, Ponderevo? By Jove, it must be nearly six
years since we met! They've got moustaches. We've fleshed
ourselves a bit, eh? And you?"
I felt a pipe was becoming after all, and that lit, I gave him a
favourable sketch of my career.
"Science! And you've worked like that! While I've been potting
round doing odd jobs for stone-masons and people, and trying to
get to sculpture. I've a sort of feeling that the chisel--I
began with painting, Ponderevo, and found I was colour-blind,
colour-blind enough to stop it. I've drawn about and thought
about--thought more particularly. I give myself three days a
week as an art student, and the rest of the time I've a sort of
trade that keeps me. And we're still in the beginning of things,
young men starting. Do you remember the old times at Goudhurst,
our doll's-house island, the Retreat of the Ten Thousand Young
Holmes and the rabbits, eh? It's surprising, if you think of it,
to find we are still young. And we used to talk of what we would
be, and we used to talk of love! I suppose you know all about
that now, Ponderevo?"
I finished and hesitated on some vague foolish lie, "No," I said,
a little ashamed of the truth. "Do you? I've been too busy."
"I'm just beginning--just as we were then. Things happen."
He sucked at his pipe for a space and stared at the plaster cast
of a flayed hand that hung on the wall.
"The fact is, Ponderevo, I'm beginning to find life a most
extraordinary queer set-out; the things that pull one, the things
that don't. The wants--This business of sex. It's a net. No
end to it, no way out of it, no sense in it. There are times
when women take possession of me, when my mind is like a painted
ceiling at Hampton Court with the pride of the flesh sprawling
all over it. WHY?... And then again sometimes when I have to
encounter a woman, I am overwhelmed by a terror of tantalising
boredom--I fly, I hide, I do anything. You've got your
scientific explanations perhaps; what's Nature and the universe
up to in that matter?"
"It's her way, I gather, of securing the continuity of the
species."
"But it doesn't," said Ewart. "That's just it! No. I have
succumbed to--dissipation--down the hill there. Euston Road way.
And it was damned ugly and mean, and I hate having done it. And
the continuity of the species--Lord!... And why does Nature make
a man so infernally ready for drinks? There's no sense in that
anyhow." He sat up in bed, to put this question with the greater
earnestness. "And why has she given me a most violent desire
towards sculpture and an equally violent desire to leave off work
directly I begin it, eh?... Let's have some more coffee. I put
it to you, these things puzzle me, Ponderevo. They dishearten
me. They keep me in bed."
He had an air of having saved up these difficulties for me for
some time. He sat with his chin almost touching his knees,
sucking at his pipe.
"That's what I mean," he went on, "when I say life is getting on
to me as extraordinarily queer, I don't see my game, nor why I
was invited. And I don't make anything of the world outside
either. What do you make of it?"
"London," I began. "It's--so enormous!"
"Isn't it! And it's all up to nothing. You find chaps keeping
grocers' shops--why the DEVIL, Ponderevo, do they keep grocers'
shops? They all do it very carefully, very steadily, very
meanly. You find people running about and doing the most
remarkable things being policemen, for example, and burglars.
They go about these businesses quite gravely and earnestly. I
somehow--can't go about mine. Is there any sense in it at
all--anywhere?"
"There must be sense in it," I said. "We're young."
"We're young--yes. But one must inquire. The grocer's a grocer
because, I suppose, he sees he comes in there. Feels that on the
whole it amounts to a call.... But the bother is I don't see
where I come in at all. Do you?"
"Where you come in?"
"No, where you come in."
"Not exactly, yet," I said. "I want to do some good in the
world--something--something effectual, before I die. I have a
sort of idea my scientific work-- I don't know."
"Yes," he mused." And I've got a sort of idea my sculpture,--but
now it is to come in and WHY,--I've no idea at all." He hugged
his knees for a space. "That's what puzzles me, Ponderevo, no
end."
He became animated. "If you will look in that cupboard," he
said, "you will find an old respectable looking roll on a plate
and a knife somewhere and a gallipot containing butter. You give
them me and I'll make my breakfast, and then if you don't mind
watching me paddle about at my simple toilet I'll get up. Then
we'll go for a walk and talk about this affair of life further.
And about Art and Literature and anything else that crops up on
the way.... Yes, that's the gallipot. Cockroach got in it?
Chuck him out--damned interloper...."
So in the first five minutes of our talk, as I seem to remember
it now, old Ewart struck the note that ran through all that
morning's intercourse....
To me it was a most memorable talk because it opened out quite
new horizons of thought. I'd been working rather close and out
of touch with Ewart's free gesticulating way. He was
pessimistic that day and sceptical to the very root of things.
He made me feel clearly, what I had not felt at all before, the
general adventurousness of life, particularly of life at the
stage we had reached, and also the absence of definite objects,
of any concerted purpose in the lives that were going on all
round us. He made me feel, too, how ready I was to take up
commonplace assumptions. Just as I had always imagined that
somewhere in social arrangements there was certainly a
Head-Master who would intervene if one went too far, so I had
always had a sort of implicit belief that in our England there
were somewhere people who understood what we were all, as a
nation, about. That crumpled into his pit of doubt and vanished.
He brought out, sharply cut and certain, the immense effect of
purposelessness in London that I was already indistinctly
feeling. We found ourselves at last returning through Highgate
Cemetery and Waterlow Park--and Ewart was talking.
"Look at it there," he said, stopping and pointing to the great
vale of London spreading wide and far. "It's like a sea--and we
swim in it. And at last down we go, and then up we come--washed
up here." He swung his arms to the long slopes about us, tombs
and headstones in long perspectives, in limitless rows.
"We're young, Ponderevo, but sooner or later our whitened
memories will wash up on one of these beaches, on some such beach
as this. George Ponderevo, F.R.S., Sidney Ewart, R.I.P. Look at
the rows of 'em!"
He paused. "Do you see that hand? The hand, I mean, pointing
upward, on the top of a blunted obelisk. Yes. Well, that's what
I do for a living--when I'm not thinking, or drinking, or
prowling, or making love, or pretending I'm trying to be a
sculptor without either the money or the morals for a model.
See? And I do those hearts afire and those pensive angel
guardians with the palm of peace. Damned well I do 'em and
damned cheap! I'm a sweated victim, Ponderevo..."
That was the way of it, anyhow. I drank deep of talk that day;
we went into theology, into philosophy; I had my first glimpse of
socialism. I felt as though I had been silent in a silence since
I and he had parted. At the thought of socialism Ewart's moods
changed for a time to a sort of energy. "After all, all this
confounded vagueness might be altered. If you could get men to
work together..."
It was a good talk that rambled through all the universe. I
thought I was giving my mind refreshment, but indeed it was
dissipation. All sorts of ideas, even now, carry me back as it
were to a fountain-head, to Waterlow Park and my resuscitated
Ewart. There stretches away south of us long garden slopes and
white gravestones and the wide expanse of London, and somewhere
in the picture is a red old wall, sun-warmed, and a great blaze
of Michaelmas daisies set off with late golden sunflowers and a
drift of mottled, blood-red, fallen leaves. It was with me that
day as though I had lifted my head suddenly out of dull and
immediate things and looked at life altogether.... But it played
the very devil with the copying up of my arrears of notes to
which I had vowed the latter half of that day.
After that reunion Ewart and I met much and talked much, and in
our subsequent encounters his monologue was interrupted and I
took my share. He had exercised me so greatly that I lay awake
at nights thinking him over, and discoursed and answered him in
my head as I went in the morning to the College. I am by nature
a doer and only by the way a critic; his philosophical assertion
of the incalculable vagueness of life which fitted his natural
indolence roused my more irritable and energetic nature to
active protests. "It's all so pointless," I said, "because
people are slack and because it's in the ebb of an age. But
you're a socialist. Well, let's bring that about! And there's a
purpose. There you are!"
Ewart gave me all my first conceptions of socialism; in a little
while I was an enthusiastic socialist and he was a passive
resister to the practical exposition of the theories he had
taught me. "We must join some organisation," I said. "We ought
to do things.... We ought to go and speak at street corners.
People don't know."
You must figure me a rather ill-dressed young man in a state of
great earnestness, standing up in that shabby studio of his and
saying these things, perhaps with some gesticulations, and Ewart
with a clay-smudged face, dressed perhaps in a flannel shirt and
trousers, with a pipe in his mouth, squatting philosophically at
a table, working at some chunk of clay that never got beyond
suggestion.
"I wonder why one doesn't want to," he said.
It was only very slowly I came to gauge Ewart's real position in
the scheme of things, to understand how deliberate and complete
was this detachment of his from the moral condemnation and
responsibilities that played so fine a part in his talk. His was
essentially the nature of an artistic appreciator; he could find
interest and beauty in endless aspects of things that I marked as
evil, or at least as not negotiable; and the impulse I had
towards self-deception, to sustained and consistent
self-devotion, disturbed and detached and pointless as it was at
that time, he had indeed a sort of admiration for but no
sympathy. Like many fantastic and ample talkers he was at bottom
secretive, and he gave me a series of little shocks of discovery
throughout our intercourse.
The first of these came in the realisation that he quite
seriously meant to do nothing in the world at all towards
reforming the evils he laid bare in so easy and dexterous a
manner. The next came in the sudden appearance of a person
called "Milly"--I've forgotten her surname--whom I found in his
room one evening, simply attired in a blue wrap--the rest of her
costume behind the screen--smoking cigarettes and sharing a
flagon of an amazingly cheap and self-assertive grocer's wine
Ewart affected, called "Canary Sack." "Hullo!" said Ewart, as I
came in. "This is Milly, you know. She's been being a
model--she IS a model really.... (keep calm, Ponderevo!) Have
some sack?"
Milly was a woman of thirty, perhaps, with a broad, rather pretty
face, a placid disposition, a bad accent and delightful blond
hair that waved off her head with an irrepressible variety of
charm; and whenever Ewart spoke she beamed at him. Ewart was
always sketching this hair of hers and embarking upon clay
statuettes of her that were never finished. She was, I know now,
a woman of the streets, whom Ewart had picked up in the most
casual manner, and who had fallen in love with him, but my
inexperience in those days was too great for me to place her
then, and Ewart offered no elucidations. She came to him, he
went to her, they took holidays together in the country when
certainly she sustained her fair share of their expenditure. I
suspect him now even of taking money from her. Odd old Ewart!
It was a relationship so alien to my orderly conceptions of
honour, to what I could imagine any friend of mine doing, that I
really hardly saw it with it there under my nose. But I see it
and I think I understand it now....
Before I fully grasped the discursive manner in which Ewart was
committed to his particular way in life, I did, I say, as the
broad constructive ideas of socialism took hold of me, try to get
him to work with me in some definite fashion as a socialist.
"We ought to join on to other socialists," I said.
"They've got something."
"Let's go and look at some first."
After some pains we discovered the office of the Fabian Society,
lurking in a cellar in Clement's Inn; and we went and interviewed
a rather discouraging secretary who stood astraddle in front of a
fire and questioned us severely and seemed to doubt the integrity
of our intentions profoundly. He advised us to attend the next
open meeting in Clifford's Inn and gave us the necessary data.
We both contrived to get to the affair, and heard a discursive
gritty paper on Trusts and one of the most inconclusive
discussions you can imagine. Three-quarters of the speakers
seemed under some jocular obsession which took the form of
pretending to be conceited. It was a sort of family joke, and as
strangers to the family we did not like it.... As we came out
through the narrow passage from Clifford's Inn to the Strand,
Ewart suddenly pitched upon a wizened, spectacled little man in a
vast felt hat and a large orange tie.
"How many members are there in this Fabian Society of yours?" he
asked.
The little man became at once defensive in his manner.
"About seven hundred," he said; "perhaps eight."
"Like--like the ones here?"
The little man gave a nervous self-satisfied laugh. "I suppose
they're up to sample," he said.
The little man dropped out of existence and we emerged upon the
Strand. Ewart twisted his arm into a queerly eloquent gesture
that gathered up all the tall facades of the banks, the business
places, the projecting clock and towers of the Law Courts, the
advertisements, the luminous signs, into one social immensity,
into a capitalistic system gigantic and invincible.
"These socialists have no sense of proportion," he said. "What
can you expect of them?"
IV
Ewart, as the embodiment of talk, was certainly a leading factor
in my conspicuous failure to go on studying. Social theory in
its first crude form of Democratic Socialism gripped my
intelligence more and more powerfully. I argued in the
laboratory with the man who shared my bench until we quarreled
and did not speak and also I fell in love.
The ferment of sex had been creeping into my being like a slowly
advancing tide through all my Wimblehurst days, the stimulus of
London was like the rising of a wind out of the sea that brings
the waves in fast and high. Ewart had his share in that. More
and more acutely and unmistakably did my perception of beauty,
form and sound, my desire for adventure, my desire for
intercourse, converge on this central and commanding business of
the individual life. I had to get me a mate.
I began to fall in love faintly with girls I passed in the
street, with women who sat before me in trains, with girl
fellow-students, with ladies in passing carriages, with
loiterers at the corners, with neat-handed waitresses in shops
and tea-rooms, with pictures even of girls and women. On my rare
visits to the theatre I always became exalted, and found the
actresses and even the spectators about me mysterious,
attractive, creatures of deep interest and desire. I had a
stronger and stronger sense that among these glancing, passing
multitudes there was somewhere one who was for me. And in spite
of every antagonistic force in the world, there was something in
my very marrow that insisted: "Stop! Look at this one! Think of
her! Won't she do ? This signifies--this before all things
signifies! Stop! Why are you hurrying by? This may be the
predestined person--before all others."
It is odd that I can't remember when first I saw Marion, who
became my wife--whom I was to make wretched, who was to make me
wretched, who was to pluck that fine generalised possibility of
love out of my early manhood and make it a personal conflict. I
became aware of her as one of a number of interesting attractive
figures that moved about in my world, that glanced back at my
eyes, that flitted by with a kind of averted watchfulness. I
would meet her coming through the Art Museum, which was my short
cut to the Brompton Road, or see her sitting, reading as I
thought, in one of the bays of the Education Library. But
really, as I found out afterwards, she never read. She used to
come there to eat a bun in quiet. She was a very
gracefully-moving figure of a girl then, very plainly dressed,
with dark brown hair I remember, in a knot low on her neck behind
that confessed the pretty roundness of her head and harmonised
with the admirable lines of ears and cheek, the grave serenity of
mouth and brow.
She stood out among the other girls very distinctly because they
dressed more than she did, struck emphatic notes of colour,
startled one by novelties in hats and bows and things. I've
always hated the rustle, the disconcerting colour boundaries, the
smart unnatural angles of women's clothes. Her plain black dress
gave her a starkness....
I do remember, though, how one afternoon I discovered the
peculiar appeal of her form for me. I had been restless with my
work and had finally slipped out of the Laboratory and come over
to the Art Museum to lounge among the pictures. I came upon her
in an odd corner of the Sheepshanks gallery, intently copying
something from a picture that hung high. I had just been in the
gallery of casts from the antique, my mind was all alive with my
newly awakened sense of line, and there she stood with face
upturned, her body drooping forward from the hips just a
little--memorably graceful--feminine.
After that I know I sought to see her, felt a distinctive
emotion at her presence, began to imagine things about her. I no
longer thought of generalised womanhood or of this casual person
or that. I thought of her.
An accident brought us together. I found myself one Monday
morning in an omnibus staggering westward from Victoria--I was
returning from a Sunday I'd spent at Wimblehurst in response to a
unique freak of hospitality on the part of Mr. Mantell. She was
the sole other inside passenger. And when the time came to pay
her fare, she became an extremely scared, disconcerted and
fumbling young woman; she had left her purse at home.
Luckily I had some money.
She looked at me with startled, troubled brown eyes; she
permitted my proffered payment to the conductor with a certain
ungraciousness that seemed a part of her shyness, and then as she
rose to go, she thanked me with an obvious affectation of ease.
"Thank you so much," she said in a pleasant soft voice; and then
less gracefully, "Awfully kind of you, you know."
I fancy I made polite noises. But just then I wasn't disposed to
be critical. I was full of the sense of her presence; her arm
was stretched out over me as she moved past me, the gracious
slenderness of her body was near me. The words we used didn't
seem very greatly to matter. I had vague ideas of getting out
with her--and I didn't.
That encounter, I have no doubt, exercised me enormously. I lay
awake at night rehearsing it, and wondering about the next phase
of our relationship. That took the form of the return of my
twopence. I was in the Science Library, digging something out of
the Encyclopedia Britannica, when she appeared beside me and
placed on the open page an evidently premeditated thin envelope,
bulgingly confessing the coins within.
"It was so very kind of you," she said, "the other day. I don't
know what I should have done, Mr.--"
I supplied my name. "I knew," I said, "you were a student here."
"Not exactly a student. I--"
"Well, anyhow, I knew you were here frequently. And I'm a
student myself at the Consolidated Technical Schools."
I plunged into autobiography and questionings, and so entangled
her in a conversation that got a quality of intimacy through the
fact that, out of deference to our fellow-readers, we were
obliged to speak in undertones. And I have no doubt that in
substance it was singularly banal. Indeed I have an impression
that all our early conversations were incredibly banal. We met
several times in a manner half-accidental, half furtive and
wholly awkward. Mentally I didn't take hold of her. I never did
take hold of her mentally. Her talk, I now know all too clearly,
was shallow, pretentious, evasive. Only--even to this day--I
don't remember it as in any way vulgar. She was, I could see
quite clearly, anxious to overstate or conceal her real social
status, a little desirous to be taken for a student in the art
school and a little ashamed that she wasn't. She came to the
museum to "copy things," and this, I gathered, had something to
do with some way of partially earning her living that I wasn't to
inquire into. I told her things about myself, vain things that I
felt might appeal to her, but that I learnt long afterwards made
her think me "conceited." We talked of books, but there she was
very much on her guard and secretive, and rather more freely of
pictures. She "liked" pictures. I think from the outset I
appreciated and did not for a moment resent that hers was a
commonplace mind, that she was the unconscious custodian of
something that had gripped my most intimate instinct, that she
embodied the hope of a possibility, was the careless proprietor
of a physical quality that had turned my head like strong wine.
I felt I had to stick to our acquaintance, flat as it was.
Presently we should get through these irrelevant exterior things,
and come to the reality of love beneath.
I saw her in dreams released, as it were, from herself,
beautiful, worshipful, glowing. And sometimes when we were
together, we would come on silences through sheer lack of matter,
and then my eyes would feast on her, and the silence seemed like
the drawing back of a curtain--her superficial self. Odd, I
confess. Odd, particularly, the enormous hold of certain things
about her upon me, a certain slight rounded duskiness of skin, a
certain perfection of modelling in her lips, her brow, a certain
fine flow about the shoulders. She wasn't indeed beautiful to
many people--these things are beyond explaining. She had
manifest defects of form and feature, and they didn't matter at
all. Her complexion was bad, but I don't think it would have
mattered if it had been positively unwholesome. I had
extraordinarily limited, extraordinarily painful, desires. I
longed intolerably to kiss her lips.
V
The affair was immensely serious and commanding to me. I don't
remember that in these earlier phases I had any thought of
turning back at all. It was clear to me that she regarded me
with an eye entirely more critical than I had for her, that she
didn't like my scholarly untidiness, my want of even the most
commonplace style. "Why do you wear collars like that?" she
said, and sent me in pursuit of gentlemanly neckwear. I remember
when she invited me a little abruptly one day to come to tea at
her home on the following Sunday and meet her father and mother
and aunt, that I immediately doubted whether my hitherto
unsuspected best clothes would create the impression she desired
me to make on her belongings. I put off the encounter until the
Sunday after, to get myself in order. I had a morning coat made
and I bought a silk hat, and had my reward in the first glance of
admiration she ever gave me. I wonder how many of my sex are as
preposterous. I was, you see, abandoning all my beliefs, my
conventions unasked. I was forgetting myself immensely. And
there was a conscious shame in it all. Never a word--did I
breathe to Ewart--to any living soul of what was going on.
Her father and mother and aunt struck me as the dismalest of
people, and her home in Walham Green was chiefly notable for its
black and amber tapestry carpets and curtains and table-cloths,
and the age and irrelevance of its books, mostly books with faded
gilt on the covers. The windows were fortified against the
intrusive eye by cheap lace curtains and an "art pot" upon an
unstable octagonal table. Several framed Art School drawings of
Marion's, bearing official South Kensington marks of approval,
adorned the room, and there was a black and gilt piano with a
hymn-book on the top of it. There were draped mirrors over all
the mantels, and above the sideboard in the dining-room in which
we sat at tea was a portrait of her father, villainously truthful
after the manner of such works. I couldn't see a trace of the
beauty I found in her in either parent, yet she somehow contrived
to be like them both.
These people pretended in a way that reminded me of the Three
Great Women in my mother's room, but they had not nearly so much
social knowledge and did not do it nearly so well. Also, I
remarked, they did it with an eye on Marion. They had wanted to
thank me, they said, for the kindness to their daughter in the
matter of the 'bus fare, and so accounted for anything unusual in
their invitation. They posed as simple gentlefolk, a little
hostile to the rush and gadding-about of London, preferring a
secluded and unpretentious quiet.
When Marion got out the white table-cloth from the
sideboard-drawer for tea, a card bearing the word "APARTMENTS"
fell to the floor. I picked it up and gave it to her before I
realised from her quickened colour that I should not have seen
it; that probably had been removed from the window in honour of
my coming.
Her father spoke once in a large remote way of he claims of
business engagements, and it was only long afterwards I realised
that he was a supernumerary clerk in the Walham Green Gas Works
and otherwise a useful man at home. He was a large, loose,
fattish man with unintelligent brown eyes magnified by
spectacles; he wore an ill-fitting frock-coat and a paper collar,
and he showed me, as his great treasure and interest, a large
Bible which he had grangerised with photographs of pictures.
Also he cultivated the little garden-yard behind the house, and
he had a small greenhouse with tomatoes. "I wish I 'ad 'eat," he
said. "One can do such a lot with 'eat. But I suppose you can't
'ave everything you want in this world."
Both he and Marion's mother treated her with a deference that
struck me as the most natural thing in the world. Her own manner
changed, became more authoritative and watchful, her shyness
disappeared. She had taken a line of her own I gathered, draped
the mirror, got the second-hand piano, and broken her parents in.
Her mother must once have been a pretty woman; she had regular
features and Marion's hair without its lustre, but she was thin
and careworn. The aunt, Miss Ramboat, was a large, abnormally
shy person very like her brother, and I don't recall anything she
said on this occasion.
To begin with there was a good deal of tension, Marion was
frightfully nervous and every one was under the necessity of
behaving in a mysteriously unreal fashion until I plunged, became
talkative and made a certain ease and interest. I told them of
the schools, of my lodgings, of Wimblehurst and my apprenticeship
days. "There's a lot of this Science about nowadays," Mr.
Ramboat reflected; "but I sometimes wonder a bit what good it
is?"
I was young enough to be led into what he called "a bit of a
discussion," which Marion truncated before our voices became
unduly raised. "I dare say, "she said, "there's much to be said
on both sides."
I remember Marion's mother asked me what church I attended, and
that I replied evasively. After tea there was music and we sang
hymns. I doubted if I had a voice when this was proposed, but
that was held to be a trivial objection, and I found sitting
close beside the sweep of hair from Marion's brow had many
compensations. I discovered her mother sitting in the horsehair
armchair and regarding us sentimentally. I went for a walk with
Marion towards Putney Bridge, and then there was more singing and
a supper of cold bacon and pie, after which Mr. Ramboat and I
smoked. During that walk, I remember, she told me the import of
her sketchings and copyings in the museum. A cousin of a friend
of hers whom she spoke of as Smithie, had developed an original
business in a sort of tea-gown garment which she called a Persian
Robe, a plain sort of wrap with a gaily embroidered yoke, and
Marion went there and worked in the busy times. In the times
that weren't busy she designed novelties in yokes by an assiduous
use of eyes and note-book in the museum, and went home and traced
out the captured forms on the foundation material. "I don't get
much," said Marion, "but it's interesting, and in the busy times
we work all day. Of course the workgirls are dreadfully common,
but we don't say much to them. And Smithie talks enough for
ten."
I quite understood the workgirls were dreadfully common.
I don't remember that the Walham Green menage and the quality
of these people, nor the light they threw on Marion, detracted in
the slightest degree at that time from the intent resolve that
held me to make her mine. I didn't like them. But I took them
as part of the affair. Indeed, on the whole, I think they threw
her up by an effect of contrast; she was so obviously controlling
them, so consciously superior to them.
More and more of my time did I give to this passion that
possessed me. I began to think chiefly of ways of pleasing
Marion, of acts of devotion, of treats, of sumptuous presents for
her, of appeals she would understand. If at times she was
manifestly unintelligent, in her ignorance became indisputable, I
told myself her simple instincts were worth all the education and
intelligence in the world. And to this day I think I wasn't
really wrong about her. There was something extraordinarily
fine about her, something simple and high, that flickered in and
out of her ignorance and commonness and limitations like the
tongue from the mouth of a snake....
One night I was privileged to meet her and bring her home from an
entertainment at the Birkbeck Institute. We came back on the
underground railway and we travelled first-class--that being the
highest class available. We were alone in the carriage, and for
the first time I ventured to put my arm about her.
"You mustn't," she said feebly.
"I love you," I whispered suddenly with my heart beating wildly,
drew her to me, drew all her beauty to me and kissed her cool and
unresisting lips.
"Love me?" she said, struggling away from me, "Don't!" and then,
as the train ran into a station, "You must tell no one.... I
don't know.... You shouldn't have done that...."
Then two other people got in with us and terminated my wooing for
a time.
When we found ourselves alone together, walking towards
Battersea, she had decided to be offended. I parted from her
unforgiven and terribly distressed.
When we met again, she told me I must never say "that" again.
I had dreamt that to kiss her lips was ultimate satisfaction.
But it was indeed only the beginning of desires. I told her my
one ambition was to marry her.
"But," she said, "you're not in a position-- What's the good of
talking like that?"
I stared at her. "I mean to," I said.
"You can't," she answered. "It will be years"
"But I love you," I insisted.
I stood not a yard from the sweet lips I had kissed; I stood
within arm's length of the inanimate beauty I desired to quicken,
and I saw opening between us a gulf of years, toil, waiting,
disappointments and an immense uncertainty.
"I love you," I said. "Don't you love me?"
She looked me in the face with grave irresponsive eyes.
"I don't know," she said. "I LIKE you, of course.... One has to
be sensibl..."
I can remember now my sense of frustration by her unresilient
reply. I should have perceived then that for her my ardour had
no quickening fire. But how was I to know? I had let myself
come to want her, my imagination endowed her with infinite
possibilities. I wanted her and wanted her, stupidly and
instinctively....
"But," I said "Love--!"
"One has to be sensible," she replied. "I like going about with
you. Can't we keep as we are?'"
VI
Well, you begin to understand my breakdown now, I have been
copious enough with these apologia. My work got more and more
spiritless, my behaviour degenerated, my punctuality declined; I
was more and more outclassed in the steady grind by my
fellow-students. Such supplies of moral energy as I still had at
command shaped now in the direction of serving Marion rather than
science.
I fell away dreadfully, more and more I shirked and skulked; the
humped men from the north, the pale men with thin, clenched
minds, the intent, hard-breathing students I found against me,
fell at last from keen rivalry to moral contempt. Even a girl
got above me upon one of the lists. Then indeed I made it a
point of honour to show by my public disregard of every rule that
I really did not even pretend to try.
So one day I found myself sitting in a mood of considerable
astonishment in Kensington Gardens, reacting on a recent heated
interview with the school Registrar in which I had displayed more
spirit than sense. I was astonished chiefly at my stupendous
falling away from all the militant ideals of unflinching study I
had brought up from Wimblehurst. I had displayed myself, as the
Registrar put it, "an unmitigated rotter." My failure to get
marks in the written examination had only been equalled by the
insufficiency of my practical work.
"I ask you," the Registrar had said, "what will become of you
when your scholarship runs out?"
It certainly was an interesting question. What was going to
become of me?
It was clear there would be nothing for me in the schools as I
had once dared to hope; there seemed, indeed, scarcely anything
in the world except an illpaid assistantship in some provincial
organized Science School or grammar school. I knew that for that
sort of work, without a degree or any qualification, one earned
hardly a bare living and had little leisure to struggle up to
anything better. If only I had even as little as fifty pounds I
might hold out in London and take my B.Sc. degree, and quadruple
my chances! My bitterness against my uncle returned at the
thought. After all, he had some of my money still, or ought to
have. Why shouldn't I act within my rights, threaten to 'take
proceedings'? I meditated for a space on the idea, and then
returned to the Science Library and wrote him a very considerable
and occasionally pungent letter.
That letter to my uncle was the nadir of my failure. Its
remarkable consequences, which ended my student days altogether,
I will tell in the next chapter.
I say "my failure." Yet there are times when I can even doubt
whether that period was a failure at all, when I become
defensively critical of those exacting courses I did not follow,
the encyclopaedic process of scientific exhaustion from which I
was distracted. My mind was not inactive, even if it fed on
forbidden food. I did not learn what my professors and
demonstrators had resolved I should learn, but I learnt many
things. My mind learnt to swing wide and to swing by itself.
After all, those other fellows who took high places in the
College examinations and were the professor's model boys haven't
done so amazingly. Some are professors themselves, some
technical experts; not one can show things done such as I,
following my own interest, have achieved. For I have built boats
that smack across the water like whiplashes; no one ever dreamt
of such boats until I built them; and I have surprised three
secrets that are more than technical discoveries, in the
unexpected hiding-places of Nature. I have come nearer flying
than any man has done. Could I have done as much if I had had a
turn for obeying those rather mediocre professors at the college
who proposed to train my mind? If I had been trained in
research--that ridiculous contradiction in terms--should I have
done more than produce additions to the existing store of little
papers with blunted conclusions, of which there are already too
many? I see no sense in mock modesty upon this matter. Even by
the standards of worldly success I am, by the side of my
fellow-students, no failure. I had my F.R.S. by the time I was
thirty-seven, and if I am not very wealthy poverty is as far from
me as the Spanish Inquisition. Suppose I had stamped down on the
head of my wandering curiosity, locked my imagination in a box
just when it wanted to grow out to things, worked by so-and-so's
excellent method and so-and-so's indications, where should I be
now?
I may be all wrong in this. It may be I should be a far more
efficient man than I am if I had cut off all those divergent
expenditures of energy, plugged up my curiosity about society
with more currently acceptable rubbish or other, abandoned
Ewart, evaded Marion instead of pursuing her, concentrated. But
I don't believe it!
However, I certainly believed it completely and was filled with
remorse on that afternoon when I sat dejectedly in Kensington
Gardens and reviewed, in the light of the Registrar's pertinent
questions my first two years in London.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
THE DAWN COMES, AND MY UNCLE APPEARS IN A NEW SILK HAT
I
Throughout my student days I had not seen my uncle. I refrained
from going to him in spite of an occasional regret that in this
way I estranged myself from my aunt Susan, and I maintained a
sulky attitude of mind towards him. And I don't think that once
in all that time I gave a thought to that mystic word of his that
was to alter all the world for us. Yet I had not altogether
forgotten it. It was with a touch of memory, dim transient
perplexity if no more--why did this thing seem in some way
personal?--that I read a new inscription upon the hoardings:
THE SECRET OF VIGOUR,
TONO-BUNGAY.
That was all. It was simple and yet in some way arresting. I
found myself repeating the word after I had passed; it roused
one's attention like the sound of distant guns. "Tono"--what's
that? and deep, rich, unhurrying;--"BUN--gay!"
Then came my uncle's amazing telegram, his answer to my hostile
note: "Come to me at once you are wanted three hundred a year
certain tono-bungay."
"By Jove!" I cried, "of course!
"It's something--. A patent-medicine! I wonder what he wants
with me."
In his Napoleonic way my uncle had omitted to give an address.
His telegram had been handed in at Farringdon Road, and after
complex meditations I replied to Ponderevo, Farringdon Road,
trusting to the rarity of our surname to reach him.
"Where are you?" I asked.
His reply came promptly:
"192A, Raggett Street, E.C."
The next day I took an unsanctioned holiday after the morning's
lecture. I discovered my uncle in a wonderfully new silk
hat--oh, a splendid hat! with a rolling brim that went beyond
the common fashion. It was decidedly too big for him--that was
its only fault. It was stuck on the back of his head, and he was
in a white waistcoat and shirt sleeves. He welcomed me with a
forgetfulness of my bitter satire and my hostile abstinence that
was almost divine. His glasses fell off at the sight of me. His
round inexpressive eyes shone brightly. He held out his plump
short hand.
"Here we are, George! What did I tell you? Needn't whisper it
now, my boy. Shout it--LOUD! spread it about! Tell every one!
Tono--TONO--, TONO-BUNGAY!"
Raggett Street, you must understand, was a thoroughfare over
which some one had distributed large quantities of cabbage
stumps and leaves. It opened out of the upper end of Farringdon
Street, and 192A was a shop with the plate-glass front coloured
chocolate, on which several of the same bills I had read upon the
hoardings had been stuck. The floor was covered by street mud
that had been brought in on dirty boots, and three energetic
young men of the hooligan type, in neck-wraps and caps, were
packing wooden cases with papered-up bottles, amidst much straw
and confusion. The counter was littered with these same swathed
bottles, of a pattern then novel but now amazingly familiar in
the world, the blue paper with the coruscating figure of a
genially nude giant, and the printed directions of how under
practically all circumstances to take Tono-Bungay. Beyond the
counter on one side opened a staircase down which I seem to
remember a girl descending with a further consignment of
bottles, and the rest of the background was a high partition,
also chocolate, with "Temporary Laboratory" inscribed upon it in
white letters, and over a door that pierced it, "Office." Here
I rapped, inaudible amid much hammering, and then entered
unanswered to find my uncle, dressed as I have described, one
hand gripping a sheath of letters, and the other scratching his
head as he dictated to one of three toiling typewriter girls.
Behind him was a further partition and a door inscribed
"ABSOLUTELY PRIVATE--NO ADMISSION," thereon. This partition was
of wood painted the universal chocolate, up to about eight feet
from the ground, and then of glass. Through the glass I saw dimly
a crowded suggestion of crucibles and glass retorts, and--by
Jove!--yes!--the dear old Wimblehurst air-pump still! It gave me
quite a little thrill--that air-pump! And beside it was the
electrical machine--but something--some serious trouble--had
happened to that. All these were evidently placed on a shelf
just at the level to show.
"Come right into the sanctum," said my uncle, after he had
finished something about "esteemed consideration," and whisked
me through the door into a room that quite amazingly failed to
verify the promise of that apparatus. It was papered with dingy
wall-paper that had peeled in places; it contained a fireplace,
an easy-chair with a cushion, a table on which stood two or three
big bottles, a number of cigar-boxes on the mantel, whisky
Tantalus and a row of soda syphons. He shut the door after me
carefully.
"Well, here we are!" he said. "Going strong! Have a whisky,
George? No!--Wise man! Neither will I! You see me at it! At
it--hard!"
"Hard at what?"
"Read it," and he thrust into my hand a label--that label that
has now become one of the most familiar objects of the chemist's
shop, the greenish-blue rather old-fashioned bordering, the
legend, the name in good black type, very clear, and the strong
man all set about with lightning flashes above the double column
of skilful lies in red--the label of Tono-Bungay. "It's
afloat," he said, as I stood puzzling at this. "It's afloat.
I'm afloat!" And suddenly he burst out singing in that throaty
tenor of his--
"I'm afloat, I'm afloat on the fierce flowing tide,
The ocean's my home and my bark is my bride!
"Ripping song that is, George. Not so much a bark as a solution,
but still--it does! Here we are at it! By-the-by! Half a mo'!
I've thought of a thing." He whisked out, leaving me to examine
this nuclear spot at leisure while his voice became dictatorial
without. The den struck me as in its large grey dirty way quite
unprecedented and extraordinary. The bottles were all labelled
simply A, B, C, and so forth, and that dear old apparatus above,
seen from this side, was even more patiently "on the shelf" than
when it had been used to impress Wimblehurst. I saw nothing for
it but to sit down in the chair and await my uncle's
explanations. I remarked a frock-coat with satin lapels behind
the door; there was a dignified umbrella in the corner and a
clothes-brush and a hat-brush stood on a side-table. My uncle
returned in five minutes looking at his watch--a gold watch--
"Gettin' lunch-time, George," he said. "You'd better come and
have lunch with me!"
"How's Aunt Susan?" I asked.
"Exuberant. Never saw her so larky. This has bucked her up
something wonderful--all this."
"All what?"
"Tono-Bungay."
"What is Tono-Bungay?" I asked.
My uncle hesitated. "Tell you after lunch, George," he said.
"Come along!" and having locked up the sanctum after himself, led
the way along a narrow dirty pavement, lined with barrows and
swept at times by avalanche-like porters bearing burthens to
vans, to Farringdon Street. He hailed a passing cab superbly,
and the cabman was infinitely respectful. "Schafer's," he said,
and off we went side by side--and with me more and more amazed at
all these things--to Schafer's Hotel, the second of the two big
places with huge lace curtain-covered windows, near the corner of
Blackfriars Bridge.
I will confess I felt a magic charm in our relative proportions
as the two colossal, pale-blue-and-red liveried porters of
Schafers' held open the inner doors for us with a respectful
salutation that in some manner they seemed to confine wholly to
my uncle. Instead of being about four inches taller, I felt at
least the same size as he, and very much slenderer. Still more
respectful--waiters relieved him of the new hat and the dignified
umbrella, and took his orders for our lunch. He gave them with a
fine assurance.
He nodded to several of the waiters.
"They know me, George, already," he said. "Point me out. Live
place! Eye for coming men!"
The detailed business of the lunch engaged our attention for a
while, and then I leant across my plate. "And NOW?" said I.
"It's the secret of vigour. Didn't you read that label?"
"Yes, but--"
"It's selling like hot cakes."
"And what is it?" I pressed.
"Well," said my uncle, and then leant forward and spoke softly
under cover of his hand, "It's nothing more or less than..."
(But here an unfortunate scruple intervenes. After all,
Tono-Bungay is still a marketable commodity and in the hands of
purchasers, who bought it from--among other vendors--me. No! I
am afraid I cannot give it away--)
"You see," said my uncle in a slow confidential whisper, with
eyes very wide and a creased forehead, "it's nice because of the"
(here he mentioned a flavouring matter and an aromatic spirit),
"it's stimulating because of" (here he mentioned two very vivid
tonics, one with a marked action on the kidney.) "And the" (here
he mentioned two other ingredients) "makes it pretty
intoxicating. Cocks their tails. Then there's" (but I touch on
the essential secret.) "And there you are. I got it out of an
old book of recipes--all except the" (here he mentioned the more
virulent substance, the one that assails the kidneys), "which is
my idea! Modern touch! There you are!"
He reverted to the direction of our lunch.
Presently he was leading the way to the lounge--sumptuous piece
in red morocco and yellow glazed crockery, with incredible vistas
of settees and sofas and things, and there I found myself grouped
with him in two excessively upholstered chairs with an
earthenware Moorish table between us bearing coffee and
Benedictine, and I was tasting the delights of a tenpenny cigar.
My uncle smoked a similar cigar in an habituated manner, and he
looked energetic and knowing and luxurious and most unexpectedly
a little bounder, round the end of it. It was just a trivial
flaw upon our swagger, perhaps that we both were clear our cigars
had to be "mild." He got obliquely across the spaces of his
great armchair so as to incline confidentially to my ear, he
curled up his little legs, and I, in my longer way, adopted a
corresponding receptive obliquity. I felt that we should strike
an unbiased observer as a couple of very deep and wily and
developing and repulsive persons.
"I want to let you into this"--puff--"George," said my uncle
round the end of his cigar. "For many reasons."
His voice grew lower and more cunning. He made explanations that
to my inexperience did not completely explain. I retain an
impression of a long credit and a share with a firm of wholesale
chemists, of a credit and a prospective share with some pirate
printers, of a third share for a leading magazine and newspaper
proprietor.
"I played 'em off one against the other," said my uncle. I took
his point in an instant. He had gone to each of them in turn and
said the others had come in.
"I put up four hundred pounds," said my uncle, "myself and my
all. And you know--"
He assumed a brisk confidence. "I hadn't five hundred pence. At
least--"
For a moment he really was just a little embarrassed. "I DID" he
said, "produce capital. You see, there was that trust affair of
yours--I ought, I suppose--in strict legality--to have put that
straight first. Zzzz....
"It was a bold thing to do," said my uncle, shifting the venue
from the region of honour to the region of courage. And then
with a characteristic outburst of piety, "Thank God it's all come
right!
"And now, I suppose, you ask where do YOU come in? Well, fact
is I've always believed in you, George. You've got--it's a sort
of dismal grit. Bark your shins, rouse you, and you'll go!
You'd rush any position you had a mind to rush. I know a bit
about character, George--trust me. You've got--" He clenched
his hands and thrust them out suddenly, and at the same time
said, with explosive violence, "Wooosh! Yes. You have! The way
you put away that Latin at Wimblehurst; I've never forgotten it.
Wo-oo-oo-osh! Your science and all that! Wo-oo-oo-osh! I know
my limitations. There's things I can do, and" (he spoke in a
whisper, as though this was the first hint of his life's secret)
"there's things I can't. Well, I can create this business, but I
can't make it go. I'm too voluminous--I'm a boiler-over, not a
simmering stick-at-it. You keep on HOTTING UP AND HOTTING UP.
Papin's digester. That's you, steady and long and piling
up,--then, wo-oo-oo-oo-osh. Come in and stiffen these niggers.
Teach them that wo-oo-oo-oo-osh. There you are! That's what I'm
after. You! Nobody else believes you're more than a boy. Come
right in with me and be a man. Eh, George? Think of the fun of
it--a thing on the go--a Real Live Thing! Wooshing it up!
Making it buzz and spin! Whoo-oo-oo." --He made alluring
expanding circles in the air with his hand. "Eh?"
His proposal, sinking to confidential undertones again, took more
definite shape. I was to give all my time and energy to
developing and organising. "You shan't write a single
advertisement, or give a single assurance" he declared. "I can
do all that." And the telegram vas no flourish; I was to have
three hundred a year. Three hundred a year. ("That's nothing,"
said my uncle, "the thing to freeze on to, when the time comes,
is your tenth of the vendor's share.")
Three hundred a year certain, anyhow! It was an enormous income
to me. For a moment I was altogether staggered. Could there be
that much money in the whole concern? I looked about me at the
sumptuous furniture of Schafer's Hotel. No doubt there were many
such incomes.
My head was spinning with unwonted Benedictine and Burgundy.
"Let me go back and look at the game again," I said. "Let me see
upstairs and round about."
I did.
"What do you think of it all?" my uncle asked at last.
"Well, for one thing," I said, "why don't you have those girls
working in a decently ventilated room? Apart from any other
consideration, they'd work twice as briskly. And they ought to
cover the corks before labelling round the bottle"
"Why?" said my uncle.
"Because--they sometimes make a mucker of the cork job, and then
the label's wasted."
"Come and change it, George," said my uncle, with sudden fervour
"Come here and make a machine of it. You can. Make it all
slick, and then make it woosh. I know you can. Oh! I know you
can."
II
I seem to remember very quick changes of mind after that lunch.
The muzzy exaltation of the unaccustomed stimulants gave way very
rapidly to a model of pellucid and impartial clairvoyance which
is one of my habitual mental states. It is intermittent; it
leaves me for weeks together, I know, but back it comes at last
like justice on circuit, and calls up all my impression, all my
illusions, all my willful and passionate proceedings. We came
downstairs again into that inner room which pretended to be a
scientific laboratory through its high glass lights, and indeed
was a lurking place. My uncle pressed a cigarette on me, and I
took it and stood before the empty fireplace while he propped his
umbrella in the corner, deposited the new silk hat that was a
little too big for him on the table, blew copiously and produced
a second cigar.
It came into my head that he had shrunken very much in size since
the Wimblehurst days, that the cannon ball he had swallowed was
rather more evident and shameless than it had been, his skin less
fresh and the nose between his glasses, which still didn't quite
fit, much redder. And just then he seemed much laxer in his
muscles and not quite as alertly quick in his movements. But he
evidently wasn't aware of the degenerative nature of his changes
as he sat there, looking suddenly quite little under my eyes.
"Well, George!" he said, quite happily unconscious of my silent
criticism, "what do you think of it all?"
"Well," I said, "in the first place--it's a damned swindle!"
"Tut! tut!" said my uncle. "It's as straight as-- It's fair
trading!"
"So much the worse for trading," I said.
"It's the sort of thing everybody does. After all, there's no
harm in the stuff--and it may do good. It might do a lot of
good--giving people confidence, f'rinstance, against an epidemic.
See? Why not? don't see where your swindle comes in."
"H'm," I said. "It's a thing you either see or don't see."
"I'd like to know what sort of trading isn't a swindle in its
way. Everybody who does a large advertised trade is selling
something common on the strength of saying it's uncommon. Look
at Chickson--they made him a baronet. Look at Lord Radmore, who
did it on lying about the alkali in soap! Rippin' ads those were
of his too!"
"You don't mean to say you think doing this stuff up in bottles
and swearing it's the quintessence of strength and making poor
devils buy it at that, is straight?"
"Why not, George? How do we know it mayn't be the quintessence
to them so far as they're concerned?"
"Oh!" I said, and shrugged my shoulders.
"There's Faith. You put Faith in 'em.... I grant our labels are
a bit emphatic. Christian Science, really. No good setting
people against the medicine. Tell me a solitary trade nowadays
that hasn't to be--emphatic. It's the modern way! Everybody
understands it--everybody allows for it."
"But the world would be no worse and rather better, if all this
stuff of yours was run down a conduit into the Thames."
"Don't see that, George, at all. 'Mong other things, all our
people would be out of work. Unemployed! I grant you
Tono-Bungay MAY be--not QUITE so good a find for the world as
Peruvian bark, but the point is, George--it MAKES TRADE! And the
world lives on trade. Commerce! A romantic exchange of
commodities and property. Romance. 'Magination. See? You must
look at these things in a broad light. Look at the wood--and
forget the trees! And hang it, George! we got to do these
things! There's no way unless you do. What do YOU mean to
do--anyhow?"
"There's ways of living," I said, "Without either fraud or
lying."
"You're a bit stiff, George. There's no fraud in this affair,
I'll bet my hat. But what do you propose to do? Go as chemist
to some one who IS running a business, and draw a salary without
a share like I offer you. Much sense in that! It comes out of
the swindle as you call it--just the same."
"Some businesses are straight and quiet, anyhow; supply a sound
article that is really needed, don't shout advertisements."
"No, George. There you're behind the times. The last of that
sort was sold up 'bout five years ago."
"Well, there's scientific research."
"And who pays for that? Who put up that big City and Guilds
place at South Kensington? Enterprising business men! They
fancy they'll have a bit of science going on, they want a handy
Expert ever and again, and there you are! And what do you get
for research when you've done it? Just a bare living and no
outlook. They just keep you to make discoveries, and if they
fancy they'll use 'em they do."
"One can teach."
"How much a year, George? How much a year? I suppose you must
respect Carlyle! Well, you take Carlyle's test--solvency.
(Lord! what a book that French Revolution of his is!) See what
the world pays teachers and discoverers and what it pays business
men! That shows the ones it really wants. There's a justice in
these big things, George, over and above the apparent injustice.
I tell you it wants trade. It's Trade that makes the world go
round! Argosies! Venice! Empire!"
My uncle suddenly rose to his feet.
"You think it over, George. You think it over! And come up on
Sunday to the new place--we got rooms in Gower Street now--and
see your aunt. She's often asked for you, George often and
often, and thrown it up at me about that bit of property--though
I've always said and always will, that twenty-five shillings in
the pound is what I'll pay you and interest up to the nail. And
think it over. It isn't me I ask you to help. It's yourself.
It's your aunt Susan. It's the whole concern. It's the commerce
of your country. And we want you badly. I tell you straight, I
know my limitations. You could take this place, you could make
it go! I can see you at it--looking rather sour. Woosh is the
word, George."
And he smiled endearingly.
"I got to dictate a letter," he said, ending the smile, and
vanished into the outer room.
III
I didn't succumb without a struggle to my uncle's allurements.
Indeed, I held out for a week while I contemplated life and my
prospects. It was a crowded and muddled contemplation. It
invaded even my sleep.
My interview with the Registrar, my talk with my uncle, my abrupt
discovery of the hopeless futility of my passion for Marion, had
combined to bring me to sense of crisis. What was I going to do
with life?
I remember certain phases of my indecisions very well.
I remember going home from our talk. I went down Farringdon
Street to the Embankment because I thought to go home by Holborn
and Oxford Street would be too crowded for thinking.... That
piece of Embankment from Blackfriars to Westminster still
reminds me of that momentous hesitation.
You know, from first to last, I saw the business with my eyes
open, I saw its ethical and moral values quite clearly. Never
for a moment do I remember myself faltering from my persuasion
that the sale of Tono-Bungay was a thoroughly dishonest
proceeding. The stuff was, I perceived, a mischievous trash,
slightly stimulating, aromatic and attractive, likely to become a
bad habit and train people in the habitual use of stronger tonics
and insidiously dangerous to people with defective kidneys. It
would cost about sevenpence the large bottle to make, including
bottling, and we were to sell it at half a crown plus the cost of
the patent medicine stamp. A thing that I will confess deterred
me from the outset far more than the sense of dishonesty in this
affair, was the supreme silliness of the whole concern. I still
clung to the idea that the world of men was or should be a sane
and just organisation, and the idea that I should set myself
gravely, just at the fine springtime of my life, to developing a
monstrous bottling and packing warehouse, bottling rubbish for
the consumption of foolish, credulous and depressed people, had
in it a touch of insanity. My early beliefs still clung to me.
I felt assured that somewhere there must be a hitch in the fine
prospect of ease and wealth under such conditions; that
somewhere, a little overgrown, perhaps, but still traceable, lay
a neglected, wasted path of use and honour for me.
My inclination to refuse the whole thing increased rather than
diminished at first as I went along the Embankment. In my
uncle's presence there had been a sort of glamour that had
prevented an outright refusal. It was a revival of affection
for him I felt in his presence, I think, in part, and in part an
instinctive feeling that I must consider him as my host. But
much more was it a curious persuasion he had the knack of
inspiring--a persuasion not so much of his integrity and capacity
as of the reciprocal and yielding foolishness of the world. One
felt that he was silly and wild, but in some way silly and wild
after the fashion of the universe. After all, one must live
somehow. I astonished him and myself by temporising.
"No," said I, "I'll think it over!"
And as I went along the embankment the first effect was all
against my uncle. He shrank--for a little while he continued to
shrink--in perspective until he was only a very small shabby
little man in a dirty back street, sending off a few hundred
bottles of rubbish to foolish buyers. The great buildings on
the right of us, the Inns and the School Board place--as it was
then--Somerset House, the big hotels, the great bridges,
Westminster's outlines ahead, had an effect of grey largeness
that reduced him to the proportions of a busy black beetle in a
crack in the floor.
And then my eye caught the advertisements on the south side of
"Sorber's Food," of "Cracknell's Ferric Wine," very bright and
prosperous signs, illuminated at night, and I realised how
astonishingly they looked at home there, how evidently part they
were in the whole thing.
I saw a man come charging out of Palace Yard--the policeman
touched his helmet to him--with a hat and a bearing astonishingly
like my uncle's. After all,--didn't Cracknell himself sit in the
House?
Tono-Bungay shouted at me from a hoarding near Adelphi Terrace; I
saw it afar off near Carfax Street; it cried out again upon me in
Kensington High Street, and burst into a perfect clamour; six or
seven times I saw it as I drew near my diggings. It certainly
had an air of being something more than a dream.
Yes, I thought it over--thoroughly enough.... Trade rules the
world. Wealth rather than trade! The thing was true, and true
too was my uncle's proposition that the quickest way to get
wealth is to sell the cheapest thing possible in the dearest
bottle. He was frightfully right after all. Pecunnia non
olet,--a Roman emperor said that. Perhaps my great heroes in
Plutarch were no more than such men, fine now only because they
are distant; perhaps after all this Socialism to which I had been
drawn was only a foolish dream, only the more foolish because all
its promises were conditionally true. Morris and these others
played with it wittingly; it gave a zest, a touch of substance,
to their aesthetic pleasures. Never would there be good faith
enough to bring such things about. They knew it; every one,
except a few young fools, knew it. As I crossed the corner of
St. James's Park wrapped in thought, I dodged back just in time
to escape a prancing pair of greys. A stout, common-looking
woman, very magnificently dressed, regarded me from the carriage
with a scornful eye. "No doubt," thought I, "a pill-vendor's
wife...."
Running through all my thoughts, surging out like a refrain, was
my uncle's master-stroke, his admirable touch of praise: "Make it
all slick--and then make it go Woosh. I know you can! Oh! I
KNOW you can!"
IV
Ewart as a moral influence was unsatisfactory. I had made up my
mind to put the whole thing before him, partly to see how he took
it, and partly to hear how it sounded when it was said. I asked
him to come and eat with me in an Italian place near Panton
Street where one could get a curious, interesting, glutting sort
of dinner for eighteen-pence. He came with a disconcerting
black-eye that he wouldn't explain. "Not so much a black-eye,"
he said, "as the aftermath of a purple patch.... What's your
difficulty?"
"I'll tell you with the salad," I said.
But as a matter of fact I didn't tell him. I threw out that I
was doubtful whether I ought to go into trade, or stick to
teaching in view of my deepening socialist proclivities; and he,
warming with the unaccustomed generosity of a sixteen-penny
Chianti, ran on from that without any further inquiry as to my
trouble.
His utterances roved wide and loose.
"The reality of life, my dear Ponderevo," I remember him saying
very impressively and punctuating with the nut-crackers as he
spoke, "is Chromatic Conflict ... and Form. Get hold of that and
let all these other questions go. The Socialist will tell you
one sort of colour and shape is right, the Individualist another.
What does it all amount to? What DOES it all amount to?
NOTHING! I have no advice to give anyone,--except to avoid
regrets. Be yourself, seek after such beautiful things as your
own sense determines to be beautiful. And don't mind the
headache in the morning.... For what, after all, is a morning,
Ponderevo? It isn't like the upper part of a day!"
He paused impressively.
"What Rot!" I cried, after a confused attempt to apprehend him.
"Isn't it! And it's my bedrock wisdom in the matter! Take it or
leave it, my dear George; take it or leave it."... He put down
the nut-crackers out of my reach and lugged a greasy-looking
note-book from his pocket. "I'm going to steal this mustard
pot," he said.
I made noises of remonstrance.
"Only as a matter of design. I've got to do an old beast's tomb.
Wholesale grocer. I'll put it on his corners,--four mustard
pots. I dare say he'd be glad of a mustard plaster now to cool
him, poor devil, where he is. But anyhow,--here goes!"
V
It came to me in the small hours that the real moral touchstone
for this great doubting of mind was Marion. I lay composing
statements of my problem and imagined myself delivering them to
her--and she, goddess-like and beautiful; giving her fine,
simply-worded judgment.
"You see, it's just to give one's self over to the Capitalistic
System," I imagined myself saying in good Socialist jargon; "it's
surrendering all one's beliefs. We MAY succeed, we MAY grow
rich, but where would the satisfaction be?"
Then she would say, "No! That wouldn't be right."
"But the alternative is to wait!"
Then suddenly she would become a goddess. She would turn upon me
frankly and nobly, with shining eyes, with arms held out. "No,"
she would say, "we love one another. Nothing ignoble shall ever
touch us. We love one another. Why wait to tell each other
that, dear? What does it matter that we are poor and may keep
poor?"
But indeed the conversation didn't go at all in that direction.
At the sight of her my nocturnal eloquence became preposterous
and all the moral values altered altogether. I had waited for
her outside the door of the Parsian-robe establishment in
Kensington High Street and walked home with her thence. I
remember how she emerged into the warm evening light and that she
wore a brown straw hat that made her, for once not only beautiful
but pretty.
"I like that hat," I said by way of opening; and she smiled her
rare delightful smile at me.
"I love you," I said in an undertone, as we jostled closer on the
pavement.
She shook her head forbiddingly, but she still smiled. Then--
"Be sensible!"
The High Street pavement is too narrow and crowded for
conversation and we were some way westward before we spoke
again.
"Look here," I said; "I want you, Marion. Don't you understand?
I want you."
"Now!" she cried warningly.
I do not know if the reader will understand how a passionate
lover, an immense admiration and desire, can be shot with a gleam
of positive hatred. Such a gleam there was in me at the serene
self-complacency of that "NOW!" It vanished almost before I
felt it. I found no warning in it of the antagonisms latent
between us.
"Marion," I said, "this isn't a trifling matter to me. I love
you; I would die to get you.... Don't you care?"
"But what is the good?"
"You don't care," I cried. "You don't care a rap!"
"You know I care," she answered. "If I didn't-- If I didn't like
you very much, should I let you come and meet me-- go about with
you?"
"Well then," I said, "promise to marry me!"
"If I do, what difference will it make?"
We were separated by two men carrying a ladder who drove between
us unawares.
"Marion," I asked when we got together again, "I tell you I want
you to marry me."
"We can't."
"Why not?"
"We can't marry--in the street."
"We could take our chance!"
"I wish you wouldn't go on talking like this. What is the good?"
She suddenly gave way to gloom. "It's no good marrying" she
said. "One's only miserable. I've seen other girls. When one's
alone one has a little pocket-money anyhow, one can go about a
little. But think of being married and no money, and perhaps
children--you can't be sure...."
She poured out this concentrated philosophy of her class and type
in jerky uncompleted sentences, with knitted brows, with
discontented eyes towards the westward glow--forgetful, it
seemed, for a moment even of me.
"Look here, Marion," I said abruptly, "what would you marry on?"
"What IS the good?" she began.
"Would you marry on three hundred a year?"
She looked at me for a moment. "That's six pounds a week," she
said. "One could manage on that, easily. Smithie's brother--No,
he only gets two hundred and fifty. He married a typewriting
girl."
"Will you marry me if I get three hundred a year?"
She looked at me again, with a curious gleam of hope.
"IF!" she said.
I held out my hand and looked her in the eyes. "It's a bargain,"
I said.
She hesitated and touched my hand for an instant. "It's silly,"
she remarked as she did so. "It means really we're--" She
paused.
"Yes?" said I.
"Engaged. You'll have to wait years. What good can it do you?"
"Not so many years." I answered.
For a moment she brooded.
Then she glanced at me with a smile, half-sweet, half-wistful,
that has stuck in my memory for ever.
"I like you!" she said. "I shall like to be engaged to you."
And, faint on the threshold of hearing, I caught her ventured
"dear!" It's odd that in writing this down my memory passed over
all that intervened and I feel it all again, and once again I'm
Marion's boyish lover taking great joy in such rare and little
things.
VI
At last I went to the address my uncle had given me in Gower
Street, and found my aunt Susan waiting tea for him.
Directly I came into the room I appreciated the change in outlook
that the achievement of Tono-Bungay had made almost as vividly as
when I saw my uncle's new hat. The furniture of the room struck
upon my eye as almost stately. The chairs and sofa were covered
with chintz which gave it a dim, remote flavour of Bladesover;
the mantel, the cornice, the gas pendant were larger and finer
than the sort of thing I had grown accustomed to in London. And
I was shown in by a real housemaid with real tails to her cap,
and great quantities of reddish hair. There was my aunt too
looking bright and pretty, in a blue-patterned tea-wrap with bows
that seemed to me the quintessence of fashion. She was sitting
in a chair by the open window with quite a pile of
yellow-labelled books on the occasional table beside her. Before
the large, paper-decorated fireplace stood a three-tiered
cake-stand displaying assorted cakes, and a tray with all the
tea equipage except the teapot, was on the large centre-table.
The carpet was thick, and a spice of adventure was given it by a
number of dyed sheep-skin mats.
"Hello!" said my aunt as I appeared. "It's George!"
"Shall I serve the tea now, Mem?" said the real housemaid,
surveying our greeting coldly.
"Not till Mr. Ponderevo comes, Meggie," said my aunt, and
grimaced with extraordinary swiftness and virulence as the
housemaid turned her back.
"Meggie she calls herself," said my aunt as the door closed, and
left me to infer a certain want of sympathy.
"You're looking very jolly, aunt," said I.
"What do you think of all this old Business he's got?" asked my
aunt.
"Seems a promising thing," I said.
"I suppose there is a business somewhere?"
"Haven't you seen it ?"
"'Fraid I'd say something AT it George, if I did. So he won't
let me. It came on quite suddenly. Brooding he was and writing
letters and sizzling something awful--like a chestnut going to
pop. Then he came home one day saying Tono-Bungay till I thought
he was clean off his onion, and singing--what was it?"
"'I'm afloat, I'm afloat,'" I guessed.
"The very thing. You've heard him. And saying our fortunes were
made. Took me out to the Ho'burm Restaurant, George,--dinner,
and we had champagne, stuff that blows up the back of your nose
and makes you go SO, and he said at last he'd got things worthy
of me--and we moved here next day. It's a swell house, George.
Three pounds a week for the rooms. And he says the Business'll
stand it."
She looked at me doubtfully.
"Either do that or smash," I said profoundly.
We discussed the question for a moment mutely with our eyes. My
aunt slapped the pile of books from Mudie's.
"I've been having such a Go of reading, George. You never did!"
"What do you think of the business?" I asked.
"Well, they've let him have money," she said, and thought and
raised her eyebrows.
"It's been a time," she went on. "The flapping about! Me
sitting doing nothing and him on the go like a rocket. He's done
wonders. But he wants you, George--he wants you. Sometimes he's
full of hope--talks of when we're going to have a carriage and be
in society--makes it seem so natural and topsy-turvy, I hardly
know whether my old heels aren't up here listening to him, and
my old head on the floor.... Then he gets depressed. Says he
wants restraint. Says he can make a splash but can't keep on.
Says if you don't come in everything will smash--But you are
coming in?"
She paused and looked at me.
"Well--"
"You don't say you won't come in!"
"But look here, aunt," I said, "do you understand quite?... It's
a quack medicine. It's trash."
"There's no law against selling quack medicine that I know of,"
said my aunt. She thought for a minute and became unusually
grave. "It's our only chance, George," she said. "If it doesn't
go..."
There came the slamming of a door, and a loud bellowing from the
next apartment through the folding doors. "Here-er Shee Rulk
lies Poo Tom Bo--oling."
"Silly old Concertina! Hark at him, George!" She raised her
voice. "Don't sing that, you old Walrus, you! Sing 'I'm
afloat!'"
One leaf of the folding doors opened and my uncle appeared.
"Hullo, George! Come along at last? Gossome tea-cake, Susan?"
"Thought it over George?" he said abruptly.
"Yes," said I.
"Coming in?"
I paused for a last moment and nodded yes.
"Ah!" he cried. "Why couldn't you say that a week ago?"
"I've had false ideas about the world," I said. "Oh! they don't
matter now! Yes, I'll come, I'll take my chance with you, I
won't hesitate again."
And I didn't. I stuck to that resolution for seven long years.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
HOW WE MADE TONO-BUNGAY HUM
I
So I made my peace with my uncle, and we set out upon this bright
enterprise of selling slightly injurious rubbish at
one-and-three-halfpence and two-and-nine a bottle, including the
Government stamp. We made Tono-Bungay hum! It brought us
wealth, influence, respect, the confidence of endless people.
All that my uncle promised me proved truth and understatement;
Tono-Bungay carried me to freedoms and powers that no life of
scientific research, no passionate service of humanity could ever
have given me....
It was my uncle's genius that did it. No doubt he needed me,--I
was, I will admit, his indispensable right hand; but his was the
brain to conceive. He wrote every advertisement; some of them
even he sketched. You must remember that his were the days before
the Time took to enterprise and the vociferous hawking of that
antiquated Encyclopedia. That alluring, button-holing, let-me
-just-tell-you-quite-soberly-something-you-ought-to-know style of
newspaper advertisement, with every now and then a convulsive
jump of some attractive phrase into capitals, was then almost a
novelty. "Many people who are MODERATELY well think they are
QUITE well," was one of his early efforts. The jerks in capitals
were, "DO NOT NEED DRUGS OR MEDICINE," and "SIMPLY A PROPER
REGIMEN TO GET YOU IN TONE." One was warned against the chemist
or druggist who pushed "much-advertised nostrums" on one's
attention. That trash did more harm than good. The thing needed
was regimen--and Tono-Bungay!
Very early, too, was that bright little quarter column, at least
it was usually a quarter column in the evening papers:
"HILARITY--Tono-Bungay. Like Mountain Air in the Veins." The
penetrating trio of questions: "Are you bored with your Business?
Are you bored with your Dinner. Are you bored with your Wife?"
--that, too, was in our Gower Street days. Both these we had in
our first campaign when we worked London south central, and west;
and then, too, we had our first poster--the HEALTH, BEAUTY, AND
STRENGTH one. That was his design; I happen still to have got by
me the first sketch he made for it. I have reproduced it here
with one or two others to enable the reader to understand the
mental quality that initiated these familiar ornaments of London.
(The second one is about eighteen months later, the germ of the
well-known "Fog" poster; the third was designed for an influenza
epidemic, but never issued.)
These things were only incidental in my department.
I had to polish them up for the artist and arrange the business
of printing and distribution, and after my uncle had had a
violent and needless quarrel with the advertising manager of the
Daily Regulator about the amount of display given to one of
his happy thoughts, I also took up the negotiations of
advertisements for the press.
We discussed and worked out distribution together first in the
drawing-room floor in Gower Street with my aunt sometimes helping
very shrewdly, and then, with a steadily improving type of cigar
and older and older whisky, in his smuggery at their first house,
the one in Beckenham. Often we worked far into the night
sometimes until dawn.
We really worked infernally hard, and, I recall, we worked with a
very decided enthusiasm, not simply on my uncle's part but mine,
It was a game, an absurd but absurdly interesting game, and the
points were scored in cases of bottles. People think a happy
notion is enough to make a man rich, that fortunes can be made
without toil. It's a dream, as every millionaire (except one or
two lucky gamblers) can testify; I doubt if J.D. Rockefeller in
the early days of Standard Oil, worked harder than we did. We
worked far into the night--and we also worked all day. We made a
rule to be always dropping in at the factory unannounced to keep
things right--for at first we could afford no properly
responsible underlings--and we traveled London, pretending to be
our own representatives and making all sorts of special
arrangements.
But none of this was my special work, and as soon as we could get
other men in, I dropped the traveling, though my uncle found it
particularly interesting and kept it up for years. "Does me
good, George, to see the chaps behind their counters like I was
once," he explained. My special and distinctive duty was to
give Tono-Bungay substance and an outward and visible bottle, to
translate my uncle's great imaginings into the creation of case
after case of labelled bottles of nonsense, and the punctual
discharge of them by railway, road and steamer towards their
ultimate goal in the Great Stomach of the People. By all modern
standards the business was, as my uncle would say, "absolutely
bona fide." We sold our stuff and got the money, and spent the
money honestly in lies and clamour to sell more stuff. Section
by section we spread it over the whole of the British Isles;
first working the middle-class London suburbs, then the outer
suburbs, then the home counties, then going (with new bills and a
more pious style of "ad") into Wales, a great field always for a
new patent-medicine, and then into Lancashire.
My uncle had in his inner office a big map of England, and as we
took up fresh sections of the local press and our consignments
invaded new areas, flags for advertisements and pink underlines
for orders showed our progress.
"The romance of modern commerce, George!" my uncle would say,
rubbing his hands together and drawing in air through his
teeth. "The romance of modern commerce, eh? Conquest. Province
by province. Like sogers."
We subjugated England and Wales; we rolled over the Cheviots with
a special adaptation containing eleven per cent. of absolute
alcohol; "Tono-Bungay: Thistle Brand." We also had the Fog
poster adapted to a kilted Briton in a misty Highland scene.
Under the shadow of our great leading line we were presently
taking subsidiary specialties into action; "Tono-Bungay Hair
Stimulant" was our first supplement. Then came "Concentrated
Tono-Bungay" for the eyes. That didn't go, but we had a
considerable success with the Hair Stimulant. We broached the
subject, I remember, in a little catechism beginning: "Why does
the hair fall out? Because the follicles are fagged. What are
the follicles?..." So it went on to the climax that the Hair
Stimulant contained all "The essential principles of that most
reviving tonic, Tono-Bungay, together with an emollient and
nutritious oil derived from crude Neat's Foot Oil by a process of
refinement, separation and deodorization.... It will be manifest
to any one of scientific attainments that in Neat's Foot Oil
derived from the hoofs and horns of beasts, we must necessarily
have a natural skin and hair lubricant."
And we also did admirable things with our next subsidiaries,
"Tono-Bungay Lozenges," and "Tono-Bungay Chocolate." These we
urged upon the public for their extraordinary nutritive and
recuperative value in cases of fatigue and strain. We gave them
posters and illustrated advertisements showing climbers hanging
from marvelously vertical cliffs, cyclist champions upon the
track, mounted messengers engaged in Aix-to-Ghent rides, soldiers
lying out in action under a hot sun. "You can GO for twenty-four
hours," we declared, "on Tono-Bungay Chocolate." We didn't say
whether you could return on the same commodity. We also showed a
dreadfully barristerish barrister, wig, side-whiskers, teeth, a
horribly life-like portrait of all existing barristers, talking
at a table, and beneath, this legend: "A Four Hours' Speech on
Tono-Bungay Lozenges, and as fresh as when he began." Then
brought in regiments of school-teachers, revivalist ministers,
politicians and the like. I really do believe there was an
element of "kick" in the strychnine in these lozenges, especially
in those made according to our earlier formula. For we altered
all our formulae--invariably weakening them enormously as sales
got ahead.
In a little while--so it seems to me now--we were employing
travelers and opening up Great Britain at the rate of a hundred
square miles a day. All the organisation throughout was sketched
in a crude, entangled, half-inspired fashion by my uncle, and
all of it had to be worked out into a practicable scheme of
quantities and expenditure by me. We had a lot of trouble
finding our travelers; in the end at least half of them were
Irish-Americans, a wonderful breed for selling medicine. We had
still more trouble over our factory manager, because of the
secrets of the inner room, and in the end we got a very capable
woman, Mrs. Hampton Diggs, who had formerly managed a large
millinery workroom, whom we could trust to keep everything in
good working order without finding out anything that wasn't put
exactly under her loyal and energetic nose. She conceived a high
opinion of Tono-Bungay and took it in all forms and large
quantities so long as I knew her. It didn't seem to do her any
harm. And she kept the girls going quite wonderfully.
My uncle's last addition to the Tono-Bungay group was the
Tono-Bungay Mouthwash. The reader has probably read a hundred
times that inspiring inquiry of his, "You are Young Yet, but are
you Sure Nothing has Aged your Gums?"
And after that we took over the agency for three or four good
American lines that worked in with our own, and could be handled
with it; Texan Embrocation, and "23--to clear the system" were
the chief....
I set down these bare facts. To me they are all linked with the
figure of my uncle. In some of the old seventeenth and early
eighteenth century prayerbooks at Bladesover there used to be
illustrations with long scrolls coming out of the mouths of the
wood-cut figures. I wish I could write all this last chapter on
a scroll coming out of the head of my uncle, show it all the time
as unfolding and pouring out from a short, fattening,
small-legged man with stiff cropped hair, disobedient glasses on
a perky little nose, and a round stare behind them. I wish I
could show you him breathing hard and a little through his nose
as his pen scrabbled out some absurd inspiration for a poster or
a picture page, and make you hear his voice, charged with solemn
import like the voice of a squeaky prophet, saying, "George!
list'n! I got an ideer. I got a notion! George!"
I should put myself into the same picture. Best setting for us,
I think, would be the Beckenham snuggery, because there we
worked hardest. It would be the lamplit room of the early
nineties, and the clock upon the mantel would indicate midnight
or later. We would be sitting on either side of the fire, I with
a pipe, my uncle with a cigar or cigarette. There would be
glasses standing inside the brass fender. Our expressions would
be very grave. My uncle used to sit right back in his armchair;
his toes always turned in when he was sitting down and his legs
had a way of looking curved, as though they hadn't bones or
joints but were stuffed with sawdust.
"George, whad'yer think of T.B. for sea-sickness?" he would
say.
"No good that I can imagine."
"Oom! No harm TRYING, George. We can but try."
I would suck my pipe. "Hard to get at. Unless we sold our stuff
specially at the docks. Might do a special at Cook's office, or
in the Continental Bradshaw."
"It 'ud give 'em confidence, George."
He would Zzzz, with his glasses reflecting the red of the glowing
coals.
"No good hiding our light under a Bushel," he would remark.
I never really determined whether my uncle regarded Tono-Bungay
as a fraud, or whether he didn't come to believe in it in a kind
of way by the mere reiteration of his own assertions. I think
that his average attitude was one of kindly, almost parental,
toleration. I remember saying on one occasion, "But you don't
suppose this stuff ever did a human being the slightest good
all?" and how his face assumed a look of protest, as of one
reproving harshness and dogmatism.
"You've a hard nature, George," he said. "You're too ready to
run things down. How can one TELL? How can one venture to
TELL!..."
I suppose any creative and developing game would have interested
me in those years. At any rate, I know I put as much zeal into
this Tono-Bungay as any young lieutenant could have done who
suddenly found himself in command of a ship. It was
extraordinarily interesting to me to figure out the advantage
accruing from this shortening of the process or that, and to
weigh it against the capital cost of the alteration. I made a
sort of machine for sticking on the labels, that I patented; to
this day there is a little trickle of royalties to me from that.
I also contrived to have our mixture made concentrated, got the
bottles, which all came sliding down a guarded slant-way, nearly
filled with distilled water at one tap, and dripped our magic
ingredients in at the next. This was an immense economy of space
for the inner sanctum. For the bottling we needed special taps,
and these, too, I invented and patented.
We had a sort of endless band of bottles sliding along an
inclined glass trough made slippery with running water. At one
end a girl held them up to the light, put aside any that were
imperfect and placed the others in the trough; the filling was
automatic; at the other end a girl slipped in the cork and drove
it home with a little mallet. Each tank, the little one for the
vivifying ingredients and the big one for distilled water, had a
level indicator, and inside I had a float arrangement that
stopped the slide whenever either had sunk too low. Another girl
stood ready with my machine to label the corked bottles and hand
them to the three packers, who slipped them into their outer
papers and put them, with a pad of corrugated paper between each
pair, into a little groove from which they could be made to slide
neatly into position in our standard packing-case. It sounds
wild, I know, but I believe I was the first man in the city of
London to pack patent medicines through the side of the
packing-case, to discover there was a better way in than by the
lid. Our cases packed themselves, practically; had only to be
put into position on a little wheeled tray and when full pulled
to the lift that dropped them to the men downstairs, who padded
up the free space and nailed on top and side. Our girls,
moreover, packed with corrugated paper and matchbook-wood box
partitions when everybody else was using expensive young men to
pack through the top of the box with straw, many breakages and
much waste and confusion.
II
As I look back at them now, those energetic years seem all
compacted to a year or so; from the days of our first hazardous
beginning in Farringdon Street with barely a thousand pounds'
worth of stuff or credit all told--and that got by something
perilously like snatching--to the days when my uncle went to the
public on behalf of himself and me (one-tenth share) and our
silent partners, the drug wholesalers and the printing people and
the owner of that group of magazines and newspapers, to ask with
honest confidence for L150,000. Those silent partners were
remarkably sorry, I know, that they had not taken larger shares
and given us longer credit when the subscriptions came pouring
in. My uncle had a clear half to play with (including the
one-tenth understood to be mine).
L150,000--think of it!--for the goodwill in a string of lies and
a trade in bottles of mitigated water! Do you realise the
madness of the world that sanctions such a thing? Perhaps you
don't. At times use and wont certainly blinded me. If it had
not been for Ewart, I don't think I should have had an inkling of
the wonderfulness of this development of my fortunes; I should
have grown accustomed to it, fallen in with all its delusions as
completely as my uncle presently did. He was immensely proud of
the flotation. "They've never been given such value," he said,
"for a dozen years." But Ewart, with his gesticulating hairy
hands and bony wrists, his single-handed chorus to all this as it
played itself over again in my memory, and he kept my fundamental
absurdity illuminated for me during all this astonishing time.
"It's just on all fours with the rest of things," he remarked;
"only more so. You needn't think you're anything out of the
way."
I remember one disquisition very distinctly. It was just after
Ewart had been to Paris on a mysterious expedition to "rough in"
some work for a rising American sculptor. This young man had
a commission for an allegorical figure of Truth (draped, of
course) for his State Capitol, and he needed help. Ewart had
returned with his hair cut en brosse and with his costume
completely translated into French. He wore, I remember, a
bicycling suit of purplish-brown, baggy beyond ageing--the only
creditable thing about it was that it had evidently not been made
for him--a voluminous black tie, a decadent soft felt hat and
several French expletives of a sinister description. "Silly
clothes, aren't they?" he said at the sight of my startled eye.
"I don't know why I got'm. They seemed all right over there."
He had come down to our Raggett Street place to discuss a
benevolent project of mine for a poster by him, and he scattered
remarkable discourse over the heads (I hope it was over the
heads) of our bottlers.
"What I like about it all, Ponderevo, is its poetry.... That's
where we get the pull of the animals. No animal would ever run a
factory like this. Think!... One remembers the Beaver, of
course. He might very possibly bottle things, but would he stick
a label round 'em and sell 'em? The Beaver is a dreamy fool,
I'll admit, him and his dams, but after all there's a sort of
protection about 'em, a kind of muddy practicality! They prevent
things getting at him. And it's not your poetry only. It's the
poetry of the customer too. Poet answering to poet--soul to
soul. Health, Strength and Beauty--in a bottle--the magic
philtre! Like a fairy tale....
"Think of the people to whom your bottles of footle go! (I'm
calling it footle, Ponderevo, out of praise," he said in
parenthesis.)
"Think of the little clerks and jaded women and overworked
people. People overstrained with wanting to do, people
overstrained with wanting to be.... People, in fact,
overstrained.... The real trouble of life, Ponderevo, isn't that
we exist--that's a vulgar error; the real trouble is that we
DON'T really exist and we want to. That's what this--in the
highest sense--just stands for! The hunger to be--for
once--really alive--to the finger tips!...
"Nobody wants to do and be the things people are--nobody. YOU
don't want to preside over this--this bottling; I don't want to
wear these beastly clothes and be led about by you; nobody wants
to keep on sticking labels on silly bottles at so many farthings
a gross. That isn't existing! That's--sus--substratum. None of
us want to be what we are, or to do what we do. Except as a sort
of basis. What do we want? You know. I know. Nobody
confesses. What we all want to be is something perpetually young
and beautiful--young Joves--young Joves, Ponderevo" --his voice
became loud, harsh and declamatory--"pursuing coy half-willing
nymphs through everlasting forests."...
There was a just-perceptible listening hang in the work about us.
"Come downstairs," I interrupted, "we can talk better there."
"I can talk better here," he answered.
He was just going on, but fortunately the implacable face of Mrs.
Hampton Diggs appeared down the aisle of bottling machines.
"All right," he said, "I'll come."
In the little sanctum below, my uncle was taking a digestive
pause after his lunch and by no means alert. His presence sent
Ewart back to the theme of modern commerce, over the excellent
cigar my uncle gave him. He behaved with the elaborate deference
due to a business magnate from an unknown man.
"What I was pointing out to your nephew, sir," said Ewart,
putting both elbows on the table, "was the poetry of commerce.
He doesn't, you know, seem to see it at all."
My uncle nodded brightly. "Whad I tell 'im," he said round his
cigar.
"We are artists. You and I, sir, can talk, if you will permit
me, as one artist to another. It's advertisement has--done it.
Advertisement has revolutionised trade and industry; it is going
to revolutionise the world. The old merchant used to tote about
commodities; the new one creates values. Doesn't need to tote.
He takes something that isn't worth anything--or something that
isn't particularly worth anything--and he makes it worth
something. He takes mustard that is just like anybody else's
mustard, and he goes about saying, shouting, singing, chalking on
walls, writing inside people's books, putting it everywhere,
'Smith's Mustard is the Best.' And behold it is the best!"
"True," said my uncle, chubbily and with a dreamy sense of
mysticism; "true!"
"It's just like an artist; he takes a lump of white marble on the
verge of a lime-kiln, he chips it about, he makes--he makes a
monument to himself--and others--a monument the world will not
willingly let die. Talking of mustard, sir, I was at Clapham
Junction the other day, and all the banks are overgrown with
horse radish that's got loose from a garden somewhere. You know
what horseradish is--grows like wildfire--spreads --spreads. I
stood at the end of the platform looking at the stuff and
thinking about it. 'Like fame,' I thought, 'rank and wild where
it isn't wanted. Why don't the really good things in life grow
like horseradish?' I thought. My mind went off in a peculiar way
it does from that to the idea that mustard costs a penny a tin--I
bought some the other day for a ham I had. It came into my head
that it would be ripping good business to use horseradish to
adulterate mustard. I had a sort of idea that I could plunge
into business on that, get rich and come back to my own proper
monumental art again. And then I said, 'But why adulterate? I
don't like the idea of adulteration.'"
"Shabby," said my uncle, nodding his head. "Bound to get found
out!"
"And totally unnecessary, too! Why not do up a
mixture--three-quarters pounded horseradish and a quarter
mustard--give it a fancy name--and sell it at twice the mustard
price. See? I very nearly started the business straight away,
only something happened. My train came along."
"Jolly good ideer," said my uncle. He looked at me. "That really
is an ideer, George," he said.
"Take shavin's, again! You know that poem of Longfellow's, sir,
that sounds exactly like the first declension. What is
it?--'Marr's a maker, men say!'"
My uncle nodded and gurgled some quotation that died away.
'Jolly good poem, George," he said in an aside to me.
"Well, it's about a carpenter and a poetic Victorian child, you
know, and some shavin's. The child made no end out of the
shavin's. So might you. Powder 'em. They might be anything.
Soak 'em in jipper,--Xylo-tobacco! Powder'em and get a little
tar and turpentinous smell in,--wood-packing for hot baths--a
Certain Cure for the scourge of Influenza! There's all these
patent grain foods,--what Americans call cereals. I believe I'm
right, sir, in saying they're sawdust."
"No!" said my uncle, removing his cigar; "as far as I can find
out it's really grain,--spoilt grain.... I've been going into
that."
"Well, there you are!" said Ewart. "Say it's spoilt grain. It
carried out my case just as well. Your modern commerce is no
more buying and selling than sculpture. It's mercy--it's
salvation. It's rescue work! It takes all sorts of fallen
commodities by the hand and raises them. Cana isn't in it. You
turn water--into Tono-Bungay."
"Tono-Bungay's all right," said my uncle, suddenly grave. "We
aren't talking of Tono-Bungay."
"Your nephew, sir, is hard; he wants everything to go to a sort
of predestinated end; he's a Calvinist of Commerce. Offer him a
dustbin full of stuff; he calls it refuse--passes by on the other
side. Now YOU, sir you'd make cinders respect themselves."
My uncle regarded him dubiously for a moment. But there was a
touch of appreciation in his eye.
"Might make 'em into a sort of sanitary brick," he reflected over
his cigar end.
"Or a friable biscuit. Why NOT? You might advertise: 'Why are
Birds so Bright? Because they digest their food perfectly! Why
do they digest their food so perfectly? Because they have a
gizzard! Why hasn't man a gizzard? Because he can buy
Ponderevo's Asphalt Triturating, Friable Biscuit--Which is
Better.'"
He delivered the last words in a shout, with his hairy hand
flourished in the air....
"Damn clever fellow," said my uncle, after he had one. "I know a
man when I see one. He'd do. But drunk, I should say. But that
only makes some chap brighter . If he WANTS to do that poster,
he can. Zzzz. That ideer of his about the horseradish. There's
something in that, George. I'm going to think over that...."
I may say at once that my poster project came to nothing in the
end, though Ewart devoted an interesting week to the matter. He
let his unfortunate disposition to irony run away with him. He
produced a picture of two beavers with a subtle likeness, he
said, to myself and my uncle--the likeness to my uncle certainly
wasn't half bad--and they were bottling rows and rows of
Tono-Bungay, with the legend "Modern commerce." It certainly
wouldn't have sold a case, though he urged it on me one cheerful
evening on the ground that it would "arouse curiosity." In
addition he produced a quite shocking study of my uncle,
excessively and needlessly nude, but, so far as I was able to
judge, an admirable likeness, engaged in feats of strength of a
Gargantuan type before an audience of deboshed and shattered
ladies. The legend, "Health, Beauty, Strength," below, gave a
needed point to his parody. This he hung up in the studio over
the oil shop, with a flap of brown paper; by way of a curtain
over it to accentuate its libellous offence.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
MARION I
As I look back on those days in which we built up the great
Tono-Bungay property out of human hope and credit for bottles and
rent and printing, I see my life as it were arranged in two
parallel columns of unequal width, a wider, more diffused,
eventful and various one which continually broadens out, the
business side of my life, and a narrow, darker and darkling one
shot ever and again with a gleam of happiness, my home-life with
Marion. For, of course, I married Marion.
I didn't, as a matter of fact, marry her until a year after
Tono-Bungay was thoroughly afloat, and then only after conflicts
and discussions of a quite strenuous sort. By that time I was
twenty-four. It seems the next thing to childhood now. We were
both in certain directions unusually ignorant and simple; we
were temperamentally antagonistic, and we hadn't--I don't think
we were capable of--an idea in common. She was young and
extraordinarily conventional--she seemed never to have an idea of
her own but always the idea of her class--and I was young and
sceptical, enterprising and passionate; the two links that held
us together were the intense appeal her physical beauty had for
me, and her appreciation of her importance in my thoughts.
There can be no doubt of my passion for her. In her I had
discovered woman desired. The nights I have lain awake on
account of her, writhing, biting my wrists in a fever of longing!
...
I have told how I got myself a silk hat and black coat to please
her on Sunday--to the derision of some of my fellow-students who
charged to meet me, and how we became engaged. But that was only
the beginning of our difference. To her that meant the beginning
of a not unpleasant little secrecy, an occasional use of verbal
endearments, perhaps even kisses. It was something to go on
indefinitely, interfering in no way with her gossiping spells of
work at Smithie's. To me it was a pledge to come together into
the utmost intimacy of soul and body so soon as we could contrive
it....
I don't know if it will strike the reader that I am setting out
to discuss the queer, unwise love relationship and my bungle of a
marriage with excessive solemnity. But to me it seems to reach
out to vastly wider issues than our little personal affair. I've
thought over my life. In these last few years I've tried to get
at least a little wisdom out of it. And in particular I've
thought over this part of my life. I'm enormously impressed by
the ignorant, unguided way in which we two entangled ourselves
with each other. It seems to me the queerest thing in all this
network of misunderstandings and misstatements and faulty and
ramshackle conventions which makes up our social order as the
individual meets it, that we should have come together so
accidentally and so blindly. Because we were no more than
samples of the common fate. Love is not only the cardinal fact
in the individual life, but the most important concern of the
community; after all, the way in which the young people of this
generation pair off determines the fate of the nation; all the
other affairs of the State are subsidiary to that. And we leave
it to flushed and blundering youth to stumble on its own
significance, with nothing to guide in but shocked looks and
sentimental twaddle and base whisperings and cant-smeared
examples.
I have tried to indicate something of my own sexual development
in the preceding chapter. Nobody was ever frank and decent with
me in this relation; nobody, no book, ever came and said to me
thus and thus is the world made, and so and so is necessary.
Everything came obscurely, indefinitely, perplexingly; and all I
knew of law or convention in the matter had the form of
threatenings and prohibitions. Except through the furtive,
shameful talk of my coevals at Goudhurst and Wimblehurst, I was
not even warned against quite horrible dangers. My ideas were
made partly of instinct, partly of a romantic imagination, partly
woven out of a medley of scraps of suggestion that came to me
haphazard. I had read widely and confusedly "Vathek," Shelley,
Tom Paine, Plutarch, Carlyle, Haeckel, William Morris, the Bible,
the Freethinker, the Clarion, "The Woman Who Did,"--I
mention the ingredients that come first to mind. All sorts of
ideas were jumbled up in me and never a lucid explanation. But
it was evident to me that the world regarded Shelley, for
example, as a very heroic as well as beautiful person; and that
to defy convention and succumb magnificently to passion was the
proper thing to do to gain the respect and affection of all
decent people.
And the make-up of Marion's mind in the matter was an equally
irrational affair. Her training had been one, not simply of
silences, but suppressions. An enormous force of suggestion had
so shaped her that the intense natural fastidiousness of girlhood
had developed into an absolute perversion of instinct. For all
that is cardinal in this essential business of life she had one
inseparable epithet--"horrid." Without any such training she
would have been a shy lover, but now she was an impossible one.
For the rest she had derived, I suppose, partly from the sort of
fiction she got from the Public Library, and partly from the
workroom talk at Smithie's. So far as the former origin went,
she had an idea of love as a state of worship and service on the
part of the man and of condescension on the part of the woman.
There was nothing "horrid" about it in any fiction she had read.
The man gave presents, did services, sought to be in every way
delightful. The woman "went out" with him, smiled at him, was
kissed by him in decorous secrecy, and if he chanced to offend,
denied her countenance and presence. Usually she did something
"for his good" to him, made him go to church, made him give up
smoking or gambling, smartened him up. Quite at the end of the
story came a marriage, and after that the interest ceased.
That was the tenor of Marion's fiction; but I think the
work-table conversation at Smithie's did something to modify
that. At Smithie's it was recognised, I think, that a "fellow"
was a possession to be desired; that it was better to be engaged
to a fellow than not; that fellows had to be kept--they might be
mislaid, they might even be stolen. There was a case of stealing
at Smithie's, and many tears.
Smithie I met before we were married, and afterwards she became a
frequent visitor to our house at Ealing. She was a thin,
bright-eyed, hawk-nosed girl of thirtyodd, with prominent
teeth, a high-pitched, eager voice and a disposition to be
urgently smart in her dress. Her hats were startling and
various, but invariably disconcerting, and she talked in a
rapid, nervous flow that was hilarious rather than witty, and
broken by little screams of "Oh, my dear!" and "you never did!"
She was the first woman I ever met who used scent. Poor old
Smithie! What a harmless, kindly soul she really was, and how
heartily I detested her! Out of the profits on the Persian robes
she supported a sister's family of three children, she "helped" a
worthless brother, and overflowed in help even to her workgirls,
but that didn't weigh with me in those youthfully-narrow times.
It was one of the intense minor irritations of my married life
that Smithie's whirlwind chatter seemed to me to have far more
influence with Marion than anything I had to say. Before all
things I coveted her grip upon Marion's inaccessible mind.
In the workroom at Smithie's, I gathered, they always spoke of me
demurely as "A Certain Person." I was rumoured to be dreadfully
"clever," and there were doubts--not altogether without
justification--of the sweetness of my temper.
II
Well, these general explanations will enable the reader to
understand the distressful times we two had together when
presently I began to feel on a footing with Marion and to fumble
conversationally for the mind and the wonderful passion I felt,
obstinately and stupidity, must be in her. I think she thought
me the maddest of sane men; "clever," in fact, which at Smithie's
was, I suppose, the next thing to insanity, a word intimating
incomprehensible and incalculable motives.... She could be
shocked at anything, she misunderstood everything, and her weapon
was a sulky silence that knitted her brows, spoilt her mouth and
robbed her face of beauty. "Well, if we can't agree, I don't see
why you should go on talking," she used to say. That would
always enrage me beyond measure. Or, "I'm afraid I'm not clever
enough to understand that."
Silly little people! I see it all now, but then I was no older
than she and I couldn't see anything but that Marion, for some
inexplicable reason, wouldn't come alive.
We would contrive semi-surreptitious walks on Sunday, and part
speechless with the anger of indefinable offences. Poor Marion!
The things I tried to put before her, my fermenting ideas about
theology, about Socialism, about aesthetics--the very words
appalled her, gave her the faint chill of approaching
impropriety, the terror of a very present intellectual
impossibility. Then by an enormous effort I would suppress
myself for a time and continue a talk that made her happy, about
Smithie's brother, about the new girl who had come to the
workroom, about the house we would presently live in. But
there we differed a little. I wanted to be accessible to St.
Paul's or Cannon Street Station, and she had set her mind quite
resolutely upon Eating.... It wasn't by any means quarreling all
the time, you understand. She liked me to play the lover
"nicely"; she liked the effect of going about--we had lunches, we
went to Earl's Court, to Kew, to theatres and concerts, but not
often to concerts, because, though Marion "liked" music, she
didn't like "too much of it," to picture shows--and there was a
nonsensical sort of babytalk I picked up--I forget where
now--that became a mighty peacemaker.
Her worst offence for me was an occasional excursion into the
Smithie style of dressing, debased West Kensington. For she had
no sense at all of her own beauty. She had no comprehension
whatever of beauty of the body, and she could slash her beautiful
lines to rags with hat-brims and trimmings. Thank Heaven! a
natural refinement, a natural timidity, and her extremely
slender purse kept her from the real Smithie efflorescence!
Poor, simple, beautiful, kindly limited Marion! Now that I am
forty-five, I can look back at her with all my old admiration
and none of my old bitterness with a new affection and not a
scrap of passion, and take her part against the equally stupid,
drivingly-energetic, sensuous, intellectual sprawl I used to be.
I was a young beast for her to have married--a hound beast. With
her it was my business to understand and control--and I exacted
fellowship, passion....
We became engaged, as I have told; we broke it off and joined
again. We went through a succession of such phases. We had no
sort of idea what was wrong with us. Presently we were formally
engaged. I had a wonderful interview with her father, in which
he was stupendously grave and H--less, wanted to know about my
origins and was tolerant (exasperatingly tolerant) because my
mother was a servant, and afterwards her mother took to kissing
me, and I bought a ring. But the speechless aunt, I gathered,
didn't approve--having doubts of my religiosity. Whenever we
were estranged we could keep apart for days; and to begin with,
every such separation was a relief. And then I would want her; a
restless longing would come upon me. I would think of the flow
of her arms, of the soft, gracious bend of her body. I would lie
awake or dream of a transfigured Marion of light and fire. It
was indeed Dame Nature driving me on to womankind in her stupid,
inexorable way; but I thought it was the need of Marion that
troubled me. So I always went back to Marion at last and made it
up and more or less conceded or ignored whatever thing had parted
us, and more and more I urged her to marry me....
In the long run that became a fixed idea. It entangled my will
and my pride; I told myself I was not going to be beaten. I
hardened to the business. I think, as a matter of fact, my real
passion for Marion had waned enormously long before we were
married, that she had lived it down by sheer irresponsiveness.
When I felt sure of my three hundred a year she stipulated for
delay, twelve months' delay, "to see how things would turn out."
There were times when she seemed simply an antagonist holding out
irritatingly against something I had to settle. Moreover, I
began to be greatly distracted by the interest and excitement of
Tono-Bungay's success, by the change and movement in things, the
going to and fro. I would forget her for days together, and then
desire her with an irritating intensity at last, one Saturday
afternoon, after a brooding morning, I determined almost savagely
that these delays must end.
I went off to the little home at Walham Green, and made Marion
come with me to Putney Common. Marion wasn't at home when I got
there and I had to fret for a time and talk to her father, who
was just back from his office, he explained, and enjoying himself
in his own way in the greenhouse.
"I'm going to ask your daughter to marry me!" I said. "I think
we've been waiting long enough."
"I don't approve of long engagements either," said her father.
"But Marion will have her own way about it, anyhow. Seen this
new powdered fertiliser?"
I went in to talk to Mrs. Ramboat. "She'll want time to get her
things," said Mrs. Ramboat....
I and Marion sat down together on a little seat under some trees
at the top of Putney Hill, and I came to my point abruptly.
"Look here, Marion," I said, "are you going to marry me or are
you not?"
She smiled at me. "Well," she said, "we're engaged--aren't we?"
"That can't go on for ever. Will you marry me next week?"
She looked me in the face. "We can't," she said.
"You promised to marry me when I had three hundred a year."
She was silent for a space. "Can't we go on for a time as we
are? We COULD marry on three hundred a year. But it means a
very little house. There's Smithie's brother. They manage on
two hundred and fifty, but that's very little. She says they
have a semi-detached house almost on the road, and hardly a bit
of garden. And the wall to next-door is so thin they hear
everything. When her baby cries--they rap. And people stand
against the railings and talk.... Can't we wait? You're doing so
well."
An extraordinary bitterness possessed me at this invasion of the
stupendous beautiful business of love by sordid necessity. I
answered her with immense restraint.
"If," I said, "we could have a double-fronted, detached
house--at Ealing, say--with a square patch of lawn in front and a
garden behind--and--and a tiled bathroom"
"That would be sixty pounds a year at least."
"Which means five hundred a year.... Yes, well, you see, I told
my uncle I wanted that, and I've got it."
"Got what?"
"Five hundred pounds a year."
"Five hundred pounds!"
I burst into laughter that had more than a taste of bitterness.
"Yes," I said, "really! and NOW what do you think?"
"Yes," she said, a little flushed; "but be sensible! Do you
really mean you've got a Rise, all at once, of two hundred a
year?"
"To marry on--yes."
She scrutinised me a moment. "You've done this as a surprise!"
she said, and laughed at my laughter. She had become radiant,
and that made me radiant, too.
"Yes," I said, "yes," and laughed no longer bitterly.
She clasped her hands and looked me in the eyes.
She was so pleased that I forgot absolutely my disgust of a
moment before. I forgot that she had raised her price two
hundred pounds a year and that I had bought her at that.
"Come!" I said, standing up; "let's go towards the sunset, dear,
and talk about it all. Do you know--this is a most beautiful
world, an amazingly beautiful world, and when the sunset falls
upon you it makes you into shining gold. No, not gold--into
golden glass.... Into something better that either glass or
gold."...
And for all that evening I wooed her and kept her glad. She made
me repeat my assurances over again and still doubted a little.
We furnished that double-fronted house from attic--it ran to an
attic--to cellar, and created a garden.
"Do you know Pampas Grass?" said Marion. "I love Pampas Grass...
if there is room."
"You shall have Pampas Grass," I declared. And there were
moments as we went in imagination about that house together, when
my whole being cried out to take her in my arms--now. But I
refrained. On that aspect of life I touched very lightly in that
talk, very lightly because I had had my lessons. She promised to
marry me within two months' time. Shyly, reluctantly, she named
a day, and next afternoon, in heat and wrath, we "broke it off"
again for the last time. We split upon procedure. I refused
flatly to have a normal wedding with wedding cake, in white
favours, carriages and the rest of it. It dawned upon me
suddenly in conversation with her and her mother, that this was
implied. I blurted out my objection forthwith, and this time it
wasn't any ordinary difference of opinion; it was a "row." I
don't remember a quarter of the things we flung out in that
dispute. I remember her mother reiterating in tones of gentle
remonstrance: "But, George dear, you must have a cake--to send
home." I think we all reiterated things. I seem to remember a
refrain of my own: "A marriage is too sacred a thing, too private
a thing, for this display. Her father came in and stood behind
me against the wall, and her aunt appeared beside the sideboard
and stood with arms, looking from speaker to speaker, a sternly
gratified prophetess. It didn't occur to me then! How painful
it was to Marion for these people to witness my rebellion.
"But, George," said her father, "what sort of marriage do you
want? You don't want to go to one of those there registry
offices?"
"That's exactly what I'd like to do. Marriage is too private a
thing--"
"I shouldn't feel married," said Mrs. Ramboat.
"Look here, Marion," I said; "we are going to be married at a
registry office. I don't believe in all these fripperies and
superstitions, and I won't submit to them. I've agreed to all
sorts of things to please you."
"What's he agreed to?" said her father--unheeded.
"I can't marry at a registry office," said Marion, sallow-white.
"Very well," I said. "I'll marry nowhere else."
"I can't marry at a registry office."
"Very well," I said, standing up, white and tense and it amazed
me, but I was also exultant; "then we won't marry at all."
She leant forward over the table, staring blankly. But presently
her half-averted face began to haunt me as she had sat at the
table, and her arm and the long droop of her shoulder.
III
The next day I did an unexampled thing. I sent a telegram to my
uncle, "Bad temper not coming to business," and set off for
Highgate and Ewart. He was actually at work--on a bust of
Millie, and seemed very glad for any interruption.
"Ewart, you old Fool," I said, "knock off and come for a day's
gossip. I'm rotten. There's a sympathetic sort of lunacy about
you. Let's go to Staines and paddle up to Windsor."
"Girl?" said Ewart, putting down a chisel.
"Yes."
That was all I told him of my affair.
"I've got no money," he remarked, to clear up ambiguity in my
invitation.
We got a jar of shandy-gaff, some food, and, on Ewart's
suggestion, two Japanese sunshades in Staines; we demanded extra
cushions at the boathouse and we spent an enormously soothing day
in discourse and meditation, our boat moored in a shady place
this side of Windsor. I seem to remember Ewart with a cushion
forward, only his heels and sunshade and some black ends of hair
showing, a voice and no more, against the shining,
smoothly-streaming mirror of the trees and bushes.
"It's not worth it," was the burthen of the voice. "You'd better
get yourself a Millie, Ponderevo, and then you wouldn't feel so
upset."
"No," I said decidedly, "that's not my way."
A thread of smoke ascended from Ewart for a while, like smoke
from an altar.
"Everything's a muddle, and you think it isn't. Nobody knows
where we are--because, as a matter of fact we aren't anywhere.
Are women property--or are they fellow-creatures? Or a sort of
proprietary goddesses? They're so obviously fellow-creatures.
You believe in the goddess?"
"No," I said, "that's not my idea."
"What is your idea?"
"Well"
"H'm," said Ewart, in my pause.
"My idea," I said, "is to meet one person who will belong to
me--to whom I shall belong--body and soul. No half-gods! Wait
till she comes. If she comes at all.... We must come to each
other young and pure."
"There's no such thing as a pure person or an impure person....
Mixed to begin with."
This was so manifestly true that it silenced me altogether.
"And if you belong to her and she to you, Ponderevo--which end's
the head?"
I made no answer except an impatient "oh!"
For a time we smoked in silence....
"Did I tell you, Ponderevo, of a wonderful discovery I've made?"
Ewart began presently.
"No," I said, "what is it?"
"There's no Mrs. Grundy."
"No?"
"No! Practically not. I've just thought all that business out.
She's merely an instrument, Ponderevo. She's borne the blame.
Grundy's a man. Grundy unmasked. Rather lean and out of sorts.
Early middle age. With bunchy black whiskers and a worried eye.
Been good so far, and it's fretting him! Moods! There's Grundy
in a state of sexual panic, for example,--'For God's sake cover
it up! They get together--they get together! It's too exciting!
The most dreadful things are happening!' Rushing about--long
arms going like a windmill. 'They must be kept apart!' Starts
out for an absolute obliteration of everything absolute
separations. One side of the road for men, and the other for
women, and a hoarding--without posters between them. Every boy
and girl to be sewed up in a sack and sealed, just the head and
hands and feet out until twenty-one. Music abolished, calico
garments for the lower animals! Sparrows to be
suppressed--ab-so-lutely."
I laughed abruptly.
"Well, that's Mr. Grundy in one mood--and it puts Mrs.
Grundy--She's a much-maligned person, Ponderevo--a rake at
heart--and it puts her in a most painful state of fluster--most
painful! She's an amenable creature. When Grundy tells her
things are shocking, she's shocked--pink and breathless. She
goes about trying to conceal her profound sense of guilt behind a
haughty expression....
"Grundy, meanwhile, is in a state of complete whirlabout. Long
lean knuckly hands pointing and gesticulating! 'They're still
thinking of things--thinking of things! It's dreadful. They get
it out of books. I can't imagine where they get it! I must
watch! There're people over there whispering! Nobody ought to
whisper!--There's something suggestive in the mere act! Then,
pictures! In the museum--things too dreadful for words. Why
can't we have pure art--with the anatomy all wrong and pure and
nice--and pure fiction pure poetry, instead of all this stuff
with allusions--allusions?... Excuse me! There's something up
behind that locked door! The keyhole! In the interests of
public morality--yes, Sir, as a pure good man--I insist--I'LL
look--it won't hurt me--I insist on looking my duty--M'm'm--the
keyhole!'"
He kicked his legs about extravagantly, and I laughed again.
"That's Grundy in one mood, Ponderevo. It isn't Mrs. Grundy.
That's one of the lies we tell about women. They're too simple.
Simple! Woman ARE simple! They take on just what men tell 'em."
Ewart meditated for a space. "Just exactly as it's put to them,"
he said, and resumed the moods of Mr. Grundy.
"Then you get old Grundy in another mood. Ever caught him
nosing, Ponderevo? Mad with the idea of mysterious, unknown,
wicked, delicious things. Things that aren't respectable. Wow!
Things he mustn't do!... Any one who knows about these things,
knows there's just as much mystery and deliciousness about
Grundy's forbidden things as there is about eating ham. Jolly
nice if it's a bright morning and you're well and hungry and
having breakfast in the open air. Jolly unattractive if you're
off colour. But Grundy's covered it all up and hidden it and put
mucky shades and covers over it until he's forgotten it. Begins
to fester round it in his mind. Has dreadful struggles--with
himself about impure thoughts.... Then you set Grundy with hot
ears,--curious in undertones. Grundy on the loose, Grundy in a
hoarse whisper and with furtive eyes and convulsive
movements--making things indecent. Evolving--in dense
vapours--indecency!
"Grundy sins. Oh, yes, he's a hypocrite. Sneaks round a corner
and sins ugly. It's Grundy and his dark corners that make vice,
vice! We artists--we have no vices.
"And then he's frantic with repentance. And wants to be cruel to
fallen women and decent harmless sculptors of the simple
nude--like me--and so back to his panic again."
"Mrs. Grundy, I suppose, doesn't know he sins," I remarked.
"No? I'm not so sure.... But, bless her heart she's a woman....
She's a woman. Then again you get Grundy with a large greasy
smile--like an accident to a butter tub--all over his face, being
Liberal Minded--Grundy in his Anti-Puritan moments, 'trying not
to see Harm in it'--Grundy the friend of innocent pleasure. He
makes you sick with the Harm he's trying not to see in it...
"And that's why everything's wrong, Ponderevo. Grundy, damn him!
stands in the light, and we young people can't see. His moods
affect us. We catch his gusts of panic, his disease of nosing,
his greasiness. We don't know what we may think, what we may
say, he does his silly utmost to prevent our reading and seeing
the one thing, the one sort of discussion we find--quite
naturally and properly--supremely interesting. So we don't
adolescence; we blunder up to sex. Dare--dare to look--and he
may dirt you for ever! The girls are terror-stricken to silence
by his significant whiskers, by the bleary something in his
eyes."
Suddenly Ewart, with an almost Jack-in-the-box effect, sat up.
"He's about us everywhere, Ponderevo," he said, very solemnly.
"Sometimes--sometimes I think he is--in our blood. In MINE."
He regarded me for my opinion very earnestly, with his pipe in
the corner of his mouth.
"You're the remotest cousin he ever had," I said.
I reflected. "Look here, Ewart," I asked, "how would you have
things different?"
He wrinkled up his queer face, regarded the wait and made his
pipe gurgle for a space, thinking deeply.
"There are complications, I admit. We've grown up under the
terror of Grundy and that innocent but docile
and--yes--formidable lady, his wife. I don't know how far the
complications aren't a disease, a sort of bleaching under the
Grundy shadow.... It is possible there are things I have still
to learn about women.... Man has eaten of the Tree of Knowledge.
His innocence is gone. You can't have your cake and eat it.
We're in for knowledge; let's have it plain and straight. I
should begin, I think, by abolishing the ideas of decency and
indecency...."
"Grundy would have fits!" I injected.
"Grundy, Ponderevo, would have cold douches--publicly--if the
sight was not too painful--three times a day.... But I don't
think, mind you, that I should let the sexes run about together.
No. The fact behind the sexes--is sex. It's no good humbugging.
It trails about--even in the best mixed company. Tugs at your
ankle. The men get showing off and quarrelling--and the women.
Or they're bored. I suppose the ancestral males have competed
for the ancestral females ever since they were both some sort of
grubby little reptile. You aren't going to alter that in a
thousand years or so.... Never should you have a mixed company,
never--except with only one man or only one woman. How would
that be?...
"Or duets only?...
"How to manage it? Some rule of etiquette, perhaps."... He
became portentously grave.
Then his long hand went out in weird gestures.
"I seem to see--I seem to see--a sort of City of Women,
Ponderevo. Yes.... A walled enclosure--good stone-mason's
work--a city wall, high as the walls of Rome, going about a
garden. Dozens of square miles of garden--trees--fountains--
arbours--lakes. Lawns on which the women play, avenues in which
they gossip, boats.... Women like that sort of thing. Any woman
who's been to a good eventful girls' school lives on the memory
of it for the rest of her life. It's one of the pathetic things
about women--the superiority of school and college--to anything
they get afterwards. And this city-garden of women will have
beautiful places for music, places for beautiful dresses, places
for beautiful work. Everything a woman can want. Nurseries.
Kindergartens. Schools. And no man--except to do rough work,
perhaps--ever comes in. The men live in a world where they can
hunt and engineer, invent and mine and manufacture, sail ships,
drink deep and practice the arts, and fight--"
"Yes," I said, "but--"
He stilled me with a gesture.
"I'm coming to that. The homes of the women, Ponderevo, will be
set in the wall of their city; each woman will have her own
particular house and home, furnished after her own heart in her
own manner--with a little balcony on the outside wall. Built
into the wall--and a little balcony. And there she will go and
look out, when the mood takes her, and all round the city there
will be a broad road and seats and great shady trees. And men
will stroll up and down there when they feel the need of feminine
company; when, for instance, they want to talk about their souls
or their characters or any of the things that only women will
stand.... The women will lean over and look at the men and smile
and talk to them as they fancy. And each woman will have this;
she will have a little silken ladder she can let down if she
chooses--if she "wants to talk closer..."
"The men would still be competing."
"There perhaps--yes. But they'd have to abide by the women's
decisions."
I raised one or two difficulties, and for a while we played with
this idea.
"Ewart," I said, "this is like Doll's Island.
"Suppose," I reflected, "an unsuccessful man laid siege to a
balcony and wouldn't let his rival come near it?"
"Move him on," said Ewart, "by a special regulation. As one does
organ-grinders. No difficulty about that. And you could forbid
it--make it against the etiquette. No life is decent without
etiquette.... And people obey etiquette sooner than laws..."
"H'm," I said, and was struck by an idea that is remote in the
world of a young man. "How about children?" I asked; "in the
City? Girls are all very well. But boys, for example--grow up."
"Ah!" said Ewart. "Yes. I forgot. They mustn't grow up
inside.... They'd turn out the boys when they were seven. The
father must come with a little pony and a little gun and manly
wear, and take the boy away. Then one could come afterwards to
one's mother's balcony.... It must be fine to have a mother.
The father and the son..."
"This is all very pretty in its way," I said at last, "but it's a
dream. Let's come back to reality. What I want to know is, what
are you going to do in Brompton, let us say, or Walham Green
NOW?"
"Oh! damn it!" he remarked, "Walham Green! What a chap you are,
Ponderevo!" and he made an abrupt end to his discourse. He
wouldn't even reply to my tentatives for a time.
"While I was talking just now," he remarked presently,
"I had a quite different idea."
"What?"
"For a masterpiece. A series. Like the busts of the Caesars.
Only not heads, you know. We don't see the people who do things
to us nowadays..."
"How will you do it, then?"
"Hands--a series of hands! The hands of the Twentieth Century.
I'll do it. Some day some one will discover it--go there--see
what I have done, and what is meant by it."
"See it where?"
"On the tombs. Why not? The Unknown Master of the Highgate
Slope! All the little, soft feminine hands, the nervous ugly
males, the hands of the flops, and the hands of the snatchers!
And Grundy's loose, lean, knuckly affair--Grundy the terror!--the
little wrinkles and the thumb! Only it ought to hold all the
others together--in a slightly disturbing squeeze....Like
Rodin's great Hand--you know the thing!"
IV
I forget how many days intervened between that last breaking off
of our engagement and Marion's surrender. But I recall now the
sharpness of my emotion, the concentrated spirit of tears and
laughter in my throat as I read the words of her unexpected
letter--"I have thought over everything, and I was selfish...."
I rushed off to Walham Green that evening to give back all she
had given me, to beat her altogether at giving. She was
extraordinarily gentle and generous that time, I remember, and
when at last I left her, she kissed me very sweetly.
So we were married.
We were married with all the customary incongruity. I
gave--perhaps after a while not altogether ungrudgingly--and
what I gave, Marion took, with a manifest satisfaction. After
all, I was being sensible. So that we had three livery carriages
to the church (one of the pairs of horses matched) and
coachmen--with improvised flavour and very shabby silk
hats--bearing white favours on their whips, and my uncle
intervened with splendour and insisted upon having a wedding
breakfast sent in from a caterer's in Hammersmith. The table had
a great display of chrysanthemums, and there was orange blossom
in the significant place and a wonderful cake. We also
circulated upwards of a score of wedges of that accompanied by
silver-printed cards in which Marion's name of Ramboat was
stricken out by an arrow in favour of Ponderevo. We had a little
rally of Marion's relations, and several friends and friends'
friends from Smithie's appeared in the church and drifted
vestry-ward. I produced my aunt and uncle a select group of
two. The effect in that shabby little house was one of
exhilarating congestion. The side-board, in which lived the
table-cloth and the "Apartments" card, was used for a display of
the presents, eked out by the unused balance of the
silver-printed cards.
Marion wore the white raiment of a bride, white silk and satin,
that did not suit her, that made her seem large and strange to
me; she obtruded bows and unfamiliar contours. She went through
all this strange ritual of an English wedding with a sacramental
gravity that I was altogether too young and egotistical to
comprehend. It was all extraordinarily central and important to
her; it was no more than an offensive, complicated, and
disconcerting intrusion of a world I was already beginning to
criticise very bitterly, to me. What was all this fuss for? The
mere indecent advertisement that I had been passionately in love
with Marion! I think, however, that Marion was only very
remotely aware of my smouldering exasperation at having in the
end behaved "nicely." I had played--up to the extent of dressing
my part; I had an admirably cut frock--coat, a new silk hat,
trousers as light as I could endure them--lighter, in fact--a
white waistcoat, night tie, light gloves. Marion, seeing me
despondent had the unusual enterprise to whisper to me that I
looked lovely; I knew too well I didn't look myself. I looked
like a special coloured supplement to Men's Wear, or The Tailor
and Cutter, Full Dress For Ceremonial Occasions. I had even the
disconcerting sensations of an unfamiliar collar. I felt
lost--in a strange body, and when I glanced down myself for
reassurance, the straight white abdomen, the alien legs confirmed
that impression.
My uncle was my best man, and looked like a banker--a little
banker--in flower. He wore a white rose in his buttonhole. He
wasn't, I think, particularly talkative. At least I recall very
little from him.
"George" he said once or twice, "this is a great occasion for
you--a very great occasion." He spoke a little doubtfully.
You see I had told him nothing about Marion until about a week
before the wedding; both he and my aunt had been taken altogether
by surprise. They couldn't, as people say, "make it out." My
aunt was intensely interested, much more than my uncle; it was
then, I think, for the first time that I really saw that she
cared for me. She got me alone, I remember, after I had made my
announcement. "Now, George," she said, "tell me everything about
her. Why didn't you tell--ME at least--before?"
I was surprised to find how difficult it was to tell her about
Marion. I perplexed her.
"Then is she beautiful?" she asked at last.
"I don't know what you'll think of her," I parried. "I think--"
"Yes?"
"I think she might be the most beautiful person in the world."
"And isn't she? To you?"
"Of course," I said, nodding my head. "Yes. She IS..."
And while I don't remember anything my uncle said or did at the
wedding, I do remember very distinctly certain little things,
scrutiny, solicitude, a curious rare flash of intimacy in my
aunt's eyes. It dawned on me that I wasn't hiding anything from
her at all. She was dressed very smartly, wearing a big-plumed
hat that made her neck seem longer and slenderer than ever, and
when she walked up the aisle with that rolling stride of hers and
her eye all on Marion, perplexed into self-forgetfulness, it
wasn't somehow funny. She was, I do believe, giving my marriage
more thought than I had done, she was concerned beyond measure at
my black rage and Marion's blindness, she was looking with eyes
that knew what loving is--for love.
In the vestry she turned away as we signed, and I verily believe
she was crying, though to this day I can't say why she should
have cried, and she was near crying too when she squeezed my hand
at parting--and she never said a word or looked at me, but just
squeezed my hand....
If I had not been so grim in spirit, I think I should have found
much of my wedding amusing. I remember a lot of ridiculous
detail that still declines to be funny in my memory. The
officiating clergyman had a cold, and turned his "n's" to "d's,"
and he made the most mechanical compliment conceivable about the
bride's age when the register was signed. Every bride he had
ever married had had it, one knew. And two middle-aged
spinsters, cousins of Marion's and dressmakers at Barking, stand
out. They wore marvellously bright and gay blouses and dim old
skirts, and had an immense respect for Mr. Ramboat. They threw
rice; they brought a whole bag with them and gave handfuls away
to unknown little boys at the church door and so created a
Lilliputian riot; and one had meant to throw a slipper. It was a
very warm old silk slipper, I know, because she dropped it out of
a pocket in the aisle--there was a sort of jumble in the
aisle--and I picked it up for her. I don't think she actually
threw it, for as we drove away from the church I saw her in a
dreadful, and, it seemed to me, hopeless, struggle with her
pocket; and afterwards my eye caught the missile of good fortune
lying, it or its fellow, most obviously mislaid, behind the
umbrella-stand in the hall....
The whole business was much more absurd, more incoherent, more
human than I had anticipated, but I was far too young and serious
to let the latter quality atone for its shortcomings. I am so
remote from this phase of my youth that I can look back at it all
as dispassionately as one looks at a picture--at some wonderful,
perfect sort of picture that is inexhaustible; but at the time
these things filled me with unspeakable resentment. Now I go
round it all, look into its details, generalise about its
aspects. I'm interested, for example, to square it with my
Bladesover theory of the British social scheme. Under stress of
tradition we were all of us trying in the fermenting chaos of
London to carry out the marriage ceremonies of a Bladesover
tenant or one of the chubby middling sort of people in some
dependent country town. There a marriage is a public function
with a public significance. There the church is to a large
extent the gathering-place of the community, and your going to
be married a thing of importance to every one you pass on the
road. It is a change of status that quite legitimately interests
the whole neighbourhood. But in London there are no neighbours,
nobody knows, nobody cares. An absolute stranger in an office
took my notice, and our banns were proclaimed to ears that had
never previously heard our names. The clergyman, even, who
married us had never seen us before, and didn't in any degree
intimate that he wanted to see us again.
Neighbours in London! The Ramboats did not know the names of the
people on either side of them. As I waited for Marion before we
started off upon our honeymoon flight, Mr. Ramboat, I remember,
came and stood beside me and stared out of the window.
"There was a funeral over there yesterday," he said, by way of
making conversation, and moved his head at the house opposite.
"Quite a smart affair it was with a glass 'earse...."
And our little procession of three carriages with
white-favour-adorned horses and drivers, went through all the
huge, noisy, indifferent traffic like a lost china image in the
coal-chute of an ironclad. Nobody made way for us, nobody cared
for us; the driver of an omnibus jeered; for a long time we
crawled behind an unamiable dust-cart. The irrelevant clatter
and tumult gave a queer flavour of indecency to this public
coming together of lovers. We seemed to have obtruded ourselves
shamelessly. The crowd that gathered outside the church would
have gathered in the same spirit and with greater alacrity for a
street accident....
At Charing Cross--we were going to Hastings--the experienced eye
of the guard detected the significance of our unusual costume
and he secured us a compartment.
"Well," said I, as the train moved out of the station, "That's
all over!" And I turned to Marion--a little unfamiliar still, in
her unfamiliar clothes--and smiled.
She regarded me gravely, timidly.
"You're not cross?" she asked.
"Cross! Why?"
"At having it all proper."
"My dear Marion!" said I, and by way of answer took and kissed
her white-gloved, leather-scented hand....
I don't remember much else about the journey, an hour or so it
was of undistinguished time--for we were both confused and a
little fatigued and Marion had a slight headache and did not want
caresses. I fell into a reverie about my aunt, and realised as
if it were a new discovery, that I cared for her very greatly. I
was acutely sorry I had not told her earlier of my marriage.
But you will not want to hear the history of my honeymoon. I
have told all that was needed to serve my present purpose. Thus
and thus it was the Will in things had its way with me. Driven
by forces I did not understand, diverted altogether from the
science, the curiosities and work to which I had once given
myself, I fought my way through a tangle of traditions, customs,
obstacles and absurdities, enraged myself, limited myself, gave
myself to occupations I saw with the clearest vision were
dishonourable and vain, and at last achieved the end of purblind
Nature, the relentless immediacy of her desire, and held, far
short of happiness, Marion weeping and reluctant in my arms.
V
Who can tell the story of the slow estrangement of two married
people, the weakening of first this bond and then that of that
complex contact? Least of all can one of the two participants.
Even now, with an interval of fifteen years to clear it up for
me, I still find a mass of impressions of Marion as confused, as
discordant, as unsystematic and self-contradictory as life. I
think of this thing and love her, of that and hate her--of a
hundred aspects in which I can now see her with an unimpassioned
sympathy. As I sit here trying to render some vision of this
infinitely confused process, I recall moments of hard and fierce
estrangement, moments of clouded intimacy, the passage of
transition all forgotten. We talked a little language together
whence were "friends," and I was "Mutney" and she was "Ming," and
we kept up such an outward show that till the very end Smithie
thought our household the most amiable in the world.
I cannot tell to the full how Marion thwarted me and failed in
that life of intimate emotions which is the kernel of love. That
life of intimate emotions is made up of little things. A
beautiful face differs from an ugly one by a difference of
surfaces and proportions that are sometimes almost
infinitesimally small. I find myself setting down little things
and little things; none of them do more than demonstrate those
essential temperamental discords I have already sought to make
clear. Some readers will understand--to others I shall seem no
more than an unfeeling brute who couldn't make allowances....
It's easy to make allowances now; but to be young and ardent and
to make allowances, to see one's married life open before one,
the life that seemed in its dawn a glory, a garden of roses, a
place of deep sweet mysteries and heart throbs and wonderful
silences, and to see it a vista of tolerations and baby-talk; a
compromise, the least effectual thing in all one's life.
Every love romance I read seemed to mock our dull intercourse,
every poem, every beautiful picture reflected upon the uneventful
succession of grey hours we had together. I think our real
difference was one of aesthetic sensibility.
I do still recall as the worst and most disastrous aspect of all
that time, her absolute disregard of her own beauty. It's the
pettiest thing to record, I know, but she could wear curl-papers
in my presence. It was her idea, too, to "wear out" her old
clothes and her failures at home when "no one was likely to see
her"--"no one" being myself. She allowed me to accumulate
a store of ungracious and slovenly memories....
All our conceptions of life differed. I remember how we differed
about furniture. We spent three or four days in Tottenham Court
Road, and she chose the things she fancied with an inexorable
resolution,--sweeping aside my suggestions with--"Oh, YOU want
such queer things." She pursued some limited, clearly seen and
experienced ideal--that excluded all other possibilities. Over
every mantel was a mirror that was draped, our sideboard was
wonderfully good and splendid with beveled glass, we had lamps on
long metal stalks and cozy corners and plants in grog-tubs.
Smithie approved it all. There wasn't a place where one could
sit and read in the whole house. My books went upon shelves in
the dining-room recess. And we had a piano though Marion's
playing was at an elementary level.
You know, it was the cruelest luck for Marion that I, with my
restlessness, my scepticism, my constantly developing ideas, had
insisted on marriage with her. She had no faculty of growth or
change; she had taken her mould, she had set in the limited ideas
of her peculiar class. She preserved her conception of what was
right in drawing-room chairs and in marriage ceremonial and in
every relation of life with a simple and luminous honesty and
conviction, with an immense unimaginative inflexibility--as a
tailor-bird builds its nest or a beaver makes its dam.
Let me hasten over this history of disappointments and
separation. I might tell of waxings and waning of love between
us, but the whole was waning. Sometimes she would do things for
me, make me a tie or a pair of slippers, and fill me with none
the less gratitude because the things were absurd. She ran our
home and our one servant with a hard, bright efficiency. She was
inordinately proud of house and garden. Always, by her lights,
she did her duty by me.
Presently the rapid development of Tono-Bungay began to take me
into the provinces, and I would be away sometimes for a week
together. This she did not like; it left her "dull," she said,
but after a time she began to go to Smithie's again and to
develop an independence of me. At Smithie's she was now a woman
with a position; she had money to spend. She would take Smithie
to theatres and out to lunch and talk interminably of the
business, and Smithie became a sort of permanent weekender with
us. Also Marion got a spaniel and began to dabble with the minor
arts, with poker-work and a Kodak and hyacinths in glasses. She
called once on a neighbour. Her parents left Walham Green--her
father severed his connection with the gas-works--and came to
live in a small house I took for them near us, and they were much
with us.
Odd the littleness of the things that exasperate when the
fountains of life are embittered! My father-in-law was
perpetually catching me in moody moments and urging me to take to
gardening. He irritated me beyond measure.
"You think too much," he would say. "If you was to let in a bit
with a spade, you might soon 'ave that garden of yours a Vision
of Flowers. That's better than thinking, George."
Or in a torrent of exasperation, "I CARN'T think, George, why you
don't get a bit of glass 'ere. This sunny corner you c'd do
wonders with a bit of glass."
And in the summer time he never came in without performing a sort
of conjuring trick in the hall, and taking cucumbers and tomatoes
from unexpected points of his person. "All out o' MY little
bit," he'd say in exemplary tones. He left a trail of vegetable
produce in the most unusual places, on mantel boards, sideboards,
the tops of pictures. Heavens! how the sudden unexpected tomato
could annoy me!...
It did much to widen our estrangement that Marion and my aunt
failed to make friends, became, by a sort of instinct,
antagonistic.
My aunt, to begin with, called rather frequently, for she was
really anxious to know Marion. At first she would arrive like a
whirlwind and pervade the house with an atmosphere of hello! She
dressed already with that cheerfully extravagant abandon that
signalised her accession to fortune, and dressed her best for
these visits.
She wanted to play the mother to me, I fancy, to tell Marion
occult secrets about the way I wore out my boots and how I never
could think to put on thicker things in cold weather. But Marion
received her with that defensive suspiciousness of the shy
person, thinking only of the possible criticism of herself; and
my aunt, perceiving this, became nervous and slangy...
"She says such queer things," said Marion once, discussing her.
"But I suppose it's witty."
"Yes," I said; "it IS witty."
"If I said things like she does--"
The queer things my aunt said were nothing to the queer things
she didn't say. I remember her in our drawing-room one day, and
how she cocked her eye--it's the only expression--at the
India-rubber plant in a Doulton-ware pot which Marion had
placed on the corner of the piano.
She was on the very verge of speech. Then suddenly she caught my
expression, and shrank up like a cat that has been discovered
looking at the milk.
Then a wicked impulse took her.
"Didn't say an old word, George," she insisted, looking me full
in the eye.
I smiled. "You're a dear," I said, "not to," as Marion came
lowering into the room to welcome her. But I felt extraordinarily
like a traitor--to the India-rubber plant, I suppose--for all
that nothing had been said...
"Your aunt makes Game of people," was Marion's verdict, and,
open-mindedly: "I suppose it's all right... for her."
Several times we went to the house in Beckenham for lunch, and
once or twice to dinner. My aunt did her peculiar best to be
friends, but Marion was implacable. She was also, I know,
intensely uncomfortable, and she adopted as her social method, an
exhausting silence, replying compactly and without giving
openings to anything that was said to her.
The gaps between my aunt's visits grew wider and wider.
My married existence became at last like a narrow deep groove in
the broad expanse of interests in which I was living. I went
about the world; I met a great number of varied personalities; I
read endless books in trains as I went to and fro. I developed
social relationships at my uncle's house that Marion did not
share. The seeds of new ideas poured in upon me and grew in me.
Those early and middle years of one's third decade are, I
suppose, for a man the years of greatest mental growth. They are
restless years and full of vague enterprise.
Each time I returned to Ealing, life there seemed more alien,
narrow, and unattractive--and Marion less beautiful and more
limited and difficult--until at last she was robbed of every
particle of her magic. She gave me always a cooler welcome, I
think, until she seemed entirely apathetic. I never asked myself
then what heartaches she might hide or what her discontents might
be.
I would come home hoping nothing, expecting nothing.
This was my fated life, and I had chosen it. I became more
sensitive to the defects I had once disregarded altogether; I
began to associate her sallow complexion with her temperamental
insufficiency, and the heavier lines of her mouth and nostril
with her moods of discontent. We drifted apart; wider and wider
the gap opened. I tired of baby-talk and stereotyped little
fondlings; I tired of the latest intelligence from those
wonderful workrooms, and showed it all too plainly; we hardly
spoke when we were alone together. The mere unreciprocated
physical residue of my passion remained--an exasperation between
us.
No children came to save us. Marion had acquired at Smithie's a
disgust and dread of maternity. All that was the fruition and
quintessence of the "horrid" elements in life, a disgusting
thing, a last indignity that overtook unwary women. I doubt
indeed a little if children would have saved us; we should have
differed so fatally about their upbringing.
Altogether, I remember my life with Marion as a long distress,
now hard, now tender. It was in those days that I first became
critical of my life and burdened with a sense of error and
maladjustment. I would lie awake in the night, asking myself the
purpose of things, reviewing my unsatisfying, ungainly home-life,
my days spent in rascal enterprise and rubbish-selling,
contrasting all I was being and doing with my adolescent
ambitions, my Wimblehurst dreams. My circumstances had an air
of finality, and I asked myself in vain why I had forced myself
into them.
VI
The end of our intolerable situation came suddenly and
unexpectedly, but in a way that I suppose was almost inevitable.
My alienated affections wandered, and I was unfaithful to Marion.
I won't pretend to extenuate the quality of my conduct. I was a
young and fairly vigorous male; all my appetite for love had been
roused and whetted and none of it had been satisfied by my love
affair and my marriage. I had pursued an elusive gleam of beauty
to the disregard of all else, and it had failed me. It had faded
when I had hoped it would grow brighter. I despaired of life and
was embittered. And things happened as I am telling. I don't
draw any moral at all in the matter, and as for social remedies,
I leave them to the social reformer. I've got to a time of life
when the only theories that interest me are generalisations about
realities.
To go to our inner office in Raggett Street I had to walk through
a room in which the typists worked. They were the correspondence
typists; our books and invoicing had long since overflowed into
the premises we had had the luck to secure on either side of us.
I was, I must confess, always in a faintly cloudily-emotional
way aware of that collection of for the most part
round-shouldered femininity, but presently one of the girls
detached herself from the others and got a real hold upon my
attention. I appreciated her at first as a straight little back,
a neater back than any of the others; as a softly rounded neck
with a smiling necklace of sham pearls; as chestnut hair very
neatly done--and as a side-long glance; presently as a quickly
turned face that looked for me.
My eye would seek her as I went through on business things--I
dictated some letters to her and so discovered she had pretty,
soft-looking hands with pink nails. Once or twice, meeting
casually, we looked one another for the flash of a second in the
eyes.
That was all. But it was enough in the mysterious free-masonry
of sex to say essential things. We had a secret between us.
One day I came into Raggett Street at lunch time and she was
alone, sitting at her desk. She glanced up as I entered, and
then became very still, with a downcast face and her hands
clenched on the table. I walked right by her to the door of the
inner office, stopped, came back and stood over her.
We neither of us spoke for quite a perceptible time. I was
trembling violently.
"Is that one of the new typewriters?" I asked at last for the
sake of speaking.
She looked up at me without a word, with her face flushed and her
eyes alight, and I bent down and kissed her lips. She leant back
to put an arm about me, drew my face to her and kissed me
again and again. I lifted her and held her in my arms. She gave
a little smothered cry to feel herself so held.
Never before had I known the quality of passionate kisses.
Somebody became audible in the shop outside.
We started back from one another with flushed faces and bright
and burning eyes.
"We can't talk here," I whispered with a confident intimacy.
"Where do you go at five?"
"Along the Embankment to Charing Cross," she answered as
intimately. "None of the others go that way..."
"About half-past five?"
"Yes, half-past five..."
The door from the shop opened, and she sat down very quickly.
"I'm glad," I said in a commonplace voice, "that these new
typewriters are all right."
I went into the inner office and routed out the paysheet in
order to find her name--Effie Rink. And did no work at all that
afternoon. I fretted about that dingy little den like a beast in
a cage.
When presently I went out, Effie was working with an
extraordinary appearance of calm--and there was no look for me at
all....
We met and had our talk that evening, a talk in whispers when
there was none to overhear; we came to an understanding. It was
strangely unlike any dream of romance I had ever entertained.
VII
I came back after a week's absence to my home again--a changed
man. I had lived out my first rush of passion for Effie, had
come to a contemplation of my position. I had gauged Effie's
place in the scheme of things, and parted from her for a time.
She was back in her place at Raggett Street after a temporary
indisposition. I did not feel in any way penitent or ashamed, I
know, as I opened the little cast-iron gate that kept Marion's
front grader and Pampas Grass from the wandering dog. Indeed, if
anything, I felt as if I had vindicated some right that had been
in question. I came back to Marion with no sense of wrong-doing
at all with, indeed, a new friendliness towards her. I don't
know how it may be proper to feel on such occasions; that is how
I felt.
I followed her in our drawing-room, standing beside the tall
lamp-stand that half filled the bay as though she had just
turned from watching for me at the window. There was something
in her pale face that arrested me. She looked as if she had not
been sleeping. She did not come forward to greet me.
"You've come home," she said.
"As I wrote to you."
She stood very still, a dusky figure against the bright window.
"Where have you been?" she asked.
"East Coast," I said easily.
She paused for a moment. "I KNOW," she said.
I stared at her. It was the most amazing moment in any life....
"By Jove!" I said at last, "I believe you do!"
"And then you come home to me!"
I walked to the hearthrug and stood quite still there regarding
this new situation.
"I didn't dream," she began. "How could you do such a thing?"
It seemed a long interval before either of us spoke another word.
"Who knows about it?" I asked at last.
"Smithie's brother. They were at Cromer."
"Confound Cromer! Yes!"
"How could you bring yourself"
I felt a spasm of petulant annoyance at this unexpected
catastrophe.
"I should like to wring Smithie's brother's neck," I said....
Marion spoke in dry, broken fragments of sentences. "You... I'd
always thought that anyhow you couldn't deceive me... I suppose
all men are horrid--about this."
"It doesn't strike me as horrid. It seems to me the most
necessary consequence--and natural thing in the world."
I became aware of some one moving about in the passage, and went
and shut the door of the room, then I walked back to the
hearthrug and turned.
"It's rough on you," I said. "But I didn't mean you to know.
You've never cared for me. I've had the devil of a time. Why
should you mind?"
She sat down in a draped armchair. "I HAVE cared for you," she
said.
I shrugged my shoulders.
"I suppose," she said, "SHE cares for you?"
I had no answer.
"Where is she now?"
"Oh! does it matter to you?... Look here, Marion! This--this I
didn't anticipate. I didn't mean this thing to smash down on you
like this. But, you know, something had to happen. I'm
sorry--sorry to the bottom of my heart that things have come to
this between us. But indeed, I'm taken by surprise. I don't
know where I am--I don't know how we got here. Things took me by
surprise. I found myself alone with her one day. I kissed her.
I went on. It seemed stupid to go back. And besides--why should
I have gone back? Why should I? From first to last, I've hardly
thought of it as touching you.... Damn!"
She scrutinised my face, and pulled at the ball-fringe of the
little table beside her.
"To think of it," she said. "I don't believe I can ever touch
you again."
We kept a long silence. I was only beginning to realise in the
most superficial way the immense catastrophe that had happened
between us. Enormous issues had rushed upon us. I felt
unprepared and altogether inadequate. I was unreasonably angry.
There came a rush of stupid expressions to my mind that my rising
sense of the supreme importance of the moment saved me from
saying. The gap of silence widened until it threatened to become
the vast memorable margin of some one among a thousand trivial
possibilities of speech that would vex our relations for ever.
Our little general servant tapped at the door--Marion always
liked the servant to tap--and appeared.
"Tea, M'm," she said--and vanished, leaving the door open.
"I will go upstairs," said I, and stopped. "I will go upstairs"
I repeated, "and put my bag in the spare room."
We remained motionless and silent for a few seconds.
"Mother is having tea with us to-day," Marion remarked at last,
and dropped the worried end of ball-fringe and stood up
slowly....
And so, with this immense discussion of our changed relations
hanging over us, we presently had tea with the unsuspecting Mrs.
Ramboat and the spaniel. Mrs. Ramboat was too well trained in
her position to remark upon our somber preoccupation. She kept a
thin trickle of talk going, and told us, I remember, that Mr.
Ramboat was "troubled" about his cannas.
"They don't come up and they won't come up. He's been round and
had an explanation with the man who sold him the bulbs--and he's
very heated and upset."
The spaniel was a great bore, begging and doing small tricks
first at one and then at the other of us. Neither of us used his
name. You see we had called him Miggles, and made a sort of trio
in the baby-talk of Mutney and Miggles and Ming.
VIII
Then presently we resumed our monstrous, momentous dialogue. I
can't now make out how long that dialogue went on. It spread
itself, I know, in heavy fragments over either three days or
four. I remember myself grouped with Marion, talking sitting on
our bed in her room, talking standing in our dining-room, saving
this thing or that. Twice we went for long walks. And we had a
long evening alone together, with jaded nerves and hearts that
fluctuated between a hard and dreary recognition of facts and, on
my part at least, a strange unwonted tenderness; because in some
extraordinary way this crisis had destroyed our mutual apathy and
made us feel one another again.
It was a dialogue that had discrepant parts that fell into lumps
of talk that failed to join on to their predecessors, that began
again at a different level, higher or lower, that assumed new
aspects in the intervals and assimilated new considerations. We
discussed the fact that we two were no longer lovers; never
before had we faced that. It seems a strange thing to write, but
as I look back, I see clearly that those several days were the
time when Marion and I were closest together, looked for the
first and last time faithfully and steadfastly into each other's
soul. For those days only, there were no pretences, I made no
concessions to her nor she to me; we concealed nothing,
exaggerated nothing. We had done with pretending. We had it out
plainly and soberly with each other. Mood followed mood and got
its stark expression.
Of course there was quarreling between us, bitter quarreling, and
we said things to one another--long pent-up things that bruised
and crushed and cut. But over it all in my memory now is an
effect of deliberate confrontation, and the figure of Marion
stands up, pale, melancholy, tear-stained, injured, implacable
and dignified.
"You love her?" she asked once, and jerked that doubt into my
mind.
I struggled with tangled ideas and emotions. "I don't know what
love is. It's all sorts of things--it's made of a dozen strands
twisted in a thousand ways."
"But you want her? You want her now--when you think of her?"
"Yes," I reflected. "I want her--right enough."
"And me? Where do I come in?"
"I suppose you come in here."
"Well, but what are you going to do?"
"Do!" I said with the exasperation of the situation growing upon
me. "What do you want me to do?"
As I look back upon all that time--across a gulf of fifteen
active years--I find I see it with an understanding judgment. I
see it as if it were the business of some one else--indeed of two
other people--intimately known yet judged without passion. I see
now that this shock, this sudden immense disillusionment, did in
real fact bring out a mind and soul in Marion; that for the first
time she emerged from habits, timidities, imitations, phrases and
a certain narrow will-impulse, and became a personality.
Her ruling motive at first was, I think, an indignant and
outraged pride. This situation must end. She asked me
categorically to give up Effie, and I, full of fresh and glowing
memories, absolutely refused.
"It's too late, Marion," I said. "It can't be done like that."
"Then we can't very well go on living together," she said. "Can
we?"
"Very well," I deliberated "if you must have it so."
"Well, can we?"
"Can you stay in this house? I mean--if I go away?"
"I don't know.... I don't think I could."
"Then--what do you want?"
Slowly we worked our way from point to point, until at last the
word "divorce" was before us.
"If we can't live together we ought to be free," said Marion.
"I don't know anything of divorce," I said--"if you mean that.
I don't know how it is done. I shall have to ask somebody--or
look it up.... Perhaps, after all, it is the thing to do. We
may as well face it."
We began to talk ourselves into a realisation of what our
divergent futures might be. I came back on the evening of that
day with my questions answered by a solicitor.
"We can't as a matter of fact," I said, "get divorced as things
are. Apparently, so far as the law goes you've got to stand this
sort of thing. It's silly but that is the law. However, it's
easy to arrange a divorce. In addition to adultery there must be
desertion or cruelty. To establish cruelty I should have to
strike you, or something of that sort, before witnesses. That's
impossible--but it's simple to desert you legally. I have to go
away from you; that's all. I can go on sending you money--and
you bring a suit, what is it?--for Restitution of Conjugal
Rights. The Court orders me to return. I disobey. Then you can
go on to divorce me. You get a Decree Nisi, and once more the
Court tries to make me come back. If we don't make it up within
six months and if you don't behave scandalously the Decree is
made absolute. That's the end of the fuss. That's how one gets
unmarried. It's easier, you see, to marry than unmarry."
"And then--how do I live? What becomes of me?"
"You'll have an income. They call it alimony. From a third to a
half of my present income--more if you like--I don't mind--three
hundred a year, say. You've got your old people to keep and
you'll need all that."
"And then--then you'll be free?"
"Both of us."
"And all this life you've hated"
I looked up at her wrung and bitter face. "I haven't hated it,"
I lied, my voice near breaking with the pain of it all. "Have
you?"
IX
The perplexing thing about life is the irresolvable complexity of
reality, of things and relations alike. Nothing is simple.
Every wrong done has a certain justice in it, and every good deed
has dregs of evil. As for us, young still, and still without
self-knowledge, resounded a hundred discordant notes in the
harsh angle of that shock. We were furiously angry with each
other, tender with each other, callously selfish, generously
self-sacrificing.
I remember Marion saying innumerable detached things that didn't
hang together one with another, that contradicted one another,
that were, nevertheless, all in their places profoundly true and
sincere. I see them now as so many vain experiments in her
effort to apprehend the crumpled confusions of our complex moral
landslide. Some I found irritating beyond measure. I answered
her--sometimes quite abominably.
"Of course," she would say again and again, "my life has been a
failure."
"I've besieged you for three years," I would retort "asking it
not to be. You've done as you pleased. If I've turned away at
last--"
Or again she would revive all the stresses before our marriage.
"How you must hate me! I made you wait. Well now--I suppose you
have your revenge."
"REVENGE!" I echoed.
Then she would try over the aspects of our new separated lives.
"I ought to earn my own living," she would insist.
"I want to be quite independent. I've always hated London.
Perhaps I shall try a poultry farm and bees. You won't mind at
first my being a burden. Afterwards--"
"We've settled all that," I said.
"I suppose you will hate me anyhow..."
There were times when she seemed to regard our separation with
absolute complacency, when she would plan all sorts of freedoms
and characteristic interests.
"I shall go out a lot with Smithie," she said.
And once she said an ugly thing that I did indeed hate her for.
that I cannot even now quite forgive her.
"Your aunt will rejoice at all this. She never cared for me..."
Into my memory of these pains and stresses comes the figure of
Smithie, full-charged with emotion, so breathless in the
presence of the horrid villain of the piece that she could make
no articulate sounds. She had long tearful confidences with
Marion, I know, sympathetic close clingings. There were moments
when only absolute speechlessness prevented her giving me a
stupendous "talking-to"--I could see it in her eye. The wrong
things she would have said! And I recall, too, Mrs. Ramboat's
slow awakening to something in, the air, the growing expression
of solicitude in her eye, only her well-trained fear of Marion
keeping her from speech.
And at last through all this welter, like a thing fated and
altogether beyond our control, parting came to Marion and me.
I hardened my heart, or I could not have gone. For at the last
it came to Marion that she was parting from me for ever. That
overbore all other things, had turned our last hour to anguish.
She forgot for a time the prospect of moving into a new house,
she forgot the outrage on her proprietorship and pride. For
the first time in her life she really showed strong emotions in
regard to me, for the first time, perhaps, they really came to
her. She began to weep slow, reluctant tears. I came into her
room, and found her asprawl on the bed, weeping.
"I didn't know," she cried. "Oh! I didn't understand!"
"I've been a fool. All my life is a wreck!
"I shall be alone!...MUTNEY! Mutney, don't leave me! Oh!
Mutney! I didn't understand."
I had to harden my heart indeed, for it seemed to me at moments
in those last hours together that at last, too late, the
longed-for thing had happened and Marion had come alive. A
new-born hunger for me lit her eyes.
"Don't leave me!" she said, "don't leave me!" She clung to me;
she kissed me with tear-salt lips.
I was promised now and pledged, and I hardened my heart against
this impossible dawn. Yet it seems to me that there were moments
when it needed but a cry, but one word to have united us again
for all our lives. Could we have united again? Would that
passage have enlightened us for ever or should we have fallen
back in a week or so into the old estrangement, the old
temperamental opposition?
Of that there is now no telling. Our own resolve carried us on
our predestined way. We behaved more and more like separating
lovers, parting inexorably, but all the preparations we had set
going worked on like a machine, and we made no attempt to stop
them. My trunks and boxes went to the station. I packed my bag
with Marion standing before me. We were like children who had
hurt each other horribly in sheer stupidity, who didn't know now
how to remedy it. We belonged to each other
immensely--immensely. The cab came to the little iron gate.
"Good-bye!" I said.
"Good-bye."
For a moment we held one another in each other's arms and
kissed--incredibly without malice. We heard our little servant
in the passage going to open the door. For the last time we
pressed ourselves to one another. We were not lovers nor
enemies, but two human souls in a frank community of pain. I
tore myself from her.
"Go away," I said to the servant, seeing that Marion had followed
me down.
I felt her standing behind me as I spoke to the cab man.
I got into the cab, resolutely not looking back, and then as it
started jumped up, craned out and looked at the door.
It was wide open, but she had disappeared....
I wonder--I suppose she ran upstairs.
X
So I parted from Marion at an extremity of perturbation and
regret, and went, as I had promised and arranged, to Effie, who
was waiting for me in apartments near Orpington. I remember her
upon the station platform, a bright, flitting figure looking
along the train for me, and our walk over the fields in the
twilight. I had expected an immense sense of relief where at
last the stresses of separation were over, but now I found I was
beyond measure wretched and perplexed, full of the profoundest
persuasion of irreparable error. The dusk and somber Marion were
so alike, her sorrow seemed to be all about me. I had to hold
myself to my own plans, to remember that I must keep faith with
Effie, with Effie who had made no terms, exacted no guarantees,
but flung herself into my hands.
We went across the evening fields in silence, towards a sky of
deepening gold and purple, and Effie was close beside me always,
very close, glancing up ever and again at my face.
Certainly she knew I grieved for Marion, that ours was now no
joyful reunion. But she showed no resentment and no jealousy.
Extraordinarily, she did not compete against Marion. Never once
in all our time together did she say an adverse word of
Marion....
She set herself presently to dispel the shadow that brooded over
me with the same instinctive skill that some women will show with
the trouble of a child. She made herself my glad and pretty
slave and handmaid; she forced me at last to rejoice in her. Yet
at the back of it all Marion remained, stupid and tearful and
infinitely distressful, so that I was almost intolerably unhappy
for her--for her and the dead body of my married love.
It is all, as I tell it now, unaccountable to me. I go back into
these remote parts, these rarely visited uplands and lonely tares
of memory, and it seems to me still a strange country. I had
thought I might be going to some sensuous paradise with Effie,
but desire which fills the universe before its satisfaction,
vanishes utterly like the going of daylight--with achievement.
All the facts and forms of life remain darkling and cold. It was
an upland of melancholy questionings, a region from which I saw
all the world at new angles and in new aspects; I had outflanked
passion and romance.
I had come into a condition of vast perplexities. For the first
time in my life, at least so it seems to me now in this
retrospect, I looked at my existence as a whole.
Since this was nothing, what was I doing? What was I for?
I was going to and fro about Tono-Bungay--the business I had
taken up to secure Marion and which held me now in spite of our
intimate separation--and snatching odd week-ends and nights for
Orpington, and all the while I struggled with these obstinate
interrogations. I used to fall into musing in the trains, I
became even a little inaccurate and forgetful about business
things. I have the clearest memory of myself sitting thoughtful
in the evening sunlight on a grassy hillside that looked toward
Seven Oaks and commanded a wide sweep of country, and that I was
thinking out my destiny. I could almost write my thought down
now, I believe, as they came to me that afternoon. Effie,
restless little cockney that she was, rustled and struggled in a
hedgerow below, gathering flowers, discovering flowers she had
never seen before. I had. I remember, a letter from Marion in
my pocket. I had even made some tentatives for return, for a
reconciliation; Heaven knows now how I had put it! but her cold,
ill-written letter repelled me. I perceived I could never face
that old inconclusive dullness of life again, that stagnant
disappointment. That, anyhow, wasn't possible. But what was
possible? I could see no way of honour or fine living before me
at all.
"What am I to do with life?" that was the question that besieged
me.
I wondered if all the world was even as I, urged to this by one
motive and to that by another, creatures of chance and impulse
and unmeaning traditions. Had I indeed to abide by what I had
said and done and chosen? Was there nothing for me in honour but
to provide for Effie, go back penitent to Marion and keep to my
trade in rubbish--or find some fresh one--and so work out the
residue of my days? I didn't accept that for a moment. But what
else was I to do? I wondered if my case was the case of many
men, whether in former ages, too, men had been so guideless, so
uncharted, so haphazard in their journey into life. In the
Middle Ages, in the old Catholic days, one went to a priest, and
he said with all the finality of natural law, this you are and
this you must do. I wondered whether even in the Middle Ages I
should have accepted that ruling without question.
I remember too very distinctly how Effie came and sat beside me
on a little box: that was before the casement window of our room.
"Gloomkins," said she.
I smiled and remained head on hand, looking out of the window
forgetful of her.
"Did you love your wife so well?" she whispered softly.
"Oh!" I cried, recalled again; "I don't know. I don't understand
these things. Life is a thing that hurts, my dear! It hurts
without logic or reason. I've blundered! I didn't understand.
Anyhow--there is no need to go hurting you, is there?"
And I turned about and drew her to me, and kissed her ear....
Yes, I had a very bad time--I still recall. I suffered, I
suppose, from a sort of ennui of the imagination. I found
myself without an object to hold my will together. I sought. I
read restlessly and discursively. I tried Ewart and got no help
from him. As I regard it all now in this retrospect, it seems to
me as if in those days of disgust and abandoned aims I discovered
myself for the first time. Before that I had seen only the world
and things in it, had sought them self-forgetful of all but my
impulse. Now I found myself GROUPED with a system of
appetites and satisfactions, with much work to do--and no desire,
it seemed, left in me.
There were moments when I thought of suicide. At times my life
appeared before me in bleak, relentless light, a series of
ignorances, crude blunderings, degradation and cruelty. I had
what the old theologians call a "conviction of sin." I sought
salvation--not perhaps in the formula a Methodist preacher would
recognise but salvation nevertheless.
Men find their salvation nowadays in many ways. Names and forms
don't, I think, matter very much; the real need is something that
we can hold and that holds one. I have known a man find that
determining factor in a dry-plate factory, and another in
writing a history of the Manor. So long as it holds one, it does
not matter. Many men and women nowadays take up some concrete
aspect of Socialism or social reform. But Socialism for me has
always been a little bit too human, too set about with
personalities and foolishness. It isn't my line. I don't like
things so human. I don't think I'm blind to the fun, the
surprises, the jolly little coarsenesses and insufficiency of
life, to the "humour of it," as people say, and to adventure, but
that isn't the root of the matter with me. There's no humour in
my blood. I'm in earnest in warp and woof. I stumble and
flounder, but I know that over all these merry immediate things,
there are other things that are great and serene, very high,
beautiful things--the reality. I haven't got it, but it's there
nevertheless. I'm a spiritual guttersnipe in love with
unimaginable goddesses. I've never seen the goddesses nor ever
shall--but it takes all the fun out of the mud--and at times I
fear it takes all the kindliness, too.
But I'm talking of things I can't expect the reader to
understand, because I don't half understand them myself. There is
something links things for me, a sunset or so, a mood or so, the
high air, something there was in Marion's form and colour,
something I find and lose in Mantegna's pictures, something in
the lines of these boats I make. (You should see X2, my last and
best!)
I can't explain myself, I perceive. Perhaps it all comes to
this, that I am a hard and morally limited cad with a mind beyond
my merits. Naturally I resist that as a complete solution.
Anyhow, I had a sense of inexorable need, of distress and
insufficiency that was unendurable, and for a time this
aeronautical engineering allayed it....
In the end of this particular crisis of which I tell so badly, I
idealised Science. I decided that in power and knowledge lay the
salvation of my life, the secret that would fill my need; that to
these things I would give myself.
I emerged at last like a man who has been diving in darkness,
clutching at a new resolve for which he had groped desperately
and long.
I came into the inner office suddenly one day--it must have been
just before the time of Marion's suit for restitution--and sat
down before my uncle.
"Look here," I said, "I'm sick of this."
"HulLO!" he answered, and put some papers aside.
"What's up, George?"
"Things are wrong."
"As how?"
"My life," I said, "it's a mess, an infinite mess."
"She's been a stupid girl, George," he said; "I partly
understand. But you're quit of her now, practically, and there's
just as good fish in the sea--"
"Oh! it's not that!" I cried. "That's only the part that shows.
I'm sick--I'm sick of all this damned rascality."
"Eh? Eh?" said my uncle. "WHAT--rascality?"
"Oh, YOU know. I want some STUFF, man. I want something to
hold on to. I shall go amok if I don't get it. I'm a different
sort of beast from you. You float in all this bunkum. _I_ feel
like a man floundering in a universe of soapsuds, up and downs,
east and west. I can't stand it. I must get my foot on
something solid or--I don't know what."
I laughed at the consternation in his face.
"I mean it," I said. "I've been thinking it over. I've made up
my mind. It's no good arguing. I shall go in for work--real
work. No! this isn't work; it's only laborious cheating. But
I've got an idea! It's an old idea--I thought of years ago, but
it came back to me. Look here! Why should I fence about with
you? I believe the time has come for flying to be possible.
Real flying!"
"Flying!"
I stuck to that, and it helped me through the worst time in my
life. My uncle, after some half-hearted resistance and a talk
with my aunt, behaved like the father of a spoilt son. He fixed
up an arrangement that gave me capital to play with, released me
from too constant a solicitude for the newer business
developments--this was in what I may call the later Moggs period
of our enterprises--and I went to work at once with grim
intensity.
But I will tell of my soaring and flying machines in the proper
place. I've been leaving the story of my uncle altogether too
long. I wanted merely to tell how it was I took to this work. I
took to these experiments after I had sought something that
Marion in some indefinable way had seemed to promise. I toiled
and forgot myself for a time, and did many things. Science too
has been something of an irresponsive mistress since, though I've
served her better than I served Marion. But at the time Science,
with her order, her inhuman distance, yet steely certainties,
saved me from despair.
Well, I have still to fly; but incidentally I have invented the
lightest engines in the world.
I am trying to tell of all the things that happened to me. It's
hard enough simply to get it put down in the remotest degree
right. But this is a novel, not a treatise. Don't imagine that I
am coming presently to any sort of solution of my difficulties.
Here among my drawings and hammerings NOW, I still question
unanswering problems. All my life has been at bottom, SEEKING,
disbelieving always, dissatisfied always with the thing seen and
the thing believed, seeking something in toil, in force, in
danger, something whose name and nature I do not clearly
understand, something beautiful, worshipful, enduring, mine
profoundly and fundamentally, and the utter redemption of myself;
I don't know--all I can tell is that it is something I have ever
failed to find.
XI
But before I finish this chapter and book altogether and go on
with the great adventure of my uncle's career. I may perhaps tell
what else remains to tell of Marion and Effie, and then for a
time set my private life behind me.
For a time Marion and I corresponded with some regularity,
writing friendly but rather uninforming letters about small
business things. The clumsy process of divorce completed itself.
She left the house at Ealing and went into the country with her
aunt and parents, taking a small farm near Lewes in Sussex. She
put up glass, she put in heat for her father, happy man! and
spoke of figs and peaches. The thing seemed to promise well
throughout a spring and summer, but the Sussex winter after
London was too much for the Ramboats. They got very muddy and
dull; Mr. Ramboat killed a cow by improper feeding, and that
disheartened them all. A twelvemonth saw the enterprise in
difficulties. I had to help her out of this, and then they
returned to London and she went into partnership with Smithie at
Streatham, and ran a business that was intimated on the firm's
stationery as "Robes." The parents and aunt were stowed away in
a cottage somewhere. After that the letters became infrequent.
But in one I remember a postscript that had a little stab of our
old intimacy: "Poor old Miggles is dead."
Nearly eight years slipped by. I grew up. I grew in experience,
in capacity, until I was fully a man, but with many new
interests, living on a larger scale in a wider world than I could
have dreamt of in my Marion days. Her letters become rare and
insignificant. At last came a gap of silence that made me
curious. For eighteen months or more I had nothing from Marion
save her quarterly receipts through the bank. Then I damned at
Smithie, and wrote a card to Marion.
"Dear Marion," I said, "how goes it?"
She astonished me tremendously by telling me she had married
again--"a Mr. Wachorn, a leading agent in the paper-pattern
trade." But she still wrote on the Ponderevo and Smith (Robes)
notepaper, from the Ponderevo and Smith address.
And that, except for a little difference of opinion about the
continuance of alimony which gave me some passages of anger, and
the use of my name by the firm, which also annoyed me, is the end
of Marion's history for me, and she vanishes out of this story.
I do not know where she is or what she is doing. I do not know
whether she is alive or dead. It seems to me utterly grotesque
that two people who have stood so close to one another as she and
I should be so separated, but so it is between us.
Effie, too, I have parted from, though I still see her at times.
Between us there was never any intention of marriage nor intimacy
of soul. She had a sudden, fierce, hot-blooded passion for me
and I for her, but I was not her first lover nor her last. She
was in another world from Marion. She had a queer, delightful
nature; I've no memory of ever seeing her sullen or malicious.
She was--indeed she was magnificently--eupeptic. That, I think,
was the central secret of her agreeableness, and, moreover, that
she was infinitely kind-hearted. I helped her at last into an
opening she coveted, and she amazed me by a sudden display of
business capacity. She has now a typewriting bureau in Riffle's
Inn, and she runs it with a brisk vigour and considerable
success, albeit a certain plumpness has overtaken her. And she
still loves her kind. She married a year or so ago a boy half
her age--a wretch of a poet, a wretched poet, and given to drugs,
a thing with lank fair hair always getting into his blue eyes,
and limp legs. She did it, she said, because he needed
nursing....
But enough of this disaster of my marriage and of my early love
affairs; I have told all that is needed for my picture to explain
how I came to take up aeroplane experiments and engineering
science; let me get back to my essential story, to Tono-Bungay
and my uncle's promotions and to the vision of the world these
things have given me.
BOOK THE THIRD
THE GREAT DAYS OF TONO-BUNGAY
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE HARDINGHAM HOTEL, AND HOW WE BECAME BIG PEOPLE
I
But now that I resume the main line of my story it may be well to
describe the personal appearance of my uncle as I remember him
during those magnificent years that followed his passage from
trade to finance. The little man plumped up very considerably
during the creation of the Tono-Bungay property, but with the
increasing excitements that followed that first flotation came
dyspepsia and a certain flabbiness and falling away. His
abdomen--if the reader will pardon my taking his features in the
order of their value--had at first a nice full roundness, but
afterwards it lost tone without, however, losing size. He always
went as though he was proud of it and would make as much of it as
possible. To the last his movements remained quick and sudden,
his short firm legs, as he walked, seemed to twinkle rather than
display the scissors-stride of common humanity, and he never
seemed to have knees, but instead, a dispersed flexibility of
limb.
There was, I seem to remember, a secular intensification of his
features; his nose developed character, became aggressive, stuck
out at the world more and more; the obliquity of his mouth, I
think, increased. From the face that returns to my memory
projects a long cigar that is sometimes cocked jauntily up from
the higher corner, that sometimes droops from the lower;--it was
as eloquent as a dog's tail, and he removed it only for the more
emphatic modes of speech. He assumed a broad black ribbon for
his glasses, and wore them more and more askew as time went on.
His hair seemed to stiffen with success, but towards the climax
it thinned greatly over the crown, and he brushed it hard back
over his ears where, however, it stuck out fiercely. It always
stuck out fiercely over his forehead, up and forward.
He adopted an urban style of dressing with the onset of
Tono-Bungay and rarely abandoned it. He preferred silk hats with
ample rich brims, often a trifle large for him by modern ideas,
and he wore them at various angles to his axis; his taste in
trouserings was towards fairly emphatic stripes and his trouser
cut was neat; he liked his frock-coat long and full, although
that seemed to shorten him. He displayed a number of valuable
rings, and I remember one upon his left little finger with a
large red stone bearing Gnostic symbols. "Clever chaps, those
Gnostics, George," he told me. "Means a lot. Lucky!" He never
had any but a black mohair watch-chair. In the country he
affected grey and a large grey cloth top-hat, except when
motoring; then he would have a brown deer-stalker cap and a fur
suit of esquimaux cut with a sort of boot-end to the trousers.
Of an evening he would wear white waistcoats and plain gold
studs. He hated diamonds. "Flashy," he said they were. "Might
as well wear--an income tax-receipt. All very well for Park
Lane. Unsold stock. Not my style. Sober financier, George."
So much for his visible presence. For a time it was very
familiar to the world, for at the crest of the boom he allowed
quite a number of photographs and at least one pencil sketch to
be published in the sixpenny papers.
His voice declined during those years from his early tenor to a
flat rich quality of sound that my knowledge of music is
inadequate to describe. His Zzz-ing inrush of air became less
frequent as he ripened, but returned in moments of excitement.
Throughout his career, in spite of his increasing and at last
astounding opulence, his more intimate habits remained as simple
as they had been at Wimblehurst. He would never avail himself of
the services of a valet; at the very climax of his greatness his
trousers were folded by a housemaid and his shoulders brushed as
he left his house or hotel. He became wary about breakfast as
life advanced, and at one time talked much of Dr. Haig and uric
acid. But for other meals he remained reasonably omnivorous. He
was something of a gastronome, and would eat anything he
particularly liked in an audible manner, and perspire upon his
forehead. He was a studiously moderate drinker--except when the
spirit of some public banquet or some great occasion caught him
and bore him beyond his wariness--there he would, as it were,
drink inadvertently and become flushed and talkative--about
everything but his business projects.
To make the portrait complete one wants to convey an effect of
sudden, quick bursts of movement like the jumps of a
Chinese-cracker to indicate that his pose whatever it is, has
been preceded and will be followed by a rush. If I were painting
him, I should certainly give him for a background that
distressed, uneasy sky that was popular in the eighteenth
century, and at a convenient distance a throbbing motor-car,
very big and contemporary, a secretary hurrying with papers, and
an alert chauffeur.
Such was the figure that created and directed the great property
of Tono-Bungay, and from the successful reconstruction of that
company passed on to a slow crescendo of magnificent creations
and promotions until the whole world of investors marveled. I
have already I think, mentioned how, long before we offered Tono
Bungay to the public, we took over the English agency of certain
American specialties. To this was presently added our
exploitation of Moggs' Domestic Soap, and so he took up the
Domestic Convenience Campaign that, coupled with his equatorial
rotundity and a certain resolute convexity in his bearings won my
uncle his Napoleonic title.
II
It illustrates the romantic element in modern commerce that my
uncle met young Moggs at a city dinner--I think it was the
Bottle-makers' Company--when both were some way advanced beyond
the initial sobriety of the occasion. This was the grandson of
the original Moggs, and a very typical instance of an educated,
cultivated, degenerate plutocrat. His people had taken him about
in his youth as the Ruskins took their John and fostered a
passion for history in him, and the actual management of the
Moggs' industry had devolved upon a cousin and a junior partner.
Mr. Moggs, being of a studious and refined disposition, had just
decided--after a careful search for a congenial subject in which
he would not be constant]y reminded of soap--to devote himself
to the History of the Thebaid, when this cousin died suddenly and
precipitated responsibilities upon him. In the frankness of
conviviality, Moggs bewailed the uncongenial task thus thrust
into his hands, and my uncle offered to lighten his burden by a
partnership then and there. They even got to terms--extremely
muzzy terms, but terms nevertheless.
Each gentleman wrote the name and address of the other on his
cuff, and they separated in a mood of brotherly carelessness, and
next morning neither seems to have thought to rescue his shirt
from the wash until it was too late. My uncle made a painful
struggle--it was one of my business mornings--to recall name and
particulars.
"He was an aquarium-faced, long, blond sort of chap, George, with
glasses and a genteel accent," he said.
I was puzzled. "Aquarium-faced?"
"You know how they look at you. His stuff was soap, I'm pretty
nearly certain. And he had a name--And the thing was the
straightest Bit-of-All-right you ever. I was clear enough to
spot that..."
We went out at last with knitted brows, and wandered up into
Finsbury seeking a good, well-stocked looking grocer. We called
first on a chemist for a pick-me-up for my uncle, and then we
found the shop we needed.
"I want," said my uncle, "half a pound of every sort of soap you
got. Yes, I want to take them now. Wait a moment, George....
Now what sort of soap d'you call THAT?"
At the third repetition of that question the young man said,
"Moggs' Domestic."
"Right," said my uncle. "You needn't guess again. Come along,
George, let's go to a telephone and get on to Moggs. Oh--the
order? Certainly. I confirm it. Send it all--send it all to
the Bishop of London; he'll have some good use for
it--(First-rate man, George, he is--charities and all that)--and
put it down to me, here's a card--Ponderevo--Tono-Bungay."
Then we went on to Moggs and found him in a camel-hair
dressing-jacket in a luxurious bed, drinking China tea, and got
the shape of everything but the figures fixed by lunch time.
Young Moggs enlarged my mind considerably; he was a sort of thing
I hadn't met before; he seemed quite clean and well-informed and
he assured me to never read newspapers nor used soap in any form
at all, "Delicate skin," he said.
"No objection to our advertising you wide and free?" said my
uncle.
"I draw the line at railway stations," said Moggs, "south-coast
cliffs, theatre programmes, books by me and poetry
generally--scenery--oh!--and the Mercure de France."
"We'll get along," said my uncle.
"So long as you don't annoy me," said Moggs, lighting a
cigarette, "you can make me as rich as you like."
We certainly made him no poorer. His was the first firm that was
advertised by a circumstantial history; we even got to
illustrated magazine articles telling of the quaint past of
Moggs. We concocted Moggsiana. Trusting to our partner's
preoccupation with the uncommercial aspects of life, we gave
graceful history--of Moggs the First, Moggs the Second, Moggs
the Third, and Moggs the Fourth. You must, unless you are very
young, remember some of them and our admirable block of a
Georgian shop window. My uncle brought early nineteenth-century
memoirs, soaked himself in the style, and devised stories about
old Moggs the First and the Duke of Wellington, George the Third
and the soap dealer ("almost certainly old Moggs"). Very soon we
had added to the original Moggs' Primrose several varieties of
scented and superfatted, a "special nurseries used in the
household of the Duke of Kent and for the old Queen in Infancy,"
a plate powder, "the Paragon," and a knife powder. We roped in
a good little second-rate black-lead firm, and carried their
origins back into the mists of antiquity. It was my uncle's own
unaided idea that we should associate that commodity with the
Black Prince. He became industriously curious about the past of
black-lead. I remember his button-holing the president of the
Pepys Society.
"I say, is there any black-lead in Pepys? You know
--black-lead--for grates! OR DOES HE PASS IT OVER AS A MATTER
OF COURSE?"
He became in those days the terror of eminent historians.
"Don't want your drum and trumpet history--no fear," he used to
say. "Don't want to know who was who's mistress, and why
so-and-so devastated such a province; that's bound to be all
lies and upsy-down anyhow. Not my affair. Nobody's affair now.
Chaps who did it didn't clearly know.... What I want to know is,
in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for Housemaid's Knee?
What did they put in their hot baths after jousting, and was the
Black Prince--you know the Black Prince--was he enameled or
painted, or what? I think myself, black-leaded--very
likely--like pipe-clay--but DID they use blacking so early?"
So it came about that in designing and writing those Moggs' Soap
Advertisements, that wrought a revolution in that department of
literature, my uncle was brought to realise not only the lost
history, but also the enormous field for invention and enterprise
that lurked among the little articles, the dustpans and mincers,
the mousetraps and carpet-sweepers that fringe the shops of the
oilman and domestic ironmonger. He was recalled to one of the
dreams of his youth, to his conception of the Ponderevo Patent
Flat that had been in his mind so early as the days before I went
to serve him at Wimblehurst. "The Home, George," he said,
"wants straightening up. Silly muddle! Things that get in the
way. Got to organise it."
For a time he displayed something like the zeal of a genuine
social reformer in relation to these matters.
"We've got to bring the Home Up to Date? That's my idee, George.
We got to make a civilised domestic machine out of these relics
of barbarism. I'm going to hunt up inventors, make a corner in
d'mestic ideas. Everything. Balls of string that won't dissolve
into a tangle, and gum that won't dry into horn. See? Then
after conveniences--beauty. Beauty, George! All these few
things ought to be made fit to look at; it's your aunt's idea,
that. Beautiful jam-pots! Get one of those new art chaps to
design all the things they make ugly now. Patent carpet-sweepers
by these greenwood chaps, housemaid's boxes it'll be a pleasure
to fall over--rich coloured house-flannels. Zzzz. Pails,
f'rinstance. Hang 'em up on the walls like warming-pans. All
the polishes and things in such tins--you'll want to cuddle 'em,
George! See the notion? 'Sted of all the silly ugly things we
got."...
We had some magnificent visions; they so affected me that when I
passed ironmongers and oil-shops they seemed to me as full of
promise as trees in late winter, flushed with the effort to burst
into leaf and flower.... And really we did do much towards that
very brightness these shops display. They were dingy things in
the eighties compared to what our efforts have made them now,
grey quiet displays.
Well, I don't intend to write down here the tortuous financial
history of Moggs' Limited, which was our first development of
Moggs and Sons; nor will I tell very much of how from that we
spread ourselves with a larger and larger conception throughout
the chandlery and minor ironmongery, how we became agents for
this little commodity, partners in that, got a tentacle round the
neck of a specialised manufacturer or so, secured a pull upon
this or that supply of raw material, and so prepared the way for
our second flotation, Domestic Utilities; "Do it," they reordered
it in the city. And then came the reconstruction of Tono-Bungay,
and then "Household services" and the Boom!
That sort of development is not to he told in detail in a novel.
I have, indeed, told much of it elsewhere. It is to be found set
out at length, painfully at length, in my uncle's examination and
mine in the bankruptcy proceedings, and in my own various
statements after his death. Some people know everything in that
story, some know it all too well, most do not want the details.
it is the story of a man of imagination among figures, and unless
you are prepared to collate columns of pounds, shillings and
pence, compare dates and check additions, you will find it very
unmeaning and perplexing. And after all, you wouldn't find the
early figures so much wrong as STRAINED. In the matter of
Moggs and Do Ut, as in the first Tono-Bungay promotion and in its
reconstruction, we left the court by city standards without a
stain on our characters. The great amalgamation of Household
Services was my uncle's first really big-scale enterprise and
his first display of bolder methods: for this we bought back Do
Ut, Moggs (going strong with a seven per cent. dividend) and
acquired Skinnerton's polishes, the Riffleshaw properties and the
Runcorn's mincer and coffee-mill business. To that Amalgamation
I was really not a party; I left it to my uncle because I was
then beginning to get keen upon the soaring experiments I had
taken on from the results then to hand of Lilienthal, Pilcher and
the Wright brothers. I was developing a glider into a flyer. I
meant to apply power to this glider as soon as I could work out
one or two residual problems affecting the longitudinal
stability. I knew that I had a sufficiently light motor in my
own modification of Bridger's light turbine, but I knew too that
until I had cured my aeroplane of a tendency demanding constant
alertness from me, a tendency to jerk up its nose at unexpected
moments and slide back upon me, the application of an engine
would be little short of suicide.
But that I will tell about later. The point I was coming to was
that I did not realise until after the crash how recklessly my
uncle had kept his promise of paying a dividend of over eight per
cent. on the ordinary shares of that hugely over-capitalised
enterprise, Household Services.
I drifted out of business affairs into my research much more than
either I or my uncle had contemplated. Finance was much less to
my taste than the organisation of the Tono-Bungay factory. In
the new field of enterprise there was a great deal of bluffing
and gambling, of taking chances and concealing material
facts--and these are hateful things to the scientific type of
mind. It wasn't fear I felt so much as an uneasy inaccuracy. I
didn't realise dangers, I simply disliked the sloppy, relaxing
quality of this new sort of work. I was at last constantly
making excuses not to come up to him in London. The latter part
of his business career recedes therefore beyond the circle of any
particular life. I lived more or less with him; I talked, I
advised, I helped him at times to fight his Sunday crowd at Crest
Hill, but I did not follow nor guide him. From the Do Ut time
onward he rushed up the financial world like a bubble in water
and left me like some busy water-thing down below in the deeps.
Anyhow, he was an immense success. The public was, I think,
particularly attracted by the homely familiarity of his field of
work--you never lost sight of your investment they felt, with
the name on the house-flannel and shaving-strop--and its
allegiance was secured by the Egyptian solidity of his apparent
results. Tono-Bungay, after its reconstruction, paid thirteen,
Moggs seven, Domestic Utilities had been a safe-looking nine;
here was Household Services with eight; on such a showing he had
merely to buy and sell Roeburn's Antiseptic fluid, Razor soaks
and Bath crystals in three weeks to clear twenty thousand pounds.
I do think that as a matter of fact Roeburn's was good value at
the price at which he gave it to the public, at least until it
was strained by ill-conserved advertisement. It was a period of
expansion and confidence; much money was seeking investment and
"Industrials" were the fashion. Prices were rising all round.
There remained little more for my uncle to do therefore, in his
climb to the high unstable crest of Financial Greatness but, as
he said, to "grasp the cosmic oyster, George, while it gaped,"
which, being translated, meant for him to buy respectable
businesses confidently and courageously at the vendor's
estimate, add thirty or forty thousand to the price and sell them
again. His sole difficulty indeed was the tactful management of
the load of shares that each of these transactions left upon his
hands. But I thought so little of these later things that I
never fully appreciated the peculiar inconveniences of that until
it was too late to help him.
III
When I think of my uncle near the days of his Great Boom and in
connection with the actualities of his enterprises, I think of
him as I used to see him in the suite of rooms he occupied in the
Hardingham Hotel, seated at a great old oak writing-table,
smoking, drinking, and incoherently busy; that was his typical
financial aspect--our evenings, our mornings, our holidays, our
motor-car expeditions, Lady Grove and Crest Hill belong to an
altogether different set of memories.
These rooms in the Hardingham were a string of apartments along
one handsome thick-carpeted corridor. All the doors upon the
corridor were locked except the first; and my uncle's bedroom,
breakfast-room and private sanctum were the least accessible
and served by an entrance from the adjacent passage, which he
also used at times as a means of escape from importunate callers.
The most eternal room was a general waiting-room and very
business-like in quality; it had one or two uneasy sofas, a
number of chairs, a green baize table, and a collection of the
very best Moggs and Tone posters: and the plush carpets normal to
the Hardingham had been replaced by a grey-green cork linoleum;
Here I would always find a remarkable miscellany of people
presided over by a peculiarly faithful and ferocious looking
commissioner, Ropper, who guarded the door that led a step nearer
my uncle. Usually there would be a parson or so, and one or two
widows; hairy, eyeglassy, middle-aged gentlemen, some of them
looking singularly like Edward Ponderevos who hadn't come off, a
variety of young and youngish men more or less attractively
dressed, some with papers protruding from their pockets, others
with their papers decently concealed. And wonderful, incidental,
frowsy people.
All these persons maintained a practically hopeless
siege--sometimes for weeks together; they had better have stayed
at home. Next came a room full of people who had some sort of
appointment, and here one would find smart-looking people,
brilliantly dressed, nervous women hiding behind magazines,
nonconformist divines, clergy in gaiters, real business men,
these latter for the most part gentlemen in admirable morning
dress who stood up and scrutinised my uncle's taste in water
colours manfully and sometimes by the hour together. Young men
again were here of various social origins, young Americans,
treasonable clerks from other concerns, university young men,
keen-looking, most of them, resolute, reserved, but on a sort of
hair trigger, ready at any moment to be most voluble, most
persuasive.
This room had a window, too, looking out into the hotel courtyard
with its fern-set fountains and mosaic pavement, and the young
men would stand against this and sometimes even mutter. One day
I heard one repeating in all urgent whisper as I passed "But you
don't quite see, Mr. Ponderevo, the full advantages, the FULL
advantages--" I met his eye and he was embarrassed.
Then came a room with a couple of secretaries--no typewriters,
because my uncle hated the clatter--and a casual person or two
sitting about, projectors whose projects were being entertained.
Here and in a further room nearer the private apartments, my
uncle's correspondence underwent an exhaustive process of pruning
and digestion before it reached him. Then the two little rooms
in which my uncle talked; my magic uncle who had got the
investing public--to whom all things were possible. As one came
in we would find him squatting with his cigar up and an
expression of dubious beatitude upon his face, while some one
urged him to grow still richer by this or that.
"That'ju, George?" he used to say. "Come in. Here's a thing.
Tell him--Mister--over again. Have a drink, George? No! Wise
man! Liss'n."
I was always ready to listen. All sorts of financial marvels
came out of the Hardingham, more particularly during my uncle's
last great flurry, but they were nothing to the projects that
passed in. It was the little brown and gold room he sat in
usually. He had had it redecorated by Bordingly and half a dozen
Sussex pictures by Webster hung about it. Latterly he wore a
velveteen jacket of a golden-brown colour in this apartment that
I think over-emphasised its esthetic intention, and he also
added some gross Chinese bronzes.
He was, on the whole, a very happy man throughout all that wildly
enterprising time. He made and, as I shall tell in its place,
spent great sums of money. He was constantly in violent motion,
constantly stimulated mentally and physically and rarely tired.
About him was an atmosphere of immense deference much of his
waking life was triumphal and all his dreams. I doubt if he had
any dissatisfaction with himself at all until the crash bore him
down. Things must have gone very rapidly with him.... I think
he must have been very happy.
As I sit here writing about all these things, jerking down notes
and throwing them aside in my attempt to give some literary form
to the tale of our promotions, the marvel of it all comes to me
as if it came for the first time the supreme unreason of it. At
the climax of his Boom, my uncle at the most sparing estimate
must have possessed in substance and credit about two million
pounds'-worth of property to set off against his vague colossal
liabilities, and from first to last he must have had a
controlling influence in the direction of nearly thirty millions.
This irrational muddle of a community in which we live gave him
that, paid him at that rate for sitting in a room and scheming
and telling it lies. For he created nothing, he invented
nothing, he economised nothing. I cannot claim that a single one
of the great businesses we organised added any real value to
human life at all. Several like Tono-Bungay were unmitigated
frauds by any honest standard, the giving of nothing coated in
advertisements for money. And the things the Hardingham gave
out, I repeat, were nothing to the things that came in. I think
of the long procession of people who sat down before us and
propounded this and that. Now it was a device for selling bread
under a fancy name and so escaping the laws as to weight--this
was afterwards floated as the Decorticated Health-Bread Company
and bumped against the law--now it was a new scheme for still
more strident advertisement, now it was a story of unsuspected
deposits of minerals, now a cheap and nasty substitute for this
or that common necessity, now the treachery of a too
well-informed employee, anxious to become our partner. It was
all put to us tentatively, persuasively. Sometimes one had a
large pink blusterous person trying to carry us off our feet by
his pseudo-boyish frankness, now some dyspeptically yellow
whisperer, now some earnest, specially dressed youth with an
eye-glass and a buttonhole, now some homely-speaking, shrewd
Manchester man or some Scotchman eager to be very clear and full.
Many came in couples or trios, often in tow of an explanatory
solicitor. Some were white and earnest, some flustered beyond
measure at their opportunity. Some of them begged and prayed to
be taken up. My uncle chose what he wanted and left the rest.
He became very autocratic to these applicants.
He felt he could make them, and they felt so too. He had but to
say "No!" and they faded out of existence.... He had become a
sort of vortex to which wealth flowed of its own accord. His
possessions increased by heaps; his shares, his leaseholds and
mortgages and debentures.
Behind his first-line things he found it necessary at last, and
sanctioned by all the precincts, to set up three general trading
companies, the London and African Investment Company, the British
Traders' Loan Company, and Business Organisations Limited. This
was in the culminating time when I had least to do with affairs.
I don't say that with any desire to exculpate myself; I admit I
was a director of all three, and I will confess I was willfully
incurious in that capacity. Each of these companies ended its
financial year solvent by selling great holdings of shares to one
or other of its sisters, and paying a dividend out of the
proceeds. I sat at the table and agreed. That was our method of
equilibrium at the iridescent climax of the bubble.
You perceive now, however, the nature of the services for which
this fantastic community have him unmanageable wealth and power
and real respect. It was all a monstrous payment for courageous
fiction, a gratuity in return for the one reality of human
life--illusion. We gave them a feeling of hope and profit; we
sent a tidal wave of water and confidence into their stranded
affairs. "We mint Faith, George," said my uncle one day.
"That's what we do. And by Jove we got to keep minting! We been
making human confidence ever since I drove the first cork of
Tono-Bungay."
"Coining" would have been a better word than minting! And yet,
you know, in a sense he was right. Civilisation is possible only
through confidence, so that we can bank our money and go unarmed
about the streets. The bank reserve or a policeman keeping order
in a jostling multitude of people, are only slightly less
impudent bluffs than my uncle's prospectuses. They couldn't for
a moment "make good" if the quarter of what they guarantee was
demanded of them. The whole of this modern mercantile investing
civilisation is indeed such stuff as dreams are made of. A
mass of people swelters and toils, great railway systems grow,
cities arise to the skies and spread wide and far, mines are
opened, factories hum, foundries roar, ships plough the seas,
countries are settled; about this busy striving world the rich
owners go, controlling all, enjoying all, confident and creating
the confidence that draws us all together into a reluctant,
nearly unconscious brotherhood. I wonder and plan my engines.
The flags flutter, the crowds cheer, the legislatures meet. Yet
it seems to me indeed at times that all this present commercial
civilisation is no more than my poor uncle's career writ large, a
swelling, thinning bubble of assurances; that its arithmetic is
just as unsound, its dividends as ill-advised, its ultimate aim
as vague and forgotten; that it all drifts on perhaps to some
tremendous parallel to his individual disaster...
Well, so it was we Boomed, and for four years and a half we lived
a life of mingled substance and moonshine. Until our particular
unsoundness overtook us we went about in the most magnificent of
motor-cars upon tangible high roads, made ourselves conspicuous
and stately in splendid houses, ate sumptuously and had a
perpetual stream of notes and money trickling into our pockets;
hundreds of thousands of men and women respected us, saluted us
and gave us toil and honour; I asked, and my worksheets rose, my
aeroplanes swooped out of nothingness to scare the downland
pe-wits; my uncle waved his hand and Lady Grove and all its
associations of chivalry and ancient peace were his; waved
again, and architects were busy planning the great palace he
never finished at Crest Hill and an army of folkmen gathered to
do his bidding, blue marble came from Canada, and timber from New
Zealand; and beneath it all, you know, there was nothing but
fictitious values as evanescent as rainbow gold.
IV
I pass the Hardingham ever and again and glance aside through the
great archway at the fountain and the ferns, and think of those
receding days when I was so near the centre of our eddy of greed
and enterprise. I see again my uncle's face, white and intent,
and hear him discourse, hear him make consciously Napoleonic
decisions, "grip" his nettles, put his "finger on the spot,"
"bluff," say "snap." He became particularly addicted to the last
idiom. Towards the end every conceivable act took the form of
saying "snap!"
The odd fish that came to us! And among others came
Gordon-Nasmyth, that queer blend of romance and illegality who
was destined to drag me into the most irrelevant adventure in my
life the Mordet Island affair; and leave me, as they say, with
blood upon my hands. It is remarkable how little it troubles my
conscience and how much it stirs my imagination, that particular
memory of the life I took. The story of Mordet Island has been
told in a government report and told all wrong; there are still
excellent reasons for leaving it wrong in places, but the
liveliest appeals of discretion forbid my leaving it out
altogether.
I've still the vividest memory of Gordon-Nasmyth's appearance in
the inner sanctum, a lank, sunburnt person in tweeds with a
yellow-brown hatchet face and one faded blue eye--the other was
a closed and sunken lid--and how he told us with a stiff
affectation of ease his incredible story of this great heap of
quap that lay abandoned or undiscovered on the beach behind
Mordet's Island among white dead mangroves and the black ooze of
brackish water.
"What's quap?" said my uncle on the fourth repetition of the
word.
"They call it quap, or quab, or quabb," said Gordon-Nasmyth; "but
our relations weren't friendly enough to get the accent right....
But there the stuff is for the taking. They don't know about it.
Nobody knows about it. I got down to the damned place in a canoe
alone. The boys wouldn't come. I pretended to be botanising."
...
To begin with, Gordon-Nasmyth was inclined to be dramatic.
"Look here," he said when he first came in, shutting the door
rather carefully behind him as he spoke, "do you two men--yes
or no--want to put up six thousand--for--a clear good chance of
fifteen hundred per cent. on your money in a year?"
"We're always getting chances like that," said my uncle, cocking
his cigar offensively, wiping his glasses and tilting his chair
back. "We stick to a safe twenty."
Gordon-Nasmyth's quick temper showed in a slight stiffening of
his attitude.
"Don't you believe him," said I, getting up before he could
reply. "You're different, and I know your books. We're very
glad you've come to us. Confound it, uncle! Its Gordon-Nasmyth!
Sit down. What is it? Minerals?"
"Quap," said Gordon-Nasmyth, fixing his eye on me, "in heaps."
"In heaps," said my uncle softly, with his glasses very oblique.
"You're only fit for the grocery," said Gordon-Nasmyth
scornfully, sitting down and helping himself to one of my uncle's
cigars. "I'm sorry I came. But, still, now I'm here.... And
first as to quap; quap, sir, is the most radio-active stuff in
the world. That's quap! It's a festering mass of earths and
heavy metals, polonium, radium, ythorium, thorium, carium, and
new things, too. There's a stuff called Xk--provisionally.
There they are, mucked up together in a sort of rotting sand.
What it is, how it got made, I don't know. It's like as if some
young creator had been playing about there. There it lies in two
heaps, one small, one great, and the world for miles about it is
blasted and scorched and dead. You can have it for the getting.
You've got to take it--that's all!"
"That sounds all right," said I. "Have you samples?"
"Well--should I? You can have anything--up to two ounces."
"Where is it?"...
His blue eye smiled at me and scrutinised me. He smoked and was
fragmentary for a time, fending off my questions; then his story
began to piece itself together. He conjured up a vision of this
strange forgotten kink in the world's littoral, of the long
meandering channels that spread and divaricate and spend their
burden of mud and silt within the thunderbelt of Atlantic surf,
of the dense tangled vegetation that creeps into the shimmering
water with root and sucker. He gave a sense of heat and a
perpetual reek of vegetable decay, and told how at last comes a
break among these things, an arena fringed with bone-white dead
trees, a sight of the hard-blue sea line beyond the dazzling
surf and a wide desolation of dirty shingle and mud, bleached and
scarred.... A little way off among charred dead weeds stands the
abandoned station,--abandoned because every man who stayed two
months at that station stayed to die, eaten up mysteriously like
a leper with its dismantled sheds and its decaying pier of
wormrotten and oblique piles and planks, still insecurely
possible.
And in the midst, two clumsy heaps shaped like the backs of hogs,
one small, one great, sticking out under a rib of rock that cuts
the space across,--quap!
"There it is," said Gordon-Nasmyth, "worth three pounds an
ounce, if it's worth a penny; two great heaps of it, rotten stuff
and soft, ready to shovel and wheel, and you may get it by the
ton!"
"How did it get there?"
"God knows! ... There it is--for the taking! In a country where
you mustn't trade. In a country where the company waits for good
kind men to find it riches and then take 'em away from 'em.
There you have it--derelict."
"Can't you do any sort of deal?"
"They're too damned stupid. You've got to go and take it.
That's all."
"They might catch you."
"They might, of course. But they're not great at catching."
We went into the particulars of that difficulty. "They wouldn't
catch me, because I'd sink first. Give me a yacht," said
Gordon-Nasmyth; "that's all I need."
"But if you get caught," said my uncle.
I am inclined to think Gordon-Nasmyth imagined we would give him
a cheque for six thousand pounds on the strength of his talk. It
was very good talk, but we didn't do that. I stipulated for
samples of his stuff for analysis, and he consented--reluctantly.
I think, on the whole, he would rather I didn't examine samples.
He made a motion pocketwards, that gave us an invincible
persuasion that he had a sample upon him, and that at the last
instant he decided not to produce it prematurely.
There was evidently a curious strain of secretiveness in him. He
didn't like to give us samples, and he wouldn't indicate within
three hundred miles the position of this Mordet Island of his.
He had it clear in his mind that he had a secret of immense
value, and he had no idea at all of just how far he ought to go
with business people. And so presently, to gain time for these
hesitations of his, he began to talk of other things. He talked
very well. He talked of the Dutch East Indies and of the Congo,
of Portuguese East Africa and Paraguay, of Malays and rich
Chinese merchants, Dyaks and negroes and the spread of the
Mahometan world in Africa to-day. And all this time he was
trying to judge if we were good enough to trust with his
adventure. Our cosy inner office became a little place, and all
our business cold and lifeless exploits beside his glimpses of
strange minglings of men, of slayings unavenged and curious
customs, of trade where no writs run, and the dark treacheries of
eastern ports and uncharted channels.
We had neither of us gone abroad except for a few vulgar raids on
Paris; our world was England, are the places of origin of half
the raw material of the goods we sold had seemed to us as remote
as fairyland or the forest of Arden. But Gordon-Nasmyth made it
so real and intimate for us that afternoon--for me, at any
rate--that it seemed like something seen and forgotten and now
again remembered.
And in the end he produced his sample, a little lump of muddy
clay speckled with brownish grains, in a glass bottle wrapped
about with lead and flannel--red flannel it was, I remember--a
hue which is, I know, popularly supposed to double all the
mystical efficacies of flannel.
"Don't carry it about on you," said Gordon-Nasmyth. "It makes
a sore."
I took the stuff to Thorold, and Thorold had the exquisite agony
of discovering two new elements in what was then a confidential
analysis. He has christened them and published since, but at the
time Gordon-Nasmyth wouldn't hear for a moment of our publication
of any facts at all; indeed, he flew into a violent passion and
abused me mercilessly even for showing the stuff to Thorold. "I
thought you were going to analyse it yourself," he said with the
touching persuasion of the layman that a scientific man knows and
practises at the sciences.
I made some commercial inquiries, and there seemed even then much
truth in Gordon-Nasmyth's estimate of the value of the stuff.
It was before the days of Capern's discovery of the value of
canadium and his use of it in the Capern filament, but the cerium
and thorium alone were worth the money he extracted for the
gas-mantles then in vogue. There were, however, doubts. Indeed,
there were numerous doubts. What were the limits of the
gas-mantle trade? How much thorium, not to speak of cerium,
could they take at a maximum. Suppose that quantity was high
enough to justify our shipload, came doubts in another quarter.
Were the heaps up to sample? Were they as big as he said? Was
Gordon-Nasmyth--imaginative? And if these values held, could we
after all get the stuff? It wasn't ours. It was on forbidden
ground. You see, there were doubts of every grade and class in
the way of this adventure.
We went some way, nevertheless, in the discussion of his project,
though I think we tried his patience. Then suddenly he vanished
from London, and I saw no more of him for a year and a half.
My uncle said that was what he had expected, and when at last
Gordon-Nasmyth reappeared and mentioned in an incidental way
that he had been to Paraguay on private (and we guessed
passionate) affairs, the business of the "quap" expedition had to
be begun again at the beginning. My uncle was disposed to be
altogether sceptical, but I wasn't so decided. I think I was
drawn by its picturesque aspects. But we neither of us dreamt of
touching it seriously until Capern's discovery.
Nasmyth's story had laid hold of my imagination like one small,
intense picture of tropical sunshine hung on a wall of grey
business affairs. I kept it going during Gordon-Nasmyth's
intermittent appearances in England. Every now and then he and I
would meet and reinforce its effect. We would lunch in London,
or he would cone to see my gliders at Crest Hill, and make new
projects for getting at those heaps again now with me, now alone.
At times they became a sort of fairy-story with us, an
imaginative exercise. And there came Capern's discovery of what
he called the ideal filament and with it an altogether less
problematical quality about the business side of quap. For the
ideal filament needed five per cent. of canadium, and canadium
was known to the world only as a newly separated constituent of a
variety of the rare mineral rutile. But to Thorold it was better
known as an element in a mysterious sample brought to him by me,
and to me it was known as one of the elements in quap. I told my
uncle, and we jumped on to the process at once. We found that
Gordon-Nasmyth, still unaware of the altered value of the stuff,
and still thinking of the experimental prices of radium and the
rarity value of cerium, had got hold of a cousin named Pollack,
made some extraordinary transaction about his life insurance
policy, and was buying a brig. We put in, put down three
thousand pounds, and forthwith the life insurance transaction and
the Pollack side of this finance vanished into thin air, leaving
Pollack, I regret to say, in the brig and in the secret--except
so far as canadium and the filament went--as residuum. We
discussed earnestly whether we should charter a steamer or go on
with the brig, but we decided on the brig as a less conspicuous
instrument for an enterprise that was after all, to put it
plainly, stealing.
But that was one of our last enterprises before our great crisis,
and I will tell of it in its place.
So it was quap came into our affairs, came in as a fairy-tale
and became real. More and more real it grew until at last it was
real, until at last I saw with my eyes the heaps my imagination
had seen for so long, and felt between my fingers again that
half-gritty, half soft texture of quap, like sanded moist-sugar
mixed with clay in which there stirs something--
One must feel it to understand.
V
All sorts of things came to the Hardingham and offered themselves
to my uncle. Gordon-Nasmyth stands but only because he played a
part at last in the crisis of our fortunes. So much came to us
that it seemed to me at times as though the whole world of human
affairs was ready to prostitute itself to our real and imaginary
millions. As I look back, I am still dazzled and incredulous to
think of the quality of our opportunities.
We did the most extraordinary things; things that it seems absurd
to me to leave to any casual man of wealth and enterprise who
cares to do them. I had some amazing perceptions of just how
modern thought and the supply of fact to the general mind may be
controlled by money. Among other things that my uncle offered
for, he tried very hard to buy the British Medical Journal and
the Lancet, and run them on what he called modern lines, and
when they resisted him he talked very vigorously for a time of
organising a rival enterprise. That was a very magnificent idea
indeed in its way; it would have given a tremendous advantage in
the handling of innumerable specialties and indeed I scarcely
know how far it would not have put the medical profession in our
grip. It still amazes me--I shall die amazed--that such a thing
can be possible in the modern state. If my uncle failed to bring
the thing off, some one else may succeed. But I doubt, even if
he had got both these weeklies, whether his peculiar style would
have suited them. The change of purpose would have shown. He
would have found it difficult to keep up their dignity.
He certainly did not keep up the dignity of the Sacred Grove,
an important critical organ which he acquired one day--by saying
"snap"--for eight hundred pounds. He got it "lock, stock and
barrel"--under one or other of which three aspects the editor was
included. Even at that price it didn't pay. If you are a
literary person you will remember the bright new cover he gave
that representative organ of British intellectual culture, and
how his sound business instincts jarred with the exalted
pretensions of a vanishing age. One old wrapper I discovered the
other day runs:--
"THE SACRED GROVE."
Weekly Magazine of Art, Philosophy, Science and
Belles Lettres.
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CONTENTS.
A Hitherto Unpublished Letter from Walter Pater.
Charlotte Bronte's Maternal Great Aunt.
A New Catholic History of England.
The Genius of Shakespeare.
Correspondence:--The Mendelian Hypothesis; The Split Infinitive;
"Commence," or "Begin;" Claverhouse; Socialism and the
Individual; The Dignity of Letters.
Folk-lore Gossip.
The Stage; the Paradox of Acting.
Travel Biography, Verse, Fiction, etc.
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I suppose it is some lingering traces of the Bladesover tradition
to me that makes this combination of letters and pills seem so
incongruous, just as I suppose it is a lingering trace of
Plutarch and my ineradicable boyish imagination that at bottom
our State should be wise, sane and dignified, that makes me think
a country which leaves its medical and literary criticism, or
indeed any such vitally important criticism, entirely to private
enterprise and open to the advances of any purchaser must be in a
frankly hopeless condition. These are ideal conceptions of mine.
As a matter of fact, nothing would be more entirely natural and
representative of the relations of learning, thought and the
economic situation in the world at the present time than this
cover of the Sacred Grove--the quiet conservatism of the one
element embedded in the aggressive brilliance of the other; the
contrasted notes of bold physiological experiment and extreme
mental immobility.
VI
There comes back, too, among these Hardingham memories, an
impression of a drizzling November day, and how we looked out of
the windows upon a procession of the London unemployed.
It was like looking down a well into some momentarily revealed
nether world. Some thousands of needy ineffectual men had been
raked together to trail their spiritless misery through the West
Eire with an appeal that was also in its way a weak and
insubstantial threat: "It is Work we need, not Charity."
There they were, half-phantom through the fog, a silent,
foot-dragging, interminable, grey procession. They carried wet,
dirty banners, they rattled boxes for pence; these men who had
not said "snap" in the right place, the men who had "snapped" too
eagerly, the men who had never said "snap," the men who had never
had a chance of saying "snap." A shambling, shameful stream they
made, oozing along the street, the gutter waste of competitive
civilisation. And we stood high out of it all, as high as if we
looked godlike from another world, standing in a room beautifully
lit and furnished, skillfully warmed, filled with costly things.
"There," thought I, "but for the grace of God, go George and
Edward Ponderevo."
But my uncle's thoughts ran in a different channel, and he made
that vision the test of a spirited but inconclusive harangue upon
Tariff Reform.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
OUR PROGRESS FROM CAMDEN TOWN TO CREST HILL
I
So far my history of my aunt and uncle has dealt chiefly with his
industrial and financial exploits. But side by side with that
history of inflation from the infinitesimal to the immense is
another development, the change year by year from the shabby
impecuniosity of the Camden Town lodging to the lavish
munificence of the Crest Hill marble staircase and my aunt's
golden bed, the bed that was facsimiled from Fontainebleau. And
the odd thing is that as I come to this nearer part of my story I
find it much more difficult to tell than the clear little
perspective memories of the earlier days. Impressions crowd upon
one another and overlap one another; I was presently to fall in
love again, to be seized by a passion to which I still faintly
respond, a passion that still clouds my mind. I came and went
between Ealing and my aunt and uncle, and presently between Effie
and clubland, and then between business and a life of research
that became far more continuous, infinitely more consecutive and
memorable than any of these other sets of experiences. I didn't
witness a regular social progress therefore; my aunt and uncle
went up in the world, so far as I was concerned, as if they were
displayed by an early cinematograph, with little jumps and
flickers.
As I recall this side of our life, the figure of my round-eyes,
button-nosed, pink-and-white Aunt Susan tends always to the
central position. We drove the car and sustained the car, she
sat in it with a magnificent variety of headgear poised upon her
delicate neck, and always with that faint ghost of a lisp no
misspelling can render--commented on and illuminated the new
aspects.
I've already sketched the little home behind the Wimblehurst
chemist's shop, the lodging near the Cobden statue, and the
apartments in Gower Street. Thence my aunt and uncle went into a
flat in Redgauntlet Mansions. There they lived when I married.
It was a compact flat, with very little for a woman to do in it
In those days my aunt, I think, used to find the time heavy upon
her hands, and so she took to books and reading, and after a time
even to going to lectures in the afternoon. I began to find
unexpected books upon her table: sociological books, travels,
Shaw's plays. "Hullo!" I said, at the sight of some volume of
the latter.
"I'm keeping a mind, George," she explained.
"Eh?"
"Keeping a mind. Dogs I never cared for. It's been a toss-up
between setting up a mind and setting up a soul. It's jolly
lucky for Him and you it's a mind. I've joined the London
Library, and I'm going in for the Royal Institution and every
blessed lecture that comes along next winter. You'd better look
out."...
And I remember her coming in late one evening with a note-book
in her hand.
"Where ya been, Susan?" said my uncle.
"Birkbeck--Physiology. I'm getting on." She sat down and took
off her gloves. "You're just glass to me," she sighed, and then
in a note of grave reproach: "You old PACKAGE! I had no idea!
The Things you've kept from me!"
Presently they were setting; up the house at Beckengham, and my
aunt intermitted her intellectual activities. The house at
Beckengham was something of an enterprise for them at that time,
a reasonably large place by the standards of the early years of
Tono-Bungay. It was a big, rather gaunt villa, with a
conservatory and a shrubbery, a tennis-lawn, a quite
considerable vegetable garden, and a small disused coach-house.
I had some glimpses of the excitements of its inauguration, but
not many because of the estrangement between my aunt and Marion.
My aunt went into that house with considerable zest, and my uncle
distinguished himself by the thoroughness with which he did the
repainting and replumbing. He had all the drains up and most of
the garden with them, and stood administrative on
heaps--administrating whisky to the workmen. I found him there
one day, most Napoleonic, on a little Elba of dirt, in an
atmosphere that defies print. He also, I remember, chose what he
considered cheerful contrasts of colours for the painting of the
woodwork. This exasperated my aunt extremely--she called him a
"Pestilential old Splosher" with an unusual note of
earnestness--and he also enraged her into novelties of abuse by
giving each bedroom the name of some favourite hero--Cliff,
Napoleon, Caesar, and so forth--and having it painted on the
door in gilt letters on a black label. "Martin Luther" was kept
for me. Only her respect for domestic discipline, she said,
prevented her retaliating with "Old Pondo" on the housemaid's
cupboard.
Also he went and ordered one of the completest sets of garden
requisites I have ever seen--and had them all painted a hard
clear blue. My aunt got herself large tins of a kindlier hued
enamel and had everything secretly recoated, and this done, she
found great joy in the garden and became an ardent rose grower
and herbaceous borderer, leaving her Mind, indeed, to damp
evenings and the winter months. When I think of her at
Beckenham, I always think first of her as dressed in that blue
cotton stuff she affected, with her arms in huge gauntleted
gardening gloves, a trowel in one hand and a small but no doubt
hardy and promising annual, limp and very young-looking and
sheepish, in the other.
Beckenham, in the persons of a vicar, a doctor's wife, and a
large proud lady called Hogberry, "called" on my uncle and aunt
almost at once, so soon in fact as the lawn was down again, and
afterwards my aunt made friends with a quiet gentlewoman next
door, a propos of an overhanging cherry tree and the need of
repairing the party fence. So she resumed her place in society
from which she had fallen with the disaster of Wimblehurst. She
made a partially facetious study of the etiquette of her
position, had cards engraved and retaliated calls. And then she
received a card for one of Mrs. Hogberry's At Homes, gave an old
garden party herself, participated in a bazaar and sale of work,
and was really becoming quite cheerfully entangled in Beckenham
society when she was suddenly taken up by the roots again by my
uncle and transplanted to Chiselhurst.
"Old Trek, George," she said compactly, "Onward and Up," when I
found her superintending the loading of two big furniture vans.
"Go up and say good-bye to 'Martin Luther,' and then I'll see
what you can do to help me."
II
I look into the jumbled stores of the middle distance of memory,
and Beckenham seems to me a quite transitory phase. But really
they were there several years; through nearly all my married
life, in fact, and far longer than the year and odd months we
lived together at Wimblehurst. But the Wimblehurst time with
them is fuller in my memory by far then the Beckenham period.
There comes back to me with a quite considerable amount of
detail the effect of that garden party of my aunt's and of a
little social misbehaviour of which I was guilty on that
occasion. It's like a scrap from another life. It's all set in
what is for me a kind of cutaneous feeling, the feeling of rather
ill-cut city clothes, frock coat and grey trousers, and of a
high collar and tie worn in sunshine among flowers. I have still
a quite vivid memory of the little trapezoidal lawn, of the
gathering, and particularly of the hats and feathers of the
gathering, of the parlour-maid and the blue tea-cups, and of
the magnificent presence of Mrs. Hogberry and of her clear,
resonant voice. It was a voice that would have gone with a
garden party on a larger scale; it went into adjacent premises;
it included the gardener who was far up the vegetable patch and
technically out of play. The only other men were my aunt's
doctor, two of the clergy, amiable contrasted men, and Mrs.
Hogberry's imperfectly grown-up son, a youth just bursting into
collar. The rest were women, except for a young girl or so in a
state of speechless good behaviour. Marion also was there.
Marion and I had arrived a little estranged, and I remember her
as a silent presence, a shadow across all that sunlit emptiness
of intercourse. We had embittered each other with one of those
miserable little disputes that seemed so unavoidable between us.
She had, with the help of Smithie, dressed rather elaborately for
the occasion, and when she saw me prepared to accompany her in, I
think it was a grey suit, she protested that silk hat and frock
coat were imperative. I was recalcitrant, she quoted an
illustrated paper showing a garden party with the King present,
and finally I capitulated--but after my evil habit,
resentfully.... Eh, dear! those old quarrels, how pitiful they
were, how trivial! And how sorrowful they are to recall! I
think they grow more sorrowful as I grow older, and all the small
passionate reasons for our mutual anger fade and fade out of
memory.
The impression that Beckenham company has left on my mind is one
of a modest unreality; they were all maintaining a front of
unspecified social pretension, and evading the display of the
economic facts of the case. Most of the husbands were "in
business" off stage, it would have been outrageous to ask what
the business was--and the wives were giving their energies to
produce, with the assistance of novels and the illustrated
magazines, a moralised version of the afternoon life of the
aristocratic class. They hadn't the intellectual or moral
enterprise of the upper-class woman, they had no political
interests, they had no views about anything, and consequently
they were, I remember, extremely difficult to talk to. They all
sat about in the summer-house and in garden-chairs, and were
very hatty and ruffley and sunshady. Three ladies and the curate
played croquet with a general immense gravity, broken by
occasional loud cries of feigned distress from the curate. "Oh!
Whacking me about again! Augh!"
The dominant social fact that afternoon was Mrs. Hogberry; she
took up a certain position commanding the croquet and went on, as
my aunt said to me in an incidental aside, "like an old
Roundabout." She talked of the way in which Beckenham society
was getting mixed, and turned on to a touching letter she had
recently received from her former nurse at Little Gossdean.
Followed a loud account of Little Gossdean and how much she and
her eight sisters had been looked up to there. "My poor mother
was quite a little Queen there, "she said. "And such NICE
Common people! People say the country labourers are getting
disrespectful nowadays. It isn't so--not if they're properly
treated. Here of course in Beckenham it's different. I won't
call the people we get here a Poor--they're certainly not a
proper Poor. They're Masses. I always tell Mr. Bugshoot they're
Masses, and ought to be treated as such."...
Dim memories of Mrs. Mackridge floated through my mind as I
listened to her....
I was whirled on this roundabout for a bit, and then had the
fortune to fall off into a tete-a-tete with a lady whom my
aunt introduced as Mrs. Mumble--but then she introduced everybody
to me as Mumble that afternoon, either by way of humour or
necessity.
That must have been one of my earliest essays in the art of
polite conversation, and I remember that I began by criticising
the local railway service, and that at the third sentence or
thereabouts Mrs. Mumble said in a distinctly bright and
encouraging way that she feared I was a very "frivolous" person.
I wonder now what it was I said that was "frivolous."
I don't know what happened to end that conversation, or if it had
an end. I remember talking to one of the clergy for a time
rather awkwardly, and being given a sort of topographical history
of Beckenham, which he assured me time after time was "Quite an
old place. Quite an old place." As though I had treated it as
new and he meant to be very patient but very convincing. Then
we hung up in a distinct pause, and my aunt rescued me.
"George," she said in a confidential undertone, "keep the pot
a-boiling." And then audibly, "I say, will you both old trot
about with tea a bit?"
"Only too delighted to TROT for you, Mrs. Ponderevo," said the
clergyman, becoming fearfully expert and in his elements; "only
too delighted."
I found we were near a rustic table, and that the housemaid was
behind us in a suitable position to catch us on the rebound with
the tea things.
"Trot!" repeated the clergyman to me, much amused; "excellent
expression!" And I just saved him from the tray as he turned
about.
We handed tea for a while....
"Give 'em cakes," said my aunt, flushed, but well in hand.
"Helps 'em to talk, George. Always talk best after a little
nourishment. Like throwing a bit of turf down an old geyser."
She surveyed the gathering with a predominant blue eye and helped
herself to tea.
"They keep on going stiff," she said in an undertone.... "I've
done my best."
"It's been a huge success," I said encouragingly.
"That boy has had his legs crossed in that position and hasn't
spoken for ten minutes. Stiffer and stiffer. Brittle. He's
beginning a dry cough--always a bad sign, George.... Walk 'em
about, shall I?--rub their noses with snow?"
Happily she didn't. I got myself involved with the gentlewoman
from next door, a pensive, languid-looking little woman with a
low voice, and fell talking; our topic, Cats and Dogs, and which
it was we liked best.
"I always feel," said the pensive little woman, "that there's
something about a dog-- A cat hasn't got it."
"Yes," I found myself admitting with great enthusiasm, "there is
something. And yet again--"
"Oh! I know there's something about a cat, too. But it isn't the
same."
"Not quite the same," I admitted; "but still it's something."
"Ah! But such a different something!"
"More sinuous."
"Much more."
"Ever so much more."
"It makes all the difference, don't you think?"
"Yes," I said, "ALL."
She glanced at me gravely and sighed a long, deeply felt "Yes."
A long pause.
The thing seemed to me to amount to a stale-mate. Fear came into
my heart and much perplexity.
"The--er--Roses," I said. I felt like a drowning man. "Those
roses--don't you think they are--very beautiful flowers?"
"Aren't they!" she agreed gently. "There seems to be something
in roses--something--I don't know how to express it."
"Something," I said helpfully.
"Yes," she said, "something. Isn't there?"
"So few people see it," I said; "more's the pity!"
She sighed and said again very softly, "Yes."...
There was another long pause. I looked at her and she was
thinking dreamily. The drowning sensation returned, the fear and
enfeeblement. I perceived by a sort of inspiration that her
tea-cup was empty.
"Let me take your cup," I said abruptly, and, that secured, made
for the table by the summer-house. I had no intention then of
deserting my aunt. But close at hand the big French window of
the drawing-room yawned inviting and suggestive. I can feel all
that temptation now, and particularly the provocation of my
collar. In an instant I was lost. I would--Just for a moment!
I dashed in, put down the cup on the keys of the grand piano and
fled upstairs, softly, swiftly, three steps at a time, to the
sanctuary of my uncle's study, his snuggery. I arrived there
breathless, convinced there was no return for me. I was very
glad and ashamed of myself, and desperate. By means of a
penknife I contrived to break open his cabinet of cigars, drew a
chair to the window, took off my coat, collar and tie, and
remained smoking guiltily and rebelliously, and peeping through
the blind at the assembly on the lawn until it was altogether
gone....
The clergymen, I thought, were wonderful.
III
A few such pictures of those early days at Beckenham stand out,
and then I find myself among the Chiselhurst memories. The
Chiselhurst mansion had "grounds" rather than a mere garden, and
there was a gardener's cottage and a little lodge at the gate.
The ascendant movement was always far more in evidence there than
at Beckenham. The velocity was increasing
One night picks itself out as typical, as, in its way, marking an
epoch. I was there, I think, about some advertisement stuff, on
some sort of business anyhow, and my uncle and aunt had come back
in a fly from a dinner at the Runcorns. (Even there he was
nibbling at Runcorn with the idea of our great Amalgamation
budding in his mind.) I got down there, I suppose, about eleven.
I found the two of them sitting in the study, my aunt on a
chair-arm with a whimsical pensiveness on her face, regarding
my uncle, and he, much extended and very rotund, in the low
arm-chair drawn up to the fender.
"Look here, George," said my uncle, after my first greetings. "I
just been saying: We aren't Oh Fay!"
"Eh?"
"Not Oh Fay! Socially!"
"Old FLY, he means, George--French!"
"Oh! Didn't think of French. One never knows where to have him.
What's gone wrong to-night?"
"I been thinking. It isn't any particular thing. I ate too much
of that fishy stuff at first, like salt frog spawn, and was a bit
confused by olives; and--well, I didn't know which wine was
which. Had to say THAT each time. It puts your talk all
wrong. And she wasn't in evening dress, not like the others. We
can't go on in that style, George--not a proper ad."
"I'm not sure you were right," I said, "in having a fly."
"We got to do it all better," said my uncle, "we got to do it in
Style. Smart business, smart men. She tries to pass it off as
humorous"--my aunt pulled a grimace-- "it isn't humorous! See!
We're on the up-grade now, fair and square. We're going to be
big. We aren't going to be laughed at as Poovenoos, see!"
"Nobody laughed at you," said my aunt. "Old Bladder!"
"Nobody isn't going to laugh at me," said my uncle, glancing at
his contours and suddenly sitting up.
My aunt raised her eyebrows slightly, swung her foot, and said
nothing.
"We aren't keeping pace with our own progress, George. We got
to. We're bumping against new people, and they set up to be
gentlefolks--etiquette dinners and all the rest of it. They give
themselves airs and expect us to be fish-out-of-water. We
aren't going to be. They think we've no Style. Well, we give
them Style for our advertisements, and we're going to give 'em
Style all through.... You needn't be born to it to dance well on
the wires of the Bond Street tradesmen. See?"
I handed him the cigar-box.
"Runcorn hadn't cigars like these," he said, truncating one
lovingly. "We beat him at cigars. We'll beat him all round."
My aunt and I regarded him, full of apprehensions.
"I got idees," he said darkly to the cigar, deepening our dread.
He pocketed his cigar-cutter and spoke again.
"We got to learn all the rotten little game first. See,
F'rinstance, we got to get samples of all the blessed wines there
are--and learn 'em up. Stern, Smoor, Burgundy, all of 'em! She
took Stern to-night--and when she tasted it first--you pulled a
face, Susan, you did. I saw you. It surprised you. You bunched
your nose. We got to get used to wine and not do that. We got
to get used to wearing evening dress--YOU, Susan, too."
"Always have had a tendency to stick out of my clothes," said my
aunt. "However--Who cares?" She shrugged her shoulders.
I had never seen my uncle so immensely serious.
"Got to get the hang of etiquette," he went on to the fire.
"Horses even. Practise everything. Dine every night in evening
dress.... Get a brougham or something. Learn up golf and tennis
and things. Country gentleman. Oh Fay. It isn't only freedom
from Goochery."
"Eh?" I said.
"Oh!--Gawshery, if you like!"
"French, George," said my aunt. "But I'M not ol' Gooch. I made
that face for fun."
"It isn't only freedom from Gawshery. We got to have Style.
See! Style! Just all right and one better. That's what I call
Style. We can do it, and we will."
He mumbled his cigar and smoked for a space, leaning forward and
looking into the fire.
"What is it," he asked, "after all? What is it? Tips about
eating; tips about drinking. Clothes. How to hold yourself, and
not say jes' the few little things they know for certain are
wrong--jes' the shibboleth things."
He was silent again, and the cigar crept up from the horizontal
towards the zenith as the confidence of his mouth increased.
"Learn the whole bag of tricks in six months." he said,
becoming more cheerful. "Ah, Susan? Beat it out! George, you
in particular ought to get hold of it. Ought to get into a good
club, and all that."
"Always ready to learn!" I said. "Ever since you gave me the
chance of Latin. So far we don't seem to have hit upon any
Latin-speaking stratum in the population."
"We've come to French," said my aunt, "anyhow."
"It's a very useful language," said my uncle. "Put a point on
things. Zzzz. As for accent, no Englishman has an accent. No
Englishman pronounces French properly. Don't you tell ME.
It's a Bluff.--It's all a Bluff. Life's a Bluff--practically.
That's why it's so important, Susan, for us to attend to Style.
Le Steel Say Lum. The Style it's the man. Whad you laughing at,
Susan? George, you're not smoking. These cigars are good for
the mind.... What do YOU think of it all? We got to adapt
ourselves. We have--so far.... Not going to be beat by these
silly things."
IV
"What do you think of it, George?" he insisted.
What I said I thought of it I don't now recall. Only I have very
distinctly the impression of meeting for a moment my aunt's
impenetrable eye. And anyhow he started in with his accustomed
energy to rape the mysteries of the Costly Life, and become the
calmest of its lords. On the whole, I think he did
it--thoroughly. I have crowded memories, a little difficult to
disentangle, of his experimental stages, his experimental
proceedings. It's hard at times to say which memory comes in
front of which. I recall him as presenting on the whole a series
of small surprises, as being again and again, unexpectedly, a
little more self-confident, a little more polished, a little
richer and finer, a little more aware of the positions and values
of things and men.
There was a time--it must have been very early--when I saw him
deeply impressed by the splendours of the dining-room of the
National Liberal Club. Heaven knows who our host was or what
that particular little "feed" was about now!--all that sticks is
the impression of our straggling entry, a string of six or seven
guests, and my uncle looking about him at the numerous bright
red-shaded tables, at the exotics in great Majolica jars, at the
shining ceramic columns and pilasters, at the impressive
portraits of Liberal statesmen and heroes, and all that
contributes to the ensemble of that palatial spectacle. He was
betrayed into a whisper to me, "This is all Right, George!" he
said. That artless comment seems almost incredible as I set it
down; there came a time so speedily when not even the clubs of
New York could have overawed my uncle, and when he could walk
through the bowing magnificence of the Royal Grand Hotel to his
chosen table in that aggressively exquisite gallery upon the
river, with all the easy calm of one of earth's legitimate kings.
The two of them learnt the new game rapidly and well; they
experimented abroad, they experimented at home. At Chiselhurst,
with the aid of a new, very costly, but highly instructive cook,
they tried over everything they heard of that roused their
curiosity and had any reputation for difficulty, from asparagus
to plover's eggs. They afterwards got a gardener who could wait
at table--and he brought the soil home to one. Then there came a
butler.
I remember my aunt's first dinner-gown very brightly, and how
she stood before the fire in the drawing-room confessing once
unsuspected pretty arms with all the courage she possessed, and
looking over her shoulder at herself in a mirror.
"A ham," she remarked reflectively, "must feel like this. Just a
necklace."...
I attempted, I think, some commonplace compliment.
My uncle appeared at the door in a white waistcoat and with his
hands in his trouser pockets; he halted and surveyed her
critically.
"Couldn't tell you from a duchess, Susan," he remarked. "I'd
like to have you painted, standin' at the fire like that.
Sargent! You look--spirited, somehow. Lord!--I wish some of
those damned tradesmen at Wimblehurst could see you."...
They did a lot of week-ending at hotels, and sometimes I went
down with them. We seemed to fall into a vast drifting
crowd of social learners. I don't know whether it is due simply
to my changed circumstances, but it seems to me there have been
immensely disproportionate developments of the hotel-frequenting
and restaurant-using population during the last twenty years.
It is not only, I think, that there are crowds of people who,
like we were, are in the economically ascendant phase, but whole
masses of the prosperous section of the population must be
altering its habits, giving up high-tea for dinner and taking to
evening dress, using the week-end hotels as a practise-ground
for these new social arts. A swift and systematic conversion to
gentility has been going on, I am convinced, throughout the whole
commercial upper-middle class since I was twenty-one. Curiously
mixed was the personal quality of the people one saw in these
raids. There were conscientiously refined and low-voiced people
reeking with proud bashfulness; there were aggressively smart
people using pet diminutives for each other loudly and seeking
fresh occasions for brilliant rudeness; there were awkward
husbands and wives quarrelling furtively about their manners and
ill at ease under the eye of the winter; cheerfully amiable and
often discrepant couples with a disposition to inconspicuous
corners, and the jolly sort, affecting an unaffected ease; plump
happy ladies who laughed too loud, and gentlemen in evening
dress who subsequently "got their pipes." And nobody, you knew,
was anybody, however expensively they dressed and whatever rooms
they took.
I look back now with a curious remoteness of spirit to those
crowded dining-rooms with their dispersed tables and their
inevitable red-shaded lights and the unsympathetic, unskillful
waiters, and the choice of "Thig or Glear, Sir?" I've not dined
in that way, in that sort of place, now for five years--it must
be quite five years, so specialised and narrow is my life
becoming.
My uncle's earlier motor-car phases work in with these
associations, and there stands out a little bright vignette of
the hall of the Magnificent, Bexhill-on-Sea, and people dressed
for dinner and sitting about amidst the scarlet furniture--satin
and white-enameled woodwork until the gong should gather them;
and my aunt is there, very marvelously wrapped about in a dust
cloak and a cage-like veil, and there are hotel porters and
under-porters very alert, and an obsequious manager; and the
tall young lady in black from the office is surprised into
admiration, and in the middle of the picture is my uncle, making
his first appearance in that Esquimaux costume I have already
mentioned, a short figure, compactly immense, hugely goggled,
wearing a sort of brown rubber proboscis, and surmounted by a
table-land of motoring cap.
V
So it was we recognised our new needs as fresh invaders of the
upper levels of the social system, and set ourselves quite
consciously to the acquisition of Style and Savoir Faire. We
became part of what is nowadays quite an important element in the
confusion of our world, that multitude of economically ascendant
people who are learning how to spend money. It is made up of
financial people, the owners of the businesses that are eating up
their competitors, inventors of new sources of wealth, such as
ourselves; it includes nearly all America as one sees it on the
European stage. It is a various multitude having only this in
common: they are all moving, and particularly their womankind are
moving, from conditions in which means were insistently finite,
things were few, and customs simple, towards a limitless
expenditure and the sphere of attraction of Bond Street, Fifth
Avenue, and Paris. Their general effect is one of progressive
revolution, of limitless rope.
They discover suddenly indulgences their moral code never foresaw
and has no provision for, elaborations, ornaments, possessions
beyond their wildest dreams. With an immense astonished zest
they begin shopping begin a systematic adaptation to a new life
crowded and brilliant with things shopped, with jewels, maids,
butlers, coachmen, electric broughams, hired town and country
houses. They plunge into it as one plunges into a career; as a
class, they talk, think, and dream possessions. Their
literature, their Press, turns all on that; immense illustrated
weeklies of unsurpassed magnificence guide them in domestic
architecture, in the art of owning a garden, in the achievement
of the sumptuous in motor-cars, in an elaborate sporting
equipment, in the purchase and control of their estates, in
travel and stupendous hotels. Once they begin to move they go
far and fast. Acquisition becomes the substance of their lives.
They find a world organised to gratify that passion. In a brief
year or so they are connoisseurs. They join in the plunder of
the eighteenth century, buy rare old books, fine old pictures,
good old furniture. Their first crude conception of dazzling
suites of the newly perfect is replaced almost from the outset by
a jackdaw dream of accumulating costly discrepant old things.
I seem to remember my uncle taking to shopping quite suddenly.
In the Beckenham days and in the early Chiselhurst days he was
chiefly interested in getting money, and except for his onslaught
on the Beckenham house, bothered very little about his personal
surroundings and possessions. I forget now when the change came
and he began to spend. Some accident must have revealed to him
this new source of power, or some subtle shifting occurred in the
tissues of his brain. He began to spend and "shop." So soon as
he began to shop, he began to shop violently. He began buying
pictures, and then, oddly enough, old clocks. For the
Chiselhurst house he bought nearly a dozen grandfather clocks and
three copper warming pans. After that he bought much furniture.
Then he plunged into art patronage, and began to commission
pictures and to make presents to churches and institutions. His
buying increased with a regular acceleration. Its development
was a part of the mental changes that came to him in the wild
excitements of the last four years of his ascent. Towards the
climax he was a furious spender; he shopped with large unexpected
purchases, he shopped like a mind seeking expression, he shopped
to astonish and dismay; shopped crescendo, shopped fortissimo,
con molto espressione until the magnificent smash of Crest Hill
eroded his shopping for ever. Always it was he who shopped. My
aunt did not shine as a purchaser. It is a curious thing, due to
I know not what fine strain in her composition, that my aunt
never set any great store upon possessions. She plunged through
that crowded bazaar of Vanity Fair during those feverish years,
spending no doubt freely and largely, but spending with
detachment and a touch of humorous contempt for the things, even
the "old" things, that money can buy. It came to me suddenly one
afternoon just how detached she was, as I saw her going towards
the Hardingham, sitting up, as she always did, rather stiffly in
her electric brougham, regarding the glittering world with
interested and ironically innocent blue eyes from under the brim
of a hat that defied comment. "No one," I thought, "would sit so
apart if she hadn't dreams--and what are her dreams?"
I'd never thought.
And I remember, too, an outburst of scornful description after
she had lunched with a party of women at the Imperial Cosmic
Club. She came round to my rooms on the chance of finding me
there, and I gave her tea. She professed herself tired and
cross, and flung herself into my chair....
"George," she cried, " the Things women are! Do _I_ stink of
money?"
"Lunching?" I asked.
She nodded.
"Plutocratic ladies?"
"Yes."
"Oriental type?"
"Oh! Like a burst hareem!... Bragging of possessions.... They
feel you. They feel your clothes, George, to see if they are
good!"
I soothed her as well as I could. "They ARE Good aren't they?"
I said.
"It's the old pawnshop in their blood," she said, drinking tea;
and then in infinite disgust, "They run their hands over your
clothes--they paw you."
I had a moment of doubt whether perhaps she had not been
discovered in possession of unsuspected forgeries. I don't
know. After that my eyes were quickened, and I began to see for
myself women running their hands over other women's furs,
scrutinising their lace, even demanding to handle jewelry,
appraising, envying, testing. They have a kind of etiquette.
The woman who feels says, "What beautiful sables?" "What lovely
lace?" The woman felt admits proudly: "It's Real, you know," or
disavows pretension modestly and hastily, "It's Rot Good." In
each other's houses they peer at the pictures, handle the selvage
of hangings, look at the bottoms of china....
I wonder if it IS the old pawnshop in the blood.
I doubt if Lady Drew and the Olympians did that sort of thing,
but here I may be only clinging to another of my former
illusions about aristocracy and the State. Perhaps always
possessions have been Booty, and never anywhere has there been
such a thing as house and furnishings native and natural to the
women and men who made use of them....
VI
For me, at least, it marked an epoch in my uncle's career when I
learnt one day that he had "shopped" Lady Grove. I realised a
fresh, wide, unpreluded step. He took me by surprise with the
sudden change of scale from such portable possessions as jewels
and motor-cars to a stretch of countryside. The transaction was
Napoleonic; he was told of the place; he said "snap"; there were
no preliminary desirings or searchings. Then he came home and
said what he had done. Even my aunt was for a day or so
measurably awestricken by this exploit in purchase, and we both
went down with him to see the house in a mood near consternation.
It struck us then as a very lordly place indeed. I remember the
three of us standing on the terrace that looked westward,
surveying the sky-reflecting windows of the house, and a feeling
of unwarrantable intrusion comes back to me.
Lady Grove, you know, is a very beautiful house indeed, a still
and gracious place, whose age-long seclusion was only
effectively broken with the toot of the coming of the motor-car.
An old Catholic family had died out in it, century by century,
and was now altogether dead. Portions of the fabric are
thirteenth century, and its last architectural revision was
Tudor; within, it is for the most part dark and chilly, save for
two or three favoured rooms and its tall-windowed, oak-galleried
hall. Its terrace is its noblest feature; a very wide, broad
lawn it is, bordered by a low stone battlement, and there is a
great cedar in one corner under whose level branches one looks
out across the blue distances of the Weald, blue distances that
are made extraordinarily Italian in quality by virtue of the
dark masses of that single tree. It is a very high terrace;
southward one looks down upon the tops of wayfaring trees and
spruces, and westward on a steep slope of beechwood, through
which the road comes. One turns back to the still old house, and
sees a grey and lichenous facade with a very finely arched
entrance. It was warmed by the afternoon light and touched with
the colour of a few neglected roses and a pyracanthus. It seemed
to me that the most modern owner conceivable in this serene fine
place was some bearded scholarly man in a black cassock,
gentle-voiced and white-handed, or some very soft-robed, grey
gentlewoman. And there was my uncle holding his goggles in a
sealskin glove, wiping the glass with a pocket-handkerchief, and
asking my aunt if Lady Grove wasn't a "Bit of all Right."
My aunt made him no answer.
"The man who built this," I speculated, "wore armour and carried
a sword."
"There's some of it inside still," said my uncle.
We went inside. An old woman with very white hair was in charge
of the place and cringed rather obviously to the new master. She
evidently found him a very strange and frightful apparition
indeed, and was dreadfully afraid of him. But if the surviving
present bowed down to us, the past did not. We stood up to the
dark, long portraits of the extinguished race--one was a
Holbein--and looked them in their sidelong eyes. They looked
back at us. We all, I know, felt the enigmatical quality in
them. Even my uncle was momentarily embarrassed, I think, by
that invincibly self-complacent expression. It was just as
though, after all, he had not bought them up and replaced them
altogether; as though that, secretly, they knew better and could
smile at him.
The spirit of the place was akin to Bladesover, but touched with
something older and remoter. That armour that stood about had
once served in tilt-yards, if indeed it had not served in
battle, and this family had sent its blood and treasure, time
after time, upon the most romantic quest in history, to
Palestine. Dreams, loyalties, place and honour, how utterly had
it all evaporated, leaving, at last, the final expression of its
spirit, these quaint painted smiles, these smiles of triumphant
completion! It had evaporated, indeed, long before the ultimate
Durgan had died, and in his old age he had cumbered the place
with Early Victorian cushions and carpets and tapestry
table-cloths and invalid appliances of a type even more extinct,
it seemed to us, than the crusades.... Yes, it was different
from Bladesover.
"Bit stuffy, George," said my uncle. "They hadn't much idea of
ventilation when this was built."
One of the panelled rooms was half-filled with presses and a
four-poster bed. "Might be the ghost room," said my uncle; but
it did not seem to me that so retiring a family as the Durgans,
so old and completely exhausted a family as the Durgans, was
likely to haunt anybody. What living thing now had any concern
with their honour and judgments and good and evil deeds? Ghosts
and witchcraft were a later innovation--that fashion came from
Scotland with the Stuarts.
Afterwards, prying for epitaphs, we found a marble crusader with
a broken nose, under a battered canopy of fretted stone, outside
the restricted limits of the present Duffield church, and half
buried in nettles. "Ichabod," said my uncle. "Eh? We shall be
like that, Susan, some day.... I'm going to clean him up a bit
and put a railing to keep off the children."
"Old saved at the eleventh hour," said my aunt, quoting one of
the less successful advertisements of Tono-Bungay.
But I don't think my uncle heard her.
It was by our captured crusader that the vicar found us. He came
round the corner at us briskly, a little out of breath. He had
an air of having been running after us since the first toot of
our horn had warned the village of our presence. He was an
Oxford man, clean-shaven, with a cadaverous complexion and a
guardedly respectful manner, a cultivated intonation, and a
general air of accommodation to the new order of things. These
Oxford men are the Greeks of our plutocratic empire. He was a
Tory in spirit, and what one may call an adapted Tory by stress
of circumstances; that is to say, he was no longer a legitimist;
he was prepared for the substitution of new lords for old. We
were pill vendors he knew, and no doubt horribly vulgar in soul;
but then it might have been some polygamous Indian rajah, a
great strain on a good man's tact, or some Jew with an inherited
expression of contempt. Anyhow, we were English, and neither
Dissenters nor Socialists, and he was cheerfully prepared to do
what he could to make gentlemen of both of us. He might have
preferred Americans for some reasons; they are not so obviously
taken from one part of the social system and dumped down in
another, and they are more teachable; but in this world we cannot
always be choosers. So he was very bright and pleasant with us,
showed us the church, gossiped informingly about our neighbours
on the countryside--Tux, the banker; Lord Boom, the magazine and
newspaper proprietor; Lord Carnaby, that great sportsman, and old
Lady Osprey. And finally he took us by way of a village
lane--three children bobbed convulsively with eyes of terror for
my uncle--through a meticulous garden to a big, slovenly Vicarage
with faded Victorian furniture and a faded Victorian wife, who
gave us tea and introduced us to a confusing family dispersed
among a lot of disintegrating basket chairs upon the edge of a
well-used tennis lawn.
These people interested me. They were a common type, no doubt,
but they were new to me. There were two lank sons who had been
playing singles at tennis, red-eared youths growing black
moustaches, and dressed in conscientiously untidy tweeds and
unbuttoned and ungirt Norfolk jackets. There were a number of
ill-nourished-looking daughters, sensible and economical in their
costume, the younger still with long, brown-stockinged legs, and
the eldest present--there were, we discovered, one or two hidden
away--displaying a large gold cross and other aggressive
ecclesiastical symbols; there were two or three fox-terriers, a
retrieverish mongrel, and an old, bloody-eyed and very
evil-smelling St. Bernard. There was a jackdaw. There was,
moreover, an ambiguous, silent lady that my aunt subsequently
decided must be a very deaf paying guest. Two or three other
people had concealed themselves at our coming and left unfinished
teas behind them. Rugs and cushions lay among the chairs, and
two of the latter were, I noted, covered with Union Jacks.
The vicar introduced us sketchily, and the faded Victorian wife
regarded my aunt with a mixture of conventional scorn and abject
respect, and talked to her in a languid, persistent voice about
people in the neighbourhood whom my aunt could not possibly know.
My aunt received these personalia cheerfully, with her blue eyes
flitting from point to point, and coming back again and again to
the pinched faces of the daughters and the cross upon the
eldest's breast. Encouraged by my aunt's manner, the vicar's
wife grew patronising and kindly, and made it evident that she
could do much to bridge the social gulf between ourselves and the
people of family about us.
I had just snatches of that conversation. "Mrs. Merridew brought
him quite a lot of money. Her father, I believe, had been in the
Spanish wine trade--quite a lady though. And after that he fell
off his horse and cracked his brain pan and took to fishing and
farming. I'm sure you'll like to know them. He's most
amusing.... The daughter had a disappointment and went to China
as a missionary and got mixed up in a massacre."...
"The most beautiful silks and things she brought back, you'd
hardly believe!"
"Yes, they gave them to propitiate her. You see, they didn't
understand the difference, and they thought that as they'd been
massacring people, THEY'D be massacred. They didn't understand
the difference Christianity makes."...
"Seven bishops they've had in the family!"
"Married a Papist and was quite lost to them."...
"He failed some dreadful examination and had to go into the
militia."...
"So she bit his leg as hard as ever she could and he let go."...
"Had four of his ribs amputated."...
"Caught meningitis and was carried off in a week."
"Had to have a large piece of silver tube let into his throat,
and if he wants to talk he puts his finger on it. It makes him
so interesting, I think. You feel he's sincere somehow. A most
charming man in every way."
"Preserved them both in spirits very luckily, and there they are
in his study, though of course he doesn't show them to
everybody."
The silent lady, unperturbed by these apparently exciting
topics, scrutinised my aunt's costume with a singular intensity,
and was visibly moved when she unbuttoned her dust cloak and
flung it wide. Meanwhile we men conversed, one of the more
spirited daughters listened brightly, and the youths lay on the
grass at our feet. My uncle offered them cigars, but they both
declined,--out of bashfulness, it seemed to me, whereas the
vicar, I think, accepted out of tact. When we were not looking
at them directly, these young men would kick each other
furtively.
Under the influence of my uncle's cigar, the vicar's mind had
soared beyond the limits of the district. "This Socialism," he
said, "seems making great headway."
My uncle shook his head. "We're too individualistic in this
country for that sort of nonsense," he said "Everybody's business
is nobody's business. That's where they go wrong."
"They have some intelligent people in their ranks, I am told,"
said the vicar, "writers and so forth. Quite a distinguished
playwright, my eldest daughter was telling me--I forget his name.
Milly, dear! Oh! she's not here. Painters, too, they have.
This Socialist, it seems to me, is part of the Unrest of the
Age.... But, as you say, the spirit of the people is against it.
In the country, at any rate. The people down here are too
sturdily independent in their small way--and too sensible
altogether."...
"It's a great thing for Duffield to have Lady Grove occupied
again," he was saying when my wandering attention came back from
some attractive casualty in his wife's discourse. "People have
always looked up to the house and considering all things, old Mr.
Durgan really was extraordinarily good--extraordinarily good.
You intend to give us a good deal of your time here, I hope."
"I mean to do my duty by the Parish," said my uncle.
"I'm sincerely glad to hear it--sincerely. We've missed--the
house influence. An English village isn't complete--People get
out of hand. Life grows dull. The young people drift away to
London."
He enjoyed his cigar gingerly for a moment.
"We shall look to you to liven things up," he said, poor man!
My uncle cocked his cigar and removed it from his mouth.
"What you think the place wants?" he asked.
He did not wait for an answer. "I been thinking while you been
talking--things one might do. Cricket--a good English
game--sports. Build the chaps a pavilion perhaps. Then every
village ought to have a miniature rifle range."
"Ye-ees," said the vicar. "Provided, of course, there isn't a
constant popping."...
"Manage that all right," said my uncle. "Thing'd be a sort of
long shed. Paint it red. British colour. Then there's a Union
Jack for the church and the village school. Paint the school
red, too, p'raps. Not enough colour about now. Too grey. Then
a maypole."
"How far our people would take up that sort of thing--" began the
vicar.
"I'm all for getting that good old English spirit back again,"
said my uncle. "Merrymakings. Lads and lasses dancing on the
village green. Harvest home. Fairings. Yule Log--all the rest
of it."
"How would old Sally Glue do for a May Queen?" asked one of the
sons in the slight pause that followed.
"Or Annie Glassbound?" said the other, with the huge virile
guffaw of a young man whose voice has only recently broken.
"Sally Glue is eighty-five," explained the vicar, "and Annie
Glassbound is well--a young lady of extremely generous
proportions. And not quite right, you know. Not quite
right--here." He tapped his brow.
"Generous proportions!" said the eldest son, and the guffaws were
renewed.
"You see," said the vicar, "all the brisker girls go into service
in or near London. The life of excitement attracts them. And no
doubt the higher wages have something to do with it. And the
liberty to wear finery. And generally--freedom from restraint.
So that there might be a little diffculty perhaps to find a May
Queen here just at present who was really young and er--
pretty.... Of course I couldn't think of any of my girls--or
anything of that sort."
"We got to attract 'em back," said my uncle. "That's what I feel
about it. We got to Buck-Up the country. The English country is
a going concern still; just as the Established Church--if you'll
excuse me saying it, is a going concern. Just as Oxford is--or
Cambridge. Or any of those old, fine old things. Only it wants
fresh capital, fresh idees and fresh methods. Light railways,
f'rinstance--scientific use of drainage. Wire fencing
machinery--all that."
The vicar's face for one moment betrayed dismay. Perhaps he was
thinking of his country walks amids the hawthorns and
honeysuckle.
"There's great things," said my uncle, "to be done on Mod'un
lines with Village Jam and Pickles--boiled in the country."
It was the reverberation of this last sentence in my mind, I
think, that sharpened my sentimental sympathy as we went through
the straggling village street and across the trim green on our
way back to London. It seemed that afternoon the most tranquil
and idyllic collection of creeper-sheltered homes you can
imagine; thatch still lingered on a whitewashed cottage or two,
pyracanthus, wall-flowers, and daffodils abounded, and an
unsystematic orchard or so was white with blossom above and gay
with bulbs below. I noted a row of straw beehives,
beehive-shaped, beehives of the type long since condemned as
inefficient by all progressive minds, and in the doctor's acre of
grass a flock of two whole sheep was grazing,--no doubt he'd
taken them on account. Two men and one old woman made gestures
of abject vassalage, and my uncle replied with a lordly gesture
of his great motoring glove....
"England's full of Bits like this," said my uncle, leaning over
the front seat and looking back with great satisfaction. The
black glare of his goggles rested for a time on the receding
turrets of Lady Grove just peeping over the trees.
"I shall have a flagstaff, I think," he considered. "Then one
could show when one is in residence. The villagers will like to
know."...
I reflected. "They will" I said. "They're used to liking to
know."...
My aunt had been unusually silent. Suddenly she spoke. "He says
Snap," she remarked; "he buys that place. And a nice old job of
Housekeeping he gives me! He sails through the village swelling
like an old turkey. And who'll have to scoot the butler? Me!
Who's got to forget all she ever knew and start again? Me!
Who's got to trek from Chiselhurst and be a great lady? Me! ...
You old Bother! Just when I was settling down and beginning to
feel at home."
My uncle turned his goggles to her. "Ah! THIS time it is home,
Susan.... We got there."
VII
It seems to me now but a step from the buying of Lady Grove to
the beginning of Crest Hill, from the days when the former was a
stupendous achievement to the days when it was too small and dark
and inconvenient altogether for a great financier's use. For me
that was a period of increasing detachment from our business and
the great world of London; I saw it more and more in broken
glimpses, and sometimes I was working in my little pavilion above
Lady Grove for a fortnight together; even when I came up it was
often solely for a meeting of the aeronautical society or for one
of the learned societies or to consult literature or employ
searchers or some such special business. For my uncle it was a
period of stupendous inflation. Each time I met him I found him
more confident, more comprehensive, more consciously a factor in
great affairs. Soon he was no longer an associate of merely
business men; he was big enough for the attentions of greater
powers.
I grew used to discovering some item of personal news about him
in my evening paper, or to the sight of a full-page portrait of
him in a sixpenny magazine. Usually the news was of some
munificent act, some romantic piece of buying or giving or some
fresh rumour of reconstruction. He saved, you will remember, the
Parbury Reynolds for the country. Or at times, it would be an
interview or my uncle's contribution to some symposium on the
"Secret of Success," or such-like topic. Or wonderful tales of
his power of work, of his wonderful organisation to get things
done, of his instant decisions and remarkable power of judging
his fellow-men. They repeated his great mot: "Eight hour
working day--I want eighty hours!"
He became modestly but resolutely "public." They cartooned him
in Vanity Fair. One year my aunt, looking indeed a very
gracious, slender lady, faced the portrait of the King in the
great room at Burlington House, and the next year saw a medallion
of my uncle by Ewart, looking out upon the world, proud and
imperial, but on the whole a trifle too prominently convex, from
the walls of the New Gallery.
I shared only intermittently in his social experiences. People
knew of me, it is true, and many of them sought to make through
me a sort of flank attack upon him, and there was a legend,
owing, very unreasonably, partly to my growing scientific
reputation and partly to an element of reserve in my manner, that
I played a much larger share in planning his operations than was
actually the case. This led to one or two very intimate private
dinners, to my inclusion in one or two house parties and various
odd offers of introductions and services that I didn't for the
most part accept. Among other people who sought me in this way
was Archie Garvell, now a smart, impecunious soldier of no
particular distinction, who would, I think, have been quite
prepared to develop any sporting instincts I possessed, and who
was beautifully unaware of our former contact. He was always
offering me winners; no doubt in a spirit of anticipatory
exchange for some really good thing in our more scientific and
certain method of getting something for nothing....
In spite of my preoccupation with my experiments, work, I did, I
find now that I come to ransack my impressions, see a great deal
of the great world during those eventful years; I had a near view
of the machinery by which an astounding Empire is run, rubbed
shoulders and exchanged experiences with bishops and statesmen,
political women and women who were not political, physicians and
soldiers, artists and authors, the directors of great journals,
philanthropists and all sorts of eminent, significant people. I
saw the statesmen without their orders and the bishops with but a
little purple silk left over from their canonicals, inhaling, not
incensen but cigar smoke. I could look at them all the better
because, for the most part, they were not looking at me but at my
uncle, and calculating consciously or unconsciously how they
might use him and assimilate him to their system, the most
unpremeditated, subtle, successful and aimless plutocracy that
ever encumbered the destinies of mankind. Not one of them, so
far as I could see, until disaster overtook him, resented his
lies, his almost naked dishonesty of method, the disorderly
disturbance of this trade and that, caused by his spasmodic
operations. I can see them now about him, see them polite,
watchful, various; his stiff compact little figure always a
centre of attention, his wiry hair, his brief nose, his
under-lip, electric with self-confidence. Wandering marginally
through distinguished gatherings, I would catch the
whispers: "That's Mr. Ponderevo!"
"The little man?"
"Yes, the little bounder with the glasses."
"They say he's made--"...
Or I would see him on some parterre of a platform beside my
aunt's hurraying hat, amidst titles and costumes, "holding his
end up," as he would say, subscribing heavily to obvious
charities, even at times making brief convulsive speeches in some
good cause before the most exalted audiences. "Mr. Chairman,
your Royal Highness, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen,"`he would
begin amidst subsiding applause and adjust those obstinate
glasses and thrust back the wings of his frock-coat and rest his
hands upon his hips and speak his fragment with ever and again an
incidental Zzzz. His hands would fret about him as he spoke,
fiddle his glasses, feel in his waistcoat pockets; ever and again
he would rise slowly to his toes as a sentence unwound jerkily
like a clockwork snake, and drop back on his heels at the end.
They were the very gestures of our first encounter when he had
stood before the empty fireplace in his minute draped parlour and
talked of my future to my mother.
In those measurelessly long hot afternoons in the little shop at
Wimblehurst he had talked and dreamt of the Romance of Modern
Commerce. Here, surely, was his romance come true.
VIII
People say that my uncle lost his head at the crest of his
fortunes, but if one may tell so much truth of a man one has in a
manner loved, he never had very much head to lose. He was always
imaginative, erratic, inconsistent, recklessly inexact, and his
inundation of wealth merely gave him scope for these qualities.
It is true, indeed, that towards the climax he became intensely
irritable at times and impatient of contradiction, but that, I
think, was rather the gnawing uneasiness of sanity than any
mental disturbance. But I find it hard either to judge him or
convey the full development of him to the reader. I saw too much
of him; my memory is choked with disarranged moods and aspects.
Now he is distended with megalomania, now he is deflated, now he
is quarrelsome, now impenetrably self-satisfied, but always he
is sudden, jerky, fragmentary, energetic, and--in some subtle
fundamental way that I find difficult to define--absurd.
There stands out--because of the tranquil beauty of its setting
perhaps--a talk we had in the veranda of the little pavilion near
my worksheds behind Crest Hill in which my aeroplanes and
navigable balloons were housed. It was one of many similar
conversations, and I do not know why it in particular should
survive its fellows. It happens so. He had come up to me after
his coffee to consult me about a certain chalice which in a
moment of splendour and under the importunity of a countess he
had determined to give to a deserving church in the east-end.
I, in a moment of even rasher generosity, had suggested Ewart as
a possible artist. Ewart had produced at once an admirable sketch
for the sacred vessel surrounded by a sort of wreath of Millies
with open arms and wings and had drawn fifty pounds on the
strength of it. After that came a series of vexatious delays.
The chalice became less and less of a commercial man's chalice,
acquired more and more the elusive quality of the Holy Grail, and
at last even the drawing receded.
My uncle grew restive...."You see, George, they'll begin to want
the blasted thing!"
"What blasted thing?"
"That chalice, damn it! They're beginning to ask questions. It
isn't Business, George."
"It's art," I protested, "and religion."
"That's all very well. But it's not a good ad for us, George, to
make a promise and not deliver the goods.... I'll have to write
off your friend Ewart as a bad debt, that's what it comes to, and
go to a decent firm."...
We sat outside on deck chairs in the veranda of the pavilion,
smoked, drank whisky, and, the chalice disposed of, meditated.
His temporary annoyance passed. It was an altogether splendid
summer night, following a blazing, indolent day. Full moonlight
brought out dimly the lines of the receding hills, one wave
beyond another; far beyond were the pin-point lights of
Leatherhead, and in the foreground the little stage from which I
used to start upon my gliders gleamed like wet steel. The season
must have been high June, for down in the woods that hid the
lights of the Lady Grove windows, I remember the nightingales
thrilled and gurgled....
"We got here, George," said my uncle, ending a long pause.
"Didn't I say?"
"Say!--when?" I asked.
"In that hole in the To'nem Court Road, eh? It's been a Straight
Square Fight, and here we are!"
I nodded.
"'Member me telling you--Tono-Bungay?.... Well.... I'd just that
afternoon thought of it!"
"I've fancied at times;" I admitted.
"It's a great world, George, nowadays, with a fair chance for
every one who lays hold of things. The career ouvert to the
Talons--eh? Tono-Bungay. Think of it! It's a great world and a
growing world, and I'm glad we're in it--and getting a pull.
We're getting big people, George. Things come to us. Eh? This
Palestine thing."...
He meditated for a time and Zzzzed softly. Then he became still.
His theme was taken up by a cricket in the grass until he himself
was ready to resume it. The cricket too seemed to fancy that in
some scheme of its own it had got there. "Chirrrrrrup" it said;
"chirrrrrrup."
"Lord, what a place that was at Wimblehurst!" he broke out. "If
ever I get a day off we'll motor there, George, and run over that
dog that sleeps in the High Street. Always was a dog asleep
there--always. Always... I'd like to see the old shop again. I
daresay old Ruck still stands between the sheep at his door,
grinning with all his teeth, and Marbel, silly beggar! comes out
with his white apron on and a pencil stuck behind his ear,
trying to look awake... Wonder if they know it's me? I'd like
'em somehow to know it's me."
"They'll have had the International Tea Company and all sorts of
people cutting them up," I said. "And that dog's been on the
pavement this six years--can't sleep even there, poor dear,
because of the motor-horns and its shattered nerves."
"Movin' everywhere," said my uncle. "I expect you're right....
It's a big time we're in, George. It's a big Progressive
On-coming Imperial Time. This Palestine business--the daring of
it.... It's, it's a Process, George. And we got our hands on
it. Here we sit--with our hands on it, George. Entrusted.
"It seems quiet to--night. But if we could see and hear." He
waved his cigar towards Leatherhead and London.
"There they are, millions, George. Jes' think of what they've
been up to to-day--those ten millions--each one doing his own
particular job. You can't grasp it. It's like old Whitman
says--what is it he says? Well, anyway it's like old Whitman.
Fine chap, Whitman! Fine old chap! Queer, you can't quote him.
... And these millions aren't anything. There's the millions
over seas, hundreds of millions, Chinese, M'rocco, Africa
generally, 'Merica.... Well, here we are, with power, with
leisure, picked out--because we've been energetic, because we've
seized opportunities, because we've made things hum when other
people have waited for them to hum. See? Here we are--with our
hands on it. Big people. Big growing people. In a sort of
way,--Forces."
He paused. "It's wonderful, George," he said.
"Anglo-Saxon energy," I said softly to the night.
"That's it, George--energy. It's put things in our
grip--threads, wires, stretching out and out, George, from that
little office of ours, out to West Africa, out to Egypt, out to
Inja, out east, west, north and south. Running the world
practically. Running it faster and faster. Creative. There's
that Palestine canal affair. Marvellous idee! Suppose we take
that up, suppose we let ourselves in for it, us and the others,
and run that water sluice from the Mediterranean into the Dead
Sea Valley--think of the difference it will make! All the desert
blooming like a rose, Jericho lost for ever, all the Holy Places
under water.... Very likely destroy Christianity."...
He mused for a space. "Cuttin' canals," murmured my uncle.
"Making tunnels.... New countries.... New centres.... Zzzz....
Finance.... Not only Palestine.
"I wonder where we shall get before we done, George? We got a
lot of big things going. We got the investing public sound and
sure. I don't see why in the end we shouldn't be very big.
There's diffculties but I'm equal to them. We're still a bit
soft in our bones, but they'll harden all right.... I suppose,
after all, I'm worth something like a million, George, cleared up
and settled. If I got out of things now. It's a great time,
George, a wonderful time!"...
I glanced through the twilight at his convexity and I must
confess it struck me that on the whole he wasn't particularly
good value.
"We got our hands on things, George, us big people. We got to
hang together, George run the show. Join up with the old order
like that mill-wheel of Kipling's. (Finest thing he ever wrote,
George; I jes' been reading it again. Made me buy Lady Grove.)
Well, we got to run the country, George. It's ours. Make it a
Scientific Organised Business Enterprise. Put idees into it.
'Lectrify it. Run the Press. Run all sorts of developments.
All sorts of developments. I been talking to Lord Boom. I been
talking to all sorts of people. Great things. Progress. The
world on business lines. Only jes' beginning."...
He fell into a deep meditation.
He Zzzzed for a time and ceased.
"YES," he said at last in the tone of a man who has at last
emerged with ultimate solutions to the profoundest problems.
"What?" I said after a seemly pause.
My uncle hung fire for a moment and it seemed to me the fate of
nations trembled in the balance. Then he spoke as one who speaks
from the very bottom of his heart--and I think it was the very
bottom of his heart.
"I'd jes' like to drop into the Eastry Arms, jes' when all those
beggars in the parlour are sittin' down to whist, Ruck and Marbel
and all, and give 'em ten minutes of my mind, George. Straight
from the shoulder. Jes' exactly what I think of them. It's a
little thing, but I'd like to do it jes' once before I die."...
He rested on that for some time Zzzz-ing.
Then he broke out at a new place in a tone of detached criticism.
"There's Boom," he reflected.
"It's a wonderful system this old British system, George. It's
staid and stable and yet it has a place for new men. We come up
and take our places. It's almost expected. We take a hand.
That's where our Democracy differs from America. Over there a
man succeeds; all he gets is money. Here there's a system open
to every one--practically.... Chaps like Boom--come from
nowhere."
His voice ceased. I reflected upon the spirit of his words.
Suddenly I kicked my feet in the air, rolled on my side and sat
up suddenly on my deck chair with my legs down.
"You don't mean it!" I said.
"Mean what, George?"
"Subscription to the party funds. Reciprocal advantage. Have
we got to that?"
"Whad you driving at, George?"
"You know. They'd never do it, man!"
"Do what?" he said feebly; and, "Why shouldn't they?"
"They'd not even go to a baronetcy. NO!.... And yet, of course,
there's Boom! And Collingshead and Gorver. They've done beer,
they've done snippets! After all Tono-Bungay--it's not like a
turf commission agent or anything like that!... There have of
course been some very gentlemanly commission agents. It isn't
like a fool of a scientific man who can't make money!"
My uncle grunted; we'd differed on that issue before.
A malignant humour took possession of me. "What would they call
you?" I speculated. "The vicar would like Duffield. Too much
like Duffer! Difficult thing, a title." I ran my mind over
various possibilities. "Why not take a leaf from a socialist
tract I came upon yesterday. Chap says we're all getting
delocalised. Beautiful word--delocalised! Why not be the first
delocalised peer? That gives you--Tono-Bungay! There is a Bungay,
you know. Lord Tono of Bungay--in bottles everywhere. Eh?"
My uncle astonished me by losing his temper.
"Damn it. George, you don't seem to see I'm serious! You're
always sneering at Tono-Bungay! As though it was some sort of
swindle. It was perfec'ly legitimate trade, perfec'ly
legitimate. Good value and a good article.... When I come up
here and tell you plans and exchange idees--you sneer at me. You
do. You don't see--it's a big thing. It's a big thing. You got
to get used to new circumstances. You got to face what lies
before us. You got to drop that tone."
IX
My uncle was not altogether swallowed up in business and
ambition. He kept in touch with modern thought. For example, he
was, I know, greatly swayed by what he called "This Overman idee,
Nietzsche--all that stuff."
He mingled those comforting suggestions of a potent and
exceptional human being emancipated from the pettier limitations
of integrity with the Napoleonic legend. It gave his imagination
a considerable outlet. That Napoleonic legend! The real
mischief of Napoleon's immensely disastrous and accidental career
began only when he was dead and the romantic type of mind was
free to elaborate his character. I do believe that my uncle
would have made a far less egregious smash if there had been no
Napoleonic legend to misguide him. He was in many ways better
and infinitely kinder than his career. But when in doubt between
decent conduct and a base advantage, that cult came in more and
more influentially: "think of Napoleon; think what the
inflexibly-wilful Napoleon would have done with such scruples as
yours;" that was the rule, and the end was invariably a new step
in dishonour.
My uncle was in an unsystematic way a collector of Napoleonic
relics; the bigger the book about his hero the more readily he
bought it; he purchased letters and tinsel and weapons that bore
however remotely upon the Man of Destiny, and he even secured in
Geneva, though he never brought home, an old coach in which
Buonaparte might have ridden; he crowded the quiet walls of Lady
Grove with engravings and figures of him, preferring, my aunt
remarked, the more convex portraits with the white vest and those
statuettes with the hands behind the back which threw forward the
figure. The Durgans watched him through it all, sardonically.
And he would stand after breakfast at times in the light of the
window at Lady Grove, a little apart, with two fingers of one
hand stuck between his waistcoat-buttons and his chin sunken,
thinking,--the most preposterous little fat man in the world.
It made my aunt feel, she said, "like an old Field
Marshal--knocks me into a cocked hat, George!"
Perhaps this Napoleonic bias made him a little less frequent with
his cigars than he would otherwise have been, but of that I
cannot be sure, and it certainly caused my aunt a considerable
amount of vexation after he had read Napoleon and the Fair Sex,
because for a time that roused him to a sense of a side of life
he had in his commercial preoccupations very largely forgotten.
Suggestion plays so great a part in this field. My uncle took
the next opportunity and had an "affair"!
It was not a very impassioned affair, and the exact particulars
never of course reached me. It is quite by chance I know
anything of it at all. One evening I was surprised to come upon
my uncle in a mixture of Bohemia and smart people at an At Home
in the flat of Robbert, the R.A. who painted my aunt, and he was
standing a little apart in a recess, talking or rather being
talked to in undertones by a plump, blond little woman in pale
blue, a Helen Scrymgeour who wrote novels and was organising a
weekly magazine. I elbowed a large lady who was saying
something about them, but I didn't need to hear the thing she
said to perceive the relationship of the two. It hit me like a
placard on a hoarding. I was amazed the whole gathering did not
see it. Perhaps they did. She was wearing a remarkably fine
diamond necklace, much too fine for journalism, and regarding him
with that quality of questionable proprietorship, of leashed but
straining intimacy, that seems inseparable from this sort of
affair. It is so much more palpable than matrimony. If anything
was wanted to complete my conviction it was my uncles's eyes when
presently he became aware of mine, a certain embarrassment and a
certain pride and defiance. And the next day he made an
opportunity to praise the lady's intelligence to me concisely,
lest I should miss the point of it all.
After that I heard some gossip--from a friend of the lady's. I
was much too curious to do anything but listen. I had never in
all my life imagined my uncle in an amorous attitude. It would
appear that she called him her "God in the Car"--after the hero
in a novel of Anthony Hope's. It was essential to the
convention of their relations that he should go relentlessly
whenever business called, and it was generally arranged that it
did call. To him women were an incident, it was understood
between them; Ambition was the master-passion. A great world
called him and the noble hunger for Power. I have never been
able to discover just how honest Mrs. Scrymgeour was in all this,
but it is quite possible the immense glamour of his financial
largeness prevailed with her and that she did bring a really
romantic feeling to their encounters. There must have been some
extraordinary moments....
I was a good deal exercised and distressed about my aunt when I
realised what was afoot. I thought it would prove a terrible
humiliation to her. I suspected her of keeping up a brave front
with the loss of my uncle's affections fretting at her heart, but
there I simply underestimated her. She didn't hear for some time
and when she did hear she was extremely angry and energetic. The
sentimental situation didn't trouble her for a moment. She
decided that my uncle "wanted smacking." She accentuated herself
with an unexpected new hat, went and gave him an inconceivable
talking-to at the Hardingham, and then came round to "blow-up"
me for not telling her what was going on before....
I tried to bring her to a proper sense of the accepted values in
this affair, but my aunt's originality of outlook was never so
invincible. "Men don't tell on one another in affairs of
passion," I protested, and such-like worldly excuses.
"Women!" she said in high indignation, "and men! It isn't women
and men--it's him and me, George! Why don't you talk sense?
"Old passion's all very well, George, in its way, and I'm the
last person to be jealous. But this is old nonsense.... I'm not
going to let him show off what a silly old lobster he is to other
women.... I'll mark every scrap of his underclothes with red
letters, 'Ponderevo-Private'--every scrap.
"Going about making love indeed,--in abdominal belts!--at his
time of life!"
I cannot imagine what passed between her and my uncle. But I
have no doubt that for once her customary badinage was laid
aside. How they talked then I do not know, for I who knew them
so well had never heard that much of intimacy between them. At
any rate it was a concerned and preoccupied "God in the Car" I
had to deal with in the next few days, unusually Zzzz-y and given
to slight impatient gestures that had nothing to do with the
current conversation. And it was evident that in all directions
he was finding things unusually difficult to explain.
All the intimate moments in this affair were hidden from me, but
in the end my aunt triumphed. He did not so much throw as jerk
over Mrs. Scrymgeour, and she did not so much make a novel of it
as upset a huge pailful of attenuated and adulterated female soul
upon this occasion. My aunt did not appear in that, even
remotely. So that it is doubtful if the lady knew the real
causes of her abandonment. The Napoleonic hero was practically
unmarried, and he threw over his lady as Napoleon threw over
Josephine for a great alliance.
It was a triumph for my aunt, but it had its price. For some
time it was evident things were strained between them. He gave
up the lady, but he resented having to do so, deeply. She had
meant more to his imagination than one could have supposed. He
wouldn't for a long time "come round." He became touchy and
impatient and secretive towards my aunt, and she, I noted, after
an amazing check or so, stopped that stream of kindly abuse that
had flowed for so long and had been so great a refreshment in
their lives. They were both the poorer for its cessation, both
less happy. She devoted herself more and more to Lady Grove and
the humours and complications of its management. The servants
took to her--as they say--she god-mothered three Susans during
her rule, the coachman's, the gardener's, and the Up Hill
gamekeeper's. She got together a library of old household books
that were in the vein of the place. She revived the still-room,
and became a great artist in jellies and elder and cowslip wine.
X
And while I neglected the development of my uncle's finances--and
my own, in my scientific work and my absorbing conflict with the
difficulties of flying,--his schemes grew more and more expansive
and hazardous, and his spending wilder and laxer. I believe that
a haunting sense of the intensifying unsoundness of his position
accounts largely for his increasing irritability and his
increasing secretiveness with my aunt and myself during these
crowning years. He dreaded, I think, having to explain, he
feared our jests might pierce unwittingly to the truth. Even in
the privacy of his mind he would not face the truth. He was
accumulating unrealisable securities in his safes until they hung
a potential avalanche over the economic world. But his buying
became a fever, and his restless desire to keep it up with
himself that he was making a triumphant progress to limitless
wealth gnawed deeper and deeper. A curious feature of this time
with him was his buying over and over again of similar things.
His ideas seemed to run in series. Within a twelve-month he
bought five new motor-cars, each more swift and powerful than its
predecessor, and only the repeated prompt resignation of his
chief chauffeur at each moment of danger, prevented his driving
them himself. He used them more and more. He developed a
passion for locomotion for its own sake.
Then he began to chafe at Lady Grove, fretted by a chance jest he
had overheard at a dinner. "This house, George," he said. "It's
a misfit. There's no elbow-room in it; it's choked with old
memories. And I can't stand all these damned Durgans!
"That chap in the corner, George. No! the other corner! The man
in a cherry-coloured coat. He watched you! He'd look silly if I
stuck a poker through his Gizzard!"
"He'd look," I reflected, "much as he does now. As though he was
amused."
He replaced his glasses, which had fallen at his emotion, and
glared at his antagonists. "What are they? What are they all,
the lot of 'em? Dead as Mutton! They just stuck in the mud.
They didn't even rise to the Reformation. The old out-of-date
Reformation! Move with the times!--they moved against the times.
Just a Family of Failure,--they never even tried!
"They're jes', George, exactly what I'm not. Exactly. It isn't
suitable.... All this living in the Past.
"And I want a bigger place too, George. I want air and sunlight
and room to move about and more service. A house where you can
get a Move on things! Zzzz. Why! it's like a discord--it
jars--even to have the telephone.... There's nothing, nothing
except the terrace, that's worth a Rap. It's all dark and old
and dried up and full of old-fashioned things--musty old
idees--fitter for a silver-fish than a modern man.... I don't
know how I got here."
He broke out into a new grievance. "That damned vicar," he
complained, "thinks I ought to think myself lucky to get this
place! Every time I meet him I can see him think it.... One of
these days, George I'll show him what a Mod'un house is like!"
And he did.
I remember the day when he declared, as Americans say, for Crest
Hill. He had come up to see my new gas plant, for I was then
only just beginning to experiment with auxiliary collapsible
balloons, and all the time the shine of his glasses was wandering
away to the open down beyond. "Let's go back to Lady Grove over
the hill," he said. "Something I want to show you. Something
fine!"
It was an empty sunlit place that summer evening, sky and earth
warm with sundown, and a pe-wit or so just accentuating the
pleasant stillness that ends a long clear day. A beautiful
peace, it was, to wreck for ever. And there was my uncle, the
modern man of power, in his grey top-hat and his grey suit and
his black-ribboned glasses, short, thin-legged, large-stomached,
pointing and gesticulating, threatening this calm.
He began with a wave of his arm. "That's the place, George," he
said. "See?"
"Eh!" I cried--for I had been thinking of remote things.
"I got it."
"Got what?"
"For a house!--a Twentieth Century house! That's the place for
it!"
One of his characteristic phrases was begotten in him.
"Four-square to the winds of heaven, George!" he said. "Eh?
Four-square to the winds of heaven!"
"You'll get the winds up here," I said.
"A mammoth house it ought to be, George--to suit these hills."
"Quite," I said.
"Great galleries and things--running out there and there--See? I
been thinking of it, George! Looking out all this way--across
the
Weald. With its back to Lady Grove."
"And the morning sun in its eye."
"Like an eagle, George,--like an eagle!"
So he broached to me what speedily became the leading occupation
of his culminating years, Crest Hill. But all the world has
heard of that extravagant place which grew and changed its plans
as it grew, and bubbled like a salted snail, and burgeoned and
bulged and evermore grew. I know not what delirium of pinnacles
and terraces and arcades and corridors glittered at last upon the
uplands of his mind; the place, for all that its expansion was
terminated abruptly by our collapse, is wonderful enough as it
stands,--that empty instinctive building of a childless man. His
chief architect was a young man named Westminster, whose work he
had picked out in the architecture room of the Royal Academy on
account of a certain grandiose courage in it, but with him he
associated from time to time a number of fellow professionals,
stonemasons, sanitary engineers, painters, sculptors, scribes,
metal workers, wood carvers, furniture designers, ceramic
specialists, landscape gardeners, and the man who designs the
arrangement and ventilation of the various new houses in the
London Zoological Gardens. In addition he had his own ideas.
The thing occupied his mind at all times, but it held it
completely from Friday night to Monday morning. He would come
down to Lady Grove on Friday night in a crowded motor-car that
almost dripped architects. He didn't, however, confine himself
to architects; every one was liable to an invitation to week-end
and view Crest Hill, and many an eager promoter, unaware of how
Napoleonically and completely my uncle had departmentalised his
mind, tried to creep up to him by way of tiles and ventilators
and new electric fittings. Always on Sunday mornings, unless the
weather was vile, he would, so soon as breakfast and his
secretaries were disposed of, visit the site with a considerable
retinue, and alter and develop plans, making modifications,
Zzzz-ing, giving immense new orders verbally--an unsatisfactory
way, as Westminster and the contractors ultimately found.
There he stands in my memory, the symbol of this age for me, the
man of luck and advertisement, the current master of the world.
There he stands upon the great outward sweep of the terrace
before the huge main entrance, a little figure, ridiculously
disproportionate to that forty-foot arch, with the granite ball
behind him--the astronomical ball, brass coopered, that
represented the world, with a little adjustable tube of lenses on
a gun-metal arm that focussed the sun upon just that point of
the earth on which it chanced to be shining vertically. There he
stands, Napoleonically grouped with his retinue men in tweeds and
golfing-suits, a little solicitor, whose name I forget, in grey
trousers and a black jacket, and Westminster in Jaeger
underclothing, a floriferous tie, and peculiar brown cloth of his
own.
The downland breeze flutters my uncle's coat-tails, disarranges
his stiff hair, and insists on the evidence of undisciplined
appetites in face and form, as he points out this or that feature
in the prospect to his attentive collaborator.
Below are hundreds of feet of wheeling-planks, ditches,
excavations, heaps of earth, piles of garden stone from the
Wealden ridges. On either hand the walls of his irrelevant
unmeaning palace rise at one time he had working in that
place--disturbing the economic balance of the whole countryside
by their presence--upwards of three thousand men....
So he poses for my picture amidst the raw beginnings that were
never to be completed. He did the strangest things about that
place, things more and more detached from any conception of
financial scale, things more and more apart from sober humanity.
He seemed to think himself, at last, released from any such
limitations. He moved a quite considerable hill, and nearly
sixty mature trees were moved with it to open his prospect
eastward, moved it about two hundred feet to the south. At
another time he caught a suggestion from some city restaurant and
made a billiard-room roofed with plate glass beneath the waters
of his ornamental lake. He furnished one wing while its roof
still awaited completion. He had a swimming bath thirty feet
square next to his bedroom upstairs, and to crown it all he
commenced a great wall to hold all his dominions together, free
from the invasion of common men. It was a ten-foot wall, glass
surmounted, and had it been completed as he intended it, it
would have had a total length of nearly eleven miles. Some of it
towards the last was so dishonestly built that it collapsed
within a year upon its foundations, but some miles of it still
stand. I never think of it now but what I think of the hundreds
of eager little investors who followed his "star," whose hopes
and lives, whose wives' security and children's prospects are all
mixed up beyond redemption with that flaking mortar....
It is curious how many of these modern financiers of chance and
bluff have ended their careers by building. It was not merely my
uncle. Sooner or later they all seem to bring their luck to the
test of realisation, try to make their fluid opulence coagulate
out as bricks and mortar, bring moonshine into relations with a
weekly wages-sheet. Then the whole fabric of confidence and
imagination totters--and down they come....
When I think of that despoiled hillside, that colossal litter of
bricks and mortar, and crude roads and paths, the scaffolding and
sheds, the general quality of unforeseeing outrage upon the
peace of nature, I am reminded of a chat I had with the vicar one
bleak day after he had witnessed a glide. He talked to me of
aeronautics as I stood in jersey and shorts beside my machine,
fresh from alighting, and his cadaverous face failed to conceal
a peculiar desolation that possessed him.
"Almost you convince me," he said, coming up to me, "against my
will.... A marvellous invention! But it will take you a long
time, sir, before you can emulate that perfect mechanism--the
wing of a bird."
He looked at my sheds.
"You've changed the look of this valley, too," he said.
"Temporary defilements," I remarked, guessing what was in his
mind.
"Of course. Things come and go. Things come and go. But--H'm.
I've just been up over the hill to look at Mr. Edward
Ponderevo's new house. That--that is something more permanent.
A magnificent place!--in many ways. Imposing. I've never
somehow brought myself to go that way before. Things are greatly
advanced.... We find--the great number of strangers introduced
into the villages about here by these operations, working-men
chiefly, a little embarrassing. It put us out. They bring a
new spirit into the place; betting--ideas--all sorts of queer
notions. Our publicans like it, of course. And they come and
sleep in one's outhouses--and make the place a little unsafe at
nights. The other morning I couldn't sleep--a slight
dyspepsia--and I looked out of the window. I was amazed to see
people going by on bicycles. A silent procession. I counted
ninety-seven--in the dawn. All going up to the new road for
Crest Hill. Remarkable I thought it. And so I've been up to see
what they were doing."
"They would have been more than remarkable thirty years ago," I
said.
"Yes, indeed. Things change. We think nothing of it now at
all--comparatively. And that big house--"
He raised his eyebrows. "Really stupendous! Stupendous.
"All the hillside--the old turf--cut to ribbons!"
His eye searched my face. "We've grown so accustomed to look up
to Lady Grove," he said, and smiled in search of sympathy. "It
shifts our centre of gravity."
"Things will readjust themselves," I lied.
He snatched at the phrase. "Of course," he said.
"They'll readjust themselves--settle down again. Must. In the
old way. It's bound to come right again--a comforting thought.
Yes. After all, Lady Grove itself had to be built once upon a
time--was--to begin with--artificial."
His eye returned to my aeroplane. He sought to dismiss his
graver preoccupations. "I should think twice," he remarked,
"before I trusted myself to that concern.... But I suppose one
grows accustomed to the motion."
He bade me good morning and went his way, bowed and
thoughtful....
He had kept the truth from his mind a long time, but that morning
it had forced its way to him with an aspect that brooked no
denial that this time it was not just changes that were coming in
his world, but that all his world lay open and defenceless,
conquered and surrendered, doomed so far as he could see, root
and branch, scale and form alike, to change.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
SOARING
I
For nearly all the time that my uncle was incubating and hatching
Crest Hill I was busy in a little transverse valley between that
great beginning and Lady Grove with more and more costly and
ambitious experiments in aerial navigation. This work was indeed
the main substance of my life through all the great time of the
Tono-Bungay symphony.
I have told already how I came to devote myself to this system of
inquiries, how in a sort of disgust with the common adventure of
life I took up the dropped ends of my college studies, taking
them up again with a man's resolution instead of a boy's
ambition. From the first I did well at this work. It--was, I
think, largely a case of special aptitude, of a peculiar
irrelevant vein of faculty running through my mind. It is one of
those things men seem to have by chance, that has little or
nothing to do with their general merit, and which it is
ridiculous to be either conceited or modest about. I did get
through a very big mass of work in those years, working for a
time with a concentrated fierceness that left little of such
energy or capacity as I possess unused. I worked out a series
of problems connected with the stability of bodies pitching in
the air and the internal movements of the wind, and I also
revolutionised one leading part at last of the theory of
explosive engines. These things are to be found in the
Philosophical Transactions, the Mathematical Journal, and
less frequently in one or two other such publications, and they
needn't detain us here. Indeed, I doubt if I could write about
them here. One acquires a sort of shorthand for one's notes and
mind in relation to such special work. I have never taught; nor
lectured, that is to say, I have never had to express my thoughts
about mechanical things in ordinary everyday language, and I
doubt very much if I could do so now without extreme tedium.
My work was, to begin with, very largely theoretical. I was able
to attack such early necessities of verification as arose with
quite little models, using a turntable to get the motion through
the air, and cane, whalebone and silk as building material. But
a time came when incalculable factors crept in, factors of human
capacity and factors of insufficient experimental knowledge, when
one must needs guess and try. Then I had to enlarge the scale of
my operations, and soon I had enlarged them very greatly. I set
to work almost concurrently on the balance and stability of
gliders and upon the steering of inflated bags, the latter a
particularly expensive branch of work. I was no doubt moved by
something of the same spirit of lavish expenditure that was
running away with my uncle in these developments. Presently
my establishment above Lady Grove had grown to a painted wood
chalet big enough to accommodate six men, and in which I would
sometimes live for three weeks together; to a gasometer, to a
motor-house, to three big corrugated-roofed sheds and lock-up
houses, to a stage from which to start gliders, to a workshop and
so forth. A rough road was made. We brought up gas from
Cheaping and electricity from Woking, which place I found also
afforded a friendly workshop for larger operations than I could
manage. I had the luck also to find a man who seemed my
heaven-sent second-in-command--Cothope his name was. He was a
self-educated-man; he had formerly been a sapper and he was
one of the best and handiest working engineers alive. Without
him I do not think I could have achieved half what I have done.
At times he has been not so much my assistant as my collaborator,
and has followed my fortunes to this day. Other men came and
went as I needed them.
I do not know how far it is possible to convey to any one who has
not experienced it, the peculiar interest, the peculiar
satisfaction that lies in a sustained research when one is not
hampered by want of money. It is a different thing from any
other sort of human effort. You are free from the exasperating
conflict with your fellow-creatures altogether--at least so far
as the essential work goes; that for me is its peculiar merit.
Scientific truth is the remotest of mistresses; she hides in
strange places, she is attained by tortuous and laborious roads,
but SHE IS ALWAYS THERE! Win to her and she will not fail you;
she is yours and mankind's for ever. She is reality, the one
reality I have found in this strange disorder of existence. She
will not sulk with you nor misunderstand you nor cheat you of
your reward upon some petty doubt. You cannot change her by
advertisement or clamour, nor stifle her in vulgarities. Things
grow under your hands when you serve her, things that are
permanent as nothing else is permanent in the whole life of man.
That, I think, is the peculiar satisfaction of science and its
enduring reward....
The taking up of experimental work produced a great change in
my personal habits. I have told how already once in my life at
Wimblehurst I had a period of discipline and continuous effort,
and how, when I came to South Kensington, I became demoralised by
the immense effect of London, by its innumerable imperative
demands upon my attention and curiosity. And I parted with much
of my personal pride when I gave up science for the development
of Tono-Bungay. But my poverty kept me abstinent and my youthful
romanticism kept me chaste until my married life was well under
way. Then in all directions I relaxed. I did a large amount of
work, but I never troubled to think whether it was my maximum nor
whether the moods and indolences that came to me at times were
avoidable things. With the coming of plenty I ate abundantly and
foolishly, drank freely and followed my impulses more and more
carelessly. I felt no reason why I should do anything else.
Never at any point did I use myself to the edge of my capacity.
The emotional crisis of my divorce did not produce any immediate
change in these matters of personal discipline. I found some
difficulty at first in concentrating my mind upon scientific
work, it was so much more exacting than business, but I got over
that difficulty by smoking. I became an inordinate cigar smoker;
it gave me moods of profound depression, but I treated these
usually by the homeopathic method,--by lighting another cigar. I
didn't realise at all how loose my moral and nervous fibre had
become until I reached the practical side of my investigations
and was face to face with the necessity of finding out just how
it felt to use a glider and just what a man could do with one.
I got into this relaxed habit of living in spite of very real
tendencies in my nature towards discipline. I've never been in
love with self-indulgence. That philosophy of the loose lip and
the lax paunch is one for which I've always had an instinctive
distrust. I like bare things, stripped things, plain, austere
and continent things, fine lines and cold colours. But in these
plethoric times when there is too much coarse stuff for everybody
and the struggle for life takes the form of competitive
advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbour's eye, when
there is no urgent demand either for personal courage, sound
nerves or stark beauty, we find ourselves by accident. Always
before these times the bulk of the people did not over-eat
themselves, because they couldn't, whether they wanted to do so
or not, and all but a very few were kept "fit" by unavoidable
exercise and personal danger. Now, if only he pitch his standard
low enough and keep free from pride, almost any one can achieve a
sort of excess. You can go through contemporary life fudging and
evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor
frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere
sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and
elemental necessities, the sweat of your death-bed. So I think
it was with my uncle; so, very nearly, it was with me.
But the glider brought me up smartly. I had to find out how
these things went down the air, and the only way to find out is
to go down with one. And for a time I wouldn't face it.
There is something impersonal about a book, I suppose. At any
rate I find myself able to write down here just the confession
I've never been able to make to any one face to face, the
frightful trouble it was to me to bring myself to do what I
suppose every other coloured boy in the West Indies could do
without turning a hair, and that is to fling myself off for my
first soar down the wind. The first trial was bound to be the
worst; it was an experiment I made with life, and the chance of
death or injury was, I supposed, about equal to the chance of
success. I believed that with a dawn-like lucidity. I had
begun with a glider that I imagined was on the lines of the
Wright brothers' aeroplane, but I could not be sure. It might
turn over. I might upset it. It might burrow its nose at the
end and smash itself and me. The conditions of the flight
necessitated alert attention; it wasn't a thing to be done by
jumping off and shutting one's eyes or getting angry or drunk to
do it. One had to use one's weight to balance. And when at last
I did it it was horrible--for ten seconds. For ten seconds or so,
as I swept down the air flattened on my infernal framework and
with the wind in my eyes, the rush of the ground beneath me
filled me with sick and helpless terror; I felt as though some
violent oscillatory current was throbbing in brain and back bone,
and I groaned aloud. I set my teeth and groaned. It was a groan
wrung out of me in spite of myself. My sensations of terror
swooped to a climax. And then, you know, they ended!
Suddenly my terror was over and done with. I was soaring through
the air right way up, steadily, and no mischance had happened. I
felt intensely alive and my nerves were strung like a bow. I
shifted a limb, swerved and shouted between fear and triumph as I
recovered from the swerve and heeled the other way and steadied
myself.
I thought I was going to hit a rook that was flying athwart
me,--it was queer with what projectile silence that jumped upon
me out of nothingness, and I yelled helplessly, "Get out of the
way!" The bird doubled itself up like a partly inverted V,
flapped, went up to the right abruptly and vanished from my
circle of interest. Then I saw the shadow of my aeroplane
keeping a fixed distance before me and very steady, and the turf
as it seemed streaming out behind it. The turf!--it wasn't after
all streaming so impossibly fast.
When I came gliding down to the safe spread of level green I had
chosen, I was as cool and ready as a city clerk who drops off an
omnibus in motion, and I had learnt much more than soaring. I
tilted up her nose at the right moment, levelled again and
grounded like a snowflake on a windless day. I lay flat for an
instant and then knelt up and got on my feet atremble, but very
satisfied with myself. Cothope was running down the hill to me.
...
But from that day I went into training, and I kept myself in
training for many months. I had delayed my experiments for very
nearly six weeks on various excuses because of my dread of this
first flight, because of the slackness of body and spirit that
had come to me with the business life. The shame of that
cowardice spurred me none the less because it was probably
altogether my own secret. I felt that Cothope at any rate might
suspect. Well,--he shouldn't suspect again.
It is curious that I remember that shame and self accusation and
its consequences far more distinctly than I recall the weeks of
vacillation before I soared. For a time I went altogether
without alcohol, I stopped smoking altogether and ate very
sparingly, and every day I did something that called a little
upon my nerves and muscles. I soared as frequently as I could.
I substituted a motor-bicycle for the London train and took my
chances in the southward traffic, and I even tried what thrills
were to be got upon a horse. But they put me on made horses, and
I conceived a perhaps unworthy contempt for the certitudes of
equestrian exercise in comparison with the adventures of
mechanism. Also I walked along the high wall at the back of Lady
Grove garden, and at last brought myself to stride the gap where
the gate comes. If I didn't altogether get rid of a certain
giddy instinct by such exercises, at least I trained my will
until it didn't matter. And soon I no longer dreaded flight, but
was eager to go higher into the air, and I came to esteem soaring
upon a glider, that even over the deepest dip in the ground had
barely forty feet of fall beneath it, a mere mockery of what
flight might be. I began to dream of the keener freshness in the
air high above the beechwoods, and it was rather to satisfy that
desire than as any legitimate development of my proper work that
presently I turned a part of my energies and the bulk of my
private income to the problem of the navigable balloon.
II
I had gone far beyond that initial stage; I had had two smashes
and a broken rib which my aunt nursed with great energy, and was
getting some reputation in the aeronautic world when, suddenly,
as though she had never really left it, the Honourable Beatrice
Normandy, dark-eyed, and with the old disorderly wave of the
hair from her brow, came back into my life. She came riding down
a grass path in the thickets below Lady Grove, perched up on a
huge black horse, and the old Earl of Carnaby and Archie Garvell,
her half-brother, were with her. My uncle had been bothering me
about the Crest Hill hot-water pipes, and we were returning by a
path transverse to theirs and came out upon them suddenly. Old
Carnaby was trespassing on our ground, and so he hailed us in a
friendly fashion and pulled up to talk to us.
I didn't note Beatrice at all at first. I was interested in Lord
Carnaby, that remarkable vestige of his own brilliant youth. I
had heard of him, but never seen him. For a man of sixty-five
who had sinned all the sins, so they said, and laid waste the
most magnificent political debut of any man of his generation, he
seemed to me to be looking remarkably fit and fresh. He was a
lean little man with grey-blue eyes in his brown face, and his
cracked voice was the worst thing in his effect.
"Hope you don't mind us coming this way, Ponderevo," he cried;
and my uncle, who was sometimes a little too general and generous
with titles, answered, "Not at all, my lord, not at all! Glad
you make use of it!"
"You're building a great place over the hill," said Carnaby.
"Thought I'd make a show for once," said my uncle. "It looks big
because it's spread out for the sun."
"Air and sunlight," said the earl. "You can't have too much of
them. But before our time they used to build for shelter and
water and the high road."
Then I discovered that the silent figure behind the earl was
Beatrice.
I'd forgotten her sufficiently to think for a moment that she
hadn't changed at all since she had watched me from behind the
skirts of Lady Drew. She was looking at me, and her dainty brow
under her broad brimmed hat--she was wearing a grey hat and loose
unbuttoned coat--was knit with perplexity, trying, I suppose, to
remember where she had seen me before. Her shaded eyes met mine
with that mute question....
It seemed incredible to me she didn't remember.
"Well," said the earl and touched his horse.
Garvell was patting the neck of his horse, which was inclined to
fidget, and disregarding me. He nodded over his shoulder and
followed. His movement seemed to release a train of memories in
her. She glanced suddenly at him and then back at me with a
flash of recognition that warmed instantly to a faint smile.
She hesitated as if to speak to me, smiled broadly and
understandingly and turned to follow the others. All three broke
into a canter and she did not look back. I stood for a second or
so at the crossing of the lanes, watching her recede, and then
became aware that my uncle was already some paces off and talking
over his shoulder in the belief that I was close behind. I
turned about and strode to overtake him. My mind was full of
Beatrice and this surprise. I remembered her simply as a
Normandy. I'd clean forgotten that Garvell was the son and she
the step-daughter of our neighbour, Lady Osprey. Indeed, I'd
probably forgotten at that time that we had Lady Osprey as a
neighbour. There was no reason at all for remembering it. It
was amazing to find her in this Surrey countryside, when I'd
never thought of her as living anywhere in the world but at
Bladesover Park, near forty miles and twenty years away. She was
so alive--so unchanged! The same quick warm blood was in her
cheeks. It seemed only yesterday that we had kissed among the
bracken stems....
"Eh?" I said.
"I say he's good stuff," said my uncle. "You can say what you
like against the aristocracy, George; Lord Carnaby's rattling
good stuff. There's a sort of Savoir Faire, something--it's an
old-fashioned phrase, George, but a good one there's a
Bong-Tong.... It's like the Oxford turf, George, you can't grow
it in a year. I wonder how they do it. It's living always on a
Scale, George. It's being there from the beginning."...
"She might," I said to myself, "be a picture by Romney come
alive!"
"They tell all these stories about him," said my uncle, "but what
do they all amount to?"
"Gods!" I said to myself; "but why have I forgotten for so long?
Those queer little brows of hers, the touch of mischief in her
eyes--the way she breaks into a smile!"
"I don't blame him," said my uncle. "Mostly it's imagination.
That and leisure, George. When I was a young man I was kept
pretty busy. So were you. Even then--!"
What puzzled me more particularly was the queer trick of my
memory that had never recalled anything vital of Beatrice
whatever when I met Garvell again that had, indeed, recalled
nothing except a boyish antagonism and our fight. Now when my
senses were full of her, it seemed incredible that I could ever
have forgotten....
III
"Oh, Crikey!" said my aunt, reading a letter behind her
coffee-machine. "HERE'S a young woman, George!"
We were breakfasting together in the big window bay at Lady Grove
that looks upon the iris beds; my uncle was in London.
I sounded an interrogative note and decapitated an egg.
"Who's Beatrice Normandy?" asked my aunt. "I've not heard of her
before."
"She the young woman?"
"Yes. Says she knows you. I'm no hand at old etiquette, George,
but her line is a bit unusual. Practically she says she's going
to make her mother--"
"Eh? Step-mother, isn't it?"
"You seem to know a lot about her. She says 'mother'--Lady
Osprey. They're to call on me, anyhow, next Wednesday week at
four, and there's got to be you for tea."
"Eh?"
"You--for tea.
"H'm. She had rather--force of character. When I knew her
before."
I became aware of my aunt's head sticking out obliquely from
behind the coffee-machine and regarding me with wide blue
curiosity. I met her gaze for a moment, flinched, coloured, and
laughed.
"I've known her longer than I've known you," I said, and
explained at length.
My aunt kept her eye on me over and round the coffee-machine as
I did so. She was greatly interested, and asked several
elucidatory questions.
"Why didn't you tell me the day you saw her? You've had her on
your mind for a week," she said.
"It IS odd I didn't tell you," I admitted.
"You thought I'd get a Down on her," said my aunt conclusively.
"That's what you thought" and opened the rest of her letters.
The two ladies came in a pony-carriage with conspicuous
punctuality, and I had the unusual experience of seeing my aunt
entertaining callers. We had tea upon the terrace under the
cedar, but old Lady Osprey, being an embittered Protestant, had
never before seen the inside of the house, and we made a sort of
tour of inspection that reminded me of my first visit to the
place. In spite of my preoccupation with Beatrice, I stored a
queer little memory of the contrast between the two other women;
my aunt, tall, slender and awkward, in a simple blue homekeeping
dress, an omnivorous reader and a very authentic wit, and the
lady of pedigree, short and plump, dressed with Victorian
fussiness, living at the intellectual level of palmistry and
genteel fiction, pink in the face and generally flustered by a
sense of my aunt's social strangeness and disposed under the
circumstances to behave rather like an imitation of the more
queenly moments of her own cook. The one seemed made of
whalebone, the other of dough. My aunt was nervous, partly
through the intrinsic difficulty of handling the lady and partly
because of her passionate desire to watch Beatrice and me, and
her nervousness took a common form with her, a wider clumsiness
of gesture and an exacerbation of her habitual oddity of phrase
which did much to deepen the pink perplexity of the lady of
title. For instance, I heard my aunt admit that one of the
Stuart Durgan ladies did look a bit "balmy on the crumpet"; she
described the knights of the age of chivalry as "korvorting about
on the off-chance of a dragon"; she explained she was "always
old mucking about the garden," and instead of offering me a
Garibaldi biscuit, she asked me with that faint lisp of hers, to
"have some squashed flies, George." I felt convinced Lady Osprey
would describe her as "a most eccentric person" on the very first
opportunity;-- "a most eccentric person." One could see her, as
people say, "shaping" for that.
Beatrice was dressed very quietly in brown, with a simple but
courageous broad-brimmed hat, and an unexpected quality of being
grown-up and responsible. She guided her step-mother through
the first encounter, scrutinised my aunt, and got us all well in
movement through the house, and then she turned her attention to
me with a quick and half-confident smile.
"We haven't met," she said, "since--"
"It was in the Warren."
"Of course," she said, "the Warren! I remembered it all except
just the name.... I was eight."
Her smiling eyes insisted on my memories being thorough. I
looked up and met them squarely, a little at a loss for what I
should say.
"I gave you away pretty completely," she said, meditating upon my
face. "And afterwards I gave way Archie."
She turned her face away from the others, and her voice fell ever
so little.
"They gave him a licking for telling lies!" she said, as though
that was a pleasant memory. "And when it was all over I went to
our wigwam. You remember the wigwam?"
"Out in the West Wood?"
"Yes--and cried--for all the evil I had done you, I suppose....
I've often thought of it since."...
Lady Osprey stopped for us to overtake her. "My dear!" she said
to Beatrice. "Such a beautiful gallery!" Then she stared very
hard at me, puzzled in the most naked fashion to understand who I
might be.
"People say the oak staircase is rather good," said my aunt, and
led the way.
Lady Osprey, with her skirts gathered for the ascent to the
gallery and her hand on the newel, turned and addressed a look
full of meaning overflowing indeed with meanings--at her charge.
The chief meaning no doubt was caution about myself, but much of
it was just meaning at large. I chanced to catch the response in
a mirror and detected Beatrice with her nose wrinkled into a
swift and entirely diabolical grimace. Lady Osprey became a
deeper shade of pink and speechless with indignation--it was
evident she disavowed all further responsibility, as she
followed my aunt upstairs.
"It's dark, but there's a sort of dignity," said Beatrice very
distinctly, regarding the hall with serene tranquillity, and
allowing the unwilling feet on the stairs to widen their distance
from us. She stood a step up, so that she looked down a little
upon me and over me at the old hall.
She turned upon me abruptly when she thought her step-mother was
beyond ear-shot.
"But how did you get here?" she asked.
"Here?"
"All this." She indicated space and leisure by a wave of the
hand at hall and tall windows and sunlit terrace. "Weren't you
the housekeeper's son?"
"I've adventured. My uncle has become--a great financier. He
used to be a little chemist about twenty miles from Bladesover.
We're promoters now, amalgamators, big people on the new model."
"I understand." She regarded me with interested eyes, visibly
thinking me out.
"And you recognised me?" I asked.
"After a second or so. I saw you recognised me. I couldn't
place you, but I knew I knew you. Then Archie being there helped
me to remember."
"I'm glad to meet again," I ventured. "I'd never forgotten you."
"One doesn't forget those childish things."
We regarded one another for a moment with a curiously easy and
confident satisfaction in coming together again. I can't explain
our ready zest in one another. The thing was so. We pleased each
other, we had no doubt in our minds that we pleased each other.
From the first we were at our ease with one another. "So
picturesque, so very picturesque," came a voice from above, and
then: "Bee-atrice!"
"I've a hundred things I want to know about you," she said with
an easy intimacy, as we went up the winding steps....
As the four of us sat at tea together under the cedar on the
terrace she asked questions about my aeronautics. My aunt helped
with a word or so about my broken ribs. Lady Osprey evidently
regarded flying as a most indesirable and improper topic--a
blasphemous intrusion upon the angels. "It isn't flying," I
explained. "We don't fly yet."
"You never will," she said compactly. "You never will."
"Well," I said, "we do what we can."
The little lady lifted a small gloved hand and indicated a
height of about four feet from the ground. "Thus far," she said,
"thus far--AND NO FARTHER! No!"
She became emphatically pink. "NO," she said again quite
conclusively, and coughed shortly. "Thank you," she said to her
ninth or tenth cake. Beatrice burst into cheerful laughter with
her eye on me. I was lying on the turf, and this perhaps caused
a slight confusion about the primordial curse in Lady Osprey's
mind.
"Upon his belly shall he go," she said with quiet distinctness,
"all the days of his life."
After which we talked no more of aeronautics.
Beatrice sat bunched together in a chair and regarded me with
exactly the same scrutiny, I thought, the same adventurous
aggression, that I had faced long ago at the tea-table in my
mother's room. She was amazingly like that little Princess of my
Bladesover memories, the wilful misbehaviours of her hair seemed
the same--her voice; things one would have expected to be changed
altogether. She formed her plans in the same quick way, and
acted with the same irresponsible decision.
She stood up abruptly.
"What is there beyond the terrace?" she said, and found me
promptly beside her.
I invented a view for her.
At the further corner from the cedar she perched herself up upon
the parapet and achieved an air of comfort among the lichenous
stones. "Now tell me," she said, "all about yourself. Tell me
about yourself; I know such duffers of men! They all do the same
things. How did you get--here? All my men WERE here. They
couldn't have got here if they hadn't been here always. They
wouldn't have thought it right. You've climbed."
"If it's climbing," I said.
She went off at a tangent. "It's--I don't know if you'll
understand--interesting to meet you again. I've remembered you.
I don't know why, but I have. I've used you as a sort of lay
figure--when I've told myself stories. But you've always been
rather stiff and difficult in my stories--in ready-made
clothes--a Labour Member or a Bradlaugh, or something like that.
You're not like that a bit. And yet you ARE!"
She looked at me. "Was it much of a fight? They make out it is.
I don't know why."
"I was shot up here by an accident," I said. "There was no fight
at all. Except to keep honest, perhaps and I made no great
figure in that. I and my uncle mixed a medicine and it blew us
up. No merit in that! But you've been here all the time. Tell
me what you have done first."
"One thing we didn't do." She meditated for a moment.
"What?" said I.
"Produce a little half-brother for Bladesover. So it went to
the Phillbrick gang. And they let it! And I and my
step-mother--we let, too. And live in a little house."
She nodded her head vaguely over her shoulder and turned to me
again. "Well, suppose it was an accident. Here you are! Now
you're here, what are you going to do? You're young. Is it to
be Parliament? heard some men the other day talking about you.
Before I knew you were you. They said that was what you ought to
do."...
She put me through my intentions with a close and vital
curiosity. It was just as she had tried to imagine me a soldier
and place me years ago. She made me feel more planless and
incidental than ever. "You want to make a flying-machine," she
pursued, "and when you fly? What then? Would it be for
fighting?
I told her something of my experimental work. She had never
heard of the soaring aeroplane, and was excited by the thought,
and keen to hear about it. She had thought all the work so far
had been a mere projecting of impossible machines. For her
Pilcher and Lilienthal had died in vain. She did not know such
men had lived in the world.
"But that's dangerous!" she said, with a note of discovery.
"Oh!--it's dangerous."
"Bee-atrice!" Lady Osprey called.
Beatrice dropped from the wall to her feet.
"Where do you do this soaring?"
"Beyond the high Barrows. East of Crest Hill and the wood."
"Do you mind people coming to see?"
"Whenever you please. Only let me know"
"I'll take my chance some day. Some day soon." She looked at
me thoughtfully, smiled, and our talk was at an end.
IV
All my later work in aeronautics is associated in my memory with
the quality of Beatrice, with her incidenta] presence, with
things she said and did and things I thought of that had
reference to her.
In the spring of that year I had got to a flying machine that
lacked nothing but longitudinal stability. My model flew like a
bird for fifty or a hundred yards or so, and then either dived
and broke its nose or, what was commoner, reared up, slid back
and smashed its propeller. The rhythm of the pitching puzzled
me. I felt it must obey some laws not yet quite clearly stated.
I became therefore a student of theory and literature for a time;
I hit upon the string of considerations that led me to what is
called Ponderevo's Principle and my F.R.S., and I worked this out
in three long papers. Meanwhile I made a lot of turn-table and
glider models and started in upon an idea of combining gas-bags
and gliders. Balloon work was new to me. I had made one or two
ascents in the balloons of the Aero Club before I started my
gasometer and the balloon shed and gave Cothope a couple of
months with Sir Peter Rumchase. My uncle found part of the
money for these developments; he was growing interested and
competitive in this business because of Lord Boom's prize and
the amount of reclame involved, and it was at his request that
I named my first navigable balloon Lord Roberts Alpha.
Lord Roberts A very nearly terminated all my investigations. My
idea both in this and its more successful and famous younger
brother, Lord Roberts B, was to utilise the idea of a contractile
balloon with a rigid flat base, a balloon shaped rather like an
inverted boat that should almost support the apparatus, but not
quite. The gas-bag was of the chambered sort used for these long
forms, and not with an internal balloonette. The trouble was to
make the thing contractile. This I sought to do by fixing a
long, fine-meshed silk net over it that was fastened to be
rolled up on two longitudinal rods. Practically I contracted my
sausage gas-bag by netting it down. The ends were too complex
for me to describe here, but I thought them out elaborately and
they were very carefully planned. Lord Roberts A was furnished
with a single big screw forward, and there was a rudder aft. The
engine was the first one to be, so to speak, right in the plane
of the gas-bag. I lay immediately under the balloon on a sort
of glider framework, far away from either engine or rudder,
controlling them by wire-pulls constructed on the principle of
the well-known Bowden brake of the cyclist.
But Lord Roberts A has been pretty exhaustively figured and
described in various aeronautical publications. The unforeseen
defect was the badness of the work in the silk netting. It tore
aft as soon as I began to contract the balloon, and the last two
segments immediately bulged through the hole, exactly as an
inner tube will bulge through the ruptured outer cover of a
pneumatic tire, and then the sharp edge of the torn net cut the
oiled-silk of the distended last segment along a weak seam and
burst it with a loud report.
Up to that point the whole thing had been going on extremely
well. As a navigable balloon and before I contracted it, the
Lord Roberts A was an unqualified success. It had run out of the
shed admirably at nine or ten miles an hour or more, and although
there was a gentle southwester blowing, it had gone up and turned
and faced it as well as any craft of the sort I have ever seen.
I lay in my customary glider position, horizontal and face
downward, and the invisibility of all the machinery gave an
extraordinary effect of independent levitation. Only by looking
up, as it were, and turning my head back could I see the flat
aeroplane bottom of the balloon and the rapid successive
passages, swish, swish, swish of the vans of the propeller. I
made a wide circle over Lady Grove and Duffield and out towards
Effingham and came back quite successfully to the starting-point.
Down below in the October sunlight were my sheds and the little
group that had been summoned to witness the start, their faces
craned upward and most of them scrutinising my expression through
field-glasses. I could see Carnaby and Beatrice on horseback,
and two girls I did not know with them; Cothope and three or four
workmen I employed; my aunt and Mrs. Levinstein, who was staying
with her, on foot, and Dimmock, the veterinary surgeon, and one
or two others. My shadow moved a little to the north of them
like the shadow of a fish. At Lady Grove the servants were out
on the lawn, and the Duffield school playground swarmed with
children too indifferent to aeronautics to cease their playing.
But in the Crest Hill direction--the place looked extraordinarily
squat and ugly from above--there were knots and strings of
staring workmen everywhere--not one of them working, but all
agape. (But now I write it, it occurs to me that perhaps it was
their dinner hour; it was certainly near twelve.) I hung for a
moment or so enjoying the soar, then turned about to face a clear
stretch of open down, let the engine out to full speed and set my
rollers at work rolling in the net, and so tightening the
gas-bags. Instantly the pace quickened with the diminished
resistance...
In that moment before the bang I think I must have been really
flying. Before the net ripped, just in the instant when my
balloon was at its systole, the whole apparatus was, I am
convinced, heavier than air. That, however, is a claim that has
been disputed, and in any case this sort of priority is a very
trivial thing.
Then came a sudden retardation, instantly followed by an
inexpressibly disconcerting tilt downward of the machine. That I
still recall with horror. I couldn't see what was happening at
all and I couldn't imagine. It was a mysterious, inexplicable
dive. The thing, it seemed, without rhyme or reason, was kicking
up its heels in the air. The bang followed immediately, and I
perceived I was falling rapidly.
I was too much taken by surprise to think of the proper cause of
the report. I don't even know what I made of it. I was
obsessed, I suppose, by that perpetual dread of the modern
aeronaut, a flash between engine and balloon. Yet obviously I
wasn't wrapped in flames. I ought to have realised instantly it
wasn't that. I did, at any rate, whatever other impressions
there were, release the winding of the outer net and let the
balloon expand again, and that no doubt did something to break my
fall. I don't remember doing that. Indeed, all I do remember is
the giddy effect upon the landscape of falling swiftly upon it
down a flat spiral, the hurried rush of fields and trees and
cottages on my left shoulder and the overhung feeling as if the
whole apparatus was pressing down the top of my head. I didn't
stop or attempt to stop the screw. That was going on, swish,
swish, swish all the time.
Cothope really knows more about the fall than I do. He describes
the easterly start, the tilt, and the appearance and bursting of
a sort of bladder aft. Then down I swooped, very swiftly, but
not nearly so steeply as I imagined I was doing. "Fifteen or
twenty degrees," said Cothope, "to be exact." From him it was
that I learnt that I let the nets loose again, and so arrested my
fall. He thinks I was more in control of myself than I remember.
But I do not see why I should have forgotten so excellent a
resolution. His impression is that I was really steering and
trying to drop into the Farthing Down beeches. "You hit the
trees," he said, "and the whole affair stood on its nose among
them, and then very slowly crumpled up. I saw you'd been jerked
out, as I thought, and I didn't stay for more. I rushed for my
bicycle."
As a matter of fact, it was purely accidental that I came down in
the woods. I am reasonably certain that I had no more control
then than a thing in a parcel. I remember I felt a sort of
wincing, "Now it comes!" as the trees rushed up to me. If I
remember that, I should remember steering. Then the propeller
smashed, everything stopped with a jerk, and I was falling into a
mass of yellowing leaves, and Lord Roberts A, so it seemed to me,
was going back into the sky.
I felt twigs and things hit me in the face, but I didn't feel
injured at the time; I clutched at things that broke, tumbled
through a froth of green and yellow into a shadowy world of great
bark-covered arms, and there, snatching wildly, got a grip on a
fair round branch, and hung.
I became intensely alert and clear-headed. I held by that
branch for a moment and then looked about me, and caught at
another, and then found myself holding to a practicable fork. I
swung forward to that and got a leg around it below its junction,
and so was able presently to clamber down, climbing very coolly
and deliberately. I dropped ten feet or so from the lowest branch
and fell on my feet. "That's all right," I said, and stared up
through the tree to see what I could of the deflated and crumpled
remains that had once been Lord Roberts A festooned on the
branches it had broken. "Gods!" I said, "what a tumble!"
I wiped something that trickled from my face and was shocked to
see my hand covered with blood. I looked at myself and saw what
seemed to me an astonishing quantity of blood running down my arm
and shoulder. I perceived my mouth was full of blood. It's a
queer moment when one realises one is hurt, and perhaps badly
hurt, and has still to discover just how far one is hurt. I
explored my face carefully and found unfamiliar contours on the
left side. The broken end of a branch had driven right through
my cheek, damaging my cheek and teeth and gums, and left a
splinter of itself stuck, like an explorer's fartherest-point
flag, in the upper maxillary. That and a sprained wrist were all
my damage. But I bled as though I had been chopped to pieces,
and it seemed to me that my face had been driven in. I can't
describe just the horrible disgust I felt at that.
"This blood must be stopped, anyhow," I said, thickheadedly.
"I wonder where there's a spider's web"--an odd twist for my
mind to take. But it was the only treatment that occurred to me.
I must have conceived some idea of going home unaided, because I
was thirty yards from the tree before I dropped.
Then a kind of black disc appeared in the middle of the world and
rushed out to the edge of things and blotted them out. I don't
remember falling down. I fainted from excitement, disgust at my
injury and loss of blood, and lay there until Cothope found me.
He was the first to find me, scorching as he did over the
downland turf, and making a wide course to get the Carnaby
plantations at their narrowest. Then presently, while he was
trying to apply the methodical teachings of the St. John's
Ambulance classes to a rather abnormal case, Beatrice came
galloping through the trees full-tilt, with Lord Carnaby hard
behind her, and she was hatless, muddy from a fall, and white as
death. "And cool as a cucumber, too," said Cothope, turning it
over in his mind as he told me.
("They never seem quite to have their heads, and never seem quite
to lose 'em," said Cothope, generalising about the sex.)
Also he witnessed she acted with remarkable decision. The
question was whether I should be taken to the house her
step-mother occupied at Bedley Corner, the Carnaby dower house,
or down to Carnaby's place at Easting. Beatrice had no doubt in
the matter, for she meant to nurse me. Carnaby didn't seem to
want that to happen. "She WOULD have it wasn't half so far,"
said Cothope. "She faced us out....
"I hate to be faced out of my opinion, so I've taken a pedometer
over it since. It's exactly forty-three yards further.
"Lord Carnaby looked at her pretty straight," said Cothope,
finishing the picture; "and then he give in."
V
But my story has made a jump from June to October, and during
that time my relations with Beatrice and the countryside that was
her setting had developed in many directions. She came and went,
moving in an orbit for which I had no data, going to London and
Paris, into Wales and Northampton, while her stepmother, on some
independent system of her own, also vanished and recurred
intermittently. At home they obeyed the rule of an inflexible
old maid, Charlotte, and Beatrice exercised all the rights of
proprietorship in Carnaby's extensive stables. Her interest in
me was from the first undisguised. She found her way to my
worksheds and developed rapidly, in spite of the sincere
discouragement of Cothope, into a keen amateur of aeronautics.
She would come sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the
afternoon, sometimes afoot with an Irish terrier, sometimes
riding. She would come for three or four days every day, vanish
for a fortnight or three weeks, return.
It was not long before I came to look for her. From the first I
found her immensely interesting. To me she was a new feminine
type altogether--I have made it plain, I think, how limited was
my knowledge of women. But she made me not simply interested in
her, but in myself. She became for me something that greatly
changes a man's world. How shall I put it? She became an
audience. Since I've emerged from the emotional developments of
the affair I have thought it out in a hundred aspects, and it
does seem to me that this way in which men and women make
audiences for one another is a curiously influential force in
their lives. For some it seems an audience is a vital necessity,
they seek audiences as creatures seek food; others again, my
uncle among them, can play to an imaginary audience. I, I think,
have lived and can live without one. In my adolescence I was my
own audience and my own court of honour. And to have an audience
in one's mind is to play a part, to become self-conscious and
dramatic. For many years I had been self-forgetful and
scientific. I had lived for work and impersonal interests until
I found scrutiny, applause and expectation in Beatrice's eyes.
Then I began to live for the effect I imagined I made upon her,
to make that very soon the principal value in my life. I played
to her. I did things for the look of them. I began to dream
more and more of beautiful situations and fine poses and
groupings with her and for her.
I put these things down because they puzzle me. I think I was in
love with Beatrice, as being in love is usually understood; but
it was quite a different state altogether from my passionate
hunger for Marion, or my keen, sensuous desire for and pleasure
in Effie. These were selfish, sincere things, fundamental and
instinctive, as sincere as the leap of a tiger. But until
matters drew to a crisis with Beatrice, there was an immense
imaginative insurgence of a quite different quality. I am
setting down here very gravely, and perhaps absurdly, what are no
doubt elementary commonplaces for innumerable people. This love
that grew up between Beatrice and myself was, I think--I put it
quite tentatively and rather curiously--romantic love. That
unfortunate and truncated affair of my uncle and the Scrymgeour
lady was really of the same stuff, if a little different in
quality. I have to admit that. The factor of audience was of
primary importance in either else.
Its effect upon me was to make me in many respects adolescent
again. It made me keener upon the point of honour, and anxious
and eager to do high and splendid things, and in particular,
brave things. So far it ennobled and upheld me. But it did also
push me towards vulgar and showy things. At bottom it was
disingenuous; it gave my life the quality of stage scenery, with
one side to the audience, another side that wasn't meant to show,
and an economy of substance. It certainly robbed my work of high
patience and quality. I cut down the toil of research in my
eagerness and her eagerness for fine flourishes in the air,
flights that would tell. I shirked the longer road.
And it robbed me, too, of any fine perception of absurdity.
Yet that was not everything in our relationship. The elemental
thing was there also. It came in very suddenly.
It was one day in the summer, though I do not now recall without
reference to my experimental memoranda whether it was in July or
August. I was working with a new and more bird-like aeroplane
with wing curvatures studied from Lilienthal, Pilcher and
Phillips, that I thought would give a different rhythm for the
pitching oscillations than anything I'd had before. I was
soaring my long course from the framework on the old barrow by my
sheds down to Tinker's Corner. It is a clear stretch of
downland, except for two or three thickets of box and thorn to
the right of my course; one transverse trough, in which there is
bush and a small rabbit warren, comes in from the east. I had
started, and was very intent on the peculiar long swoop with
which any new arrangement flew. Then, without any sort of
notice, right ahead of me appeared Beatrice, riding towards
Tinker's Corner to waylay and talk to me. She looked round over
her shoulder, saw me coming, touched her horse to a gallop, and
then the brute bolted right into the path of my machine.
There was a queer moment of doubt whether we shouldn't all smash
together. I had to make up my mind very quickly whether I would
pitch-up and drop backward at once and take my chance of falling
undamaged--a poor chance it would have been--in order to avoid
any risk to her, or whether I would lift against the wind and
soar right over her. This latter I did. She had already got her
horse in hand when I came up to her. Her woman's body lay along
his neck, and she glanced up as I, with wings aspread, and every
nerve in a state of tension, swept over her.
Then I had landed, and was going back to where her horse stood
still and trembling.
We exchanged no greetings. She slid from her saddle into my
arms, and for one instant I held her.
"Those great wings," she said, and that was all.
She lay in my arms, and I thought for a moment she had fainted.
"Very near a nasty accident," said Cothope, coming up and
regarding our grouping with disfavour. He took her horse by the
bridle. "Very dangerous thing coming across us like that."
Beatrice disengaged herself from me, stood for a moment
trembling, and then sat down on the turf "I'll just sit down for
a moment," she said.
"Oh!" she said.
She covered her face with her hands, while Cothope looked at her
with an expression between suspicion and impatience.
For some moments nobody moved. Then Cothope remarked that
perhaps he'd better get her water.
As for me, I was filled with a new outrageous idea, begotten I
scarcely know how from this incident, with its instant contacts
and swift emotions, and that was that I must make love to and
possess Beatrice. I see no particular reason why that thought
should have come to me in that moment, but it did. I do not
believe that before then I had thought of our relations in such
terms at all. Suddenly, as I remember it, the factor of passion
came. She crouched there, and I stood over her, and neither of
us said a word. But it was just as though something had been
shouted from the sky.
Cothope had gone twenty paces perhaps when she uncovered her
face. "I shan't want any water," she said. "Call him back."
VI
After that the spirit of our relations changed. The old ease had
gone. She came to me less frequently, and when she came she
would have some one with her, usually old Carnaby, and he would
do the bulk of the talking. All through September she was away.
When we were alone together there was a curious constraint. We
became clouds of inexpressible feeling towards one another; we
could think of nothing that was not too momentous for words.
Then came the smash of Lord Roberts A, and I found myself with a
bandaged face in a bedroom in the Bedley Corner dower-house
with Beatrice presiding over an inefficient nurse, Lady Osprey
very pink and shocked in the background, and my aunt jealously
intervening.
My injuries were much more showy than serious, and I could have
been taken to Lady Grove next day, but Beatrice would not permit
that, and kept me at Bedley Corner three clear days. In the
afternoon of the second day she became extremely solicitous for
the proper aeration of the nurse, packed her off for an hour in a
brisk rain, and sat by me alone.
I asked her to marry me.
All the whole I must admit it was not a situation that lent
itself to eloquence. I lay on my back and talked through
bandages, and with some little difficulty, for my tongue and
mouth had swollen. But I was feverish and in pain, and the
emotional suspense I had been in so long with regard to her
became now an unendurable impatience.
"Comfortable?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Shall I read to you?"
"No. I want to talk."
"You can't. I'd better talk to you."
"No," I said, "I want to talk to you."
She came and stood by my bedside and looked me in the eyes. "I
don't--I don't want you to talk to me," she said. "I thought you
couldn't talk."
"I get few chances--of you."
"You'd better not talk. Don't talk now. Let me chatter instead.
You ought not to talk."
"It isn't much" I said.
"I'd rather you didn't."
"I'm not going to be disfigured," I said. "Only a scar."
"Oh!" she said, as if she had expected something quite
different. "Did you think you'd become a sort of gargoyle?"
"L'Homme qui Rit!--I didn't know. But that's all right. Jolly
flowers those are!"
"Michaelmas daisies," she said. "I'm glad you'r not disfigured,
and those are perennial sunflowers. Do you know no flowers at
all? When I saw you on the ground I certainly thought you were
dead. You ought to have been, by all the rules of the game."
She said some other things, but I was thinking of my next move.
"Are we social equals?" I said abruptly.
She stared at me. "Queer question," she said.
"But are we?"
"H'm. Difficult to say. But why do you ask? Is the daughter of
a courtesy Baron who died--of general disreputableness, I
believe--before his father--? I give it up. Does it matter?"
"No. My mind is confused. I want to know if you will marry me."
She whitened and said nothing. I suddenly felt I must plead with
her. "Damn these bandages!" I said, breaking into ineffectual
febrile rage.
She roused herself to her duties as nurse. "What are you doing?
Why are you trying to sit up? Sit down! Don't touch your
bandages. I told you not to talk."
She stood helpless for a moment, then took me firmly by the
shoulders and pushed me back upon the pillow. She gripped the
wrist of the hand I had raised to my face.
"I told you not to talk," she whispered close to my face. "I
asked you not to talk. Why couldn't you do as I asked you?"
"You've been avoiding me for a month," I said.
"I know. You might have known. Put your hand back--down by your
side."
I obeyed. She sat on the edge of the bed. A flush had come to
her cheeks, and her eyes were very bright. "I asked you," she
repeated, "not to talk."
My eyes questioned her mutely.
She put her hand on my chest. Her eyes were tormented.
"How can I answer you now?" she said.
"How can I say anything now?"
"What do you mean?" I asked.
She made no answer.
"Do you mean it must be 'No'?"
She nodded.
"But" I said, and my whole soul was full of accusations.
"I know," she said. "I can't explain. I can't. But it has to
be 'No!' It can't be. It's utterly, finally, for ever
impossible.... Keep your hands still!"
"But," I said, "when we met again--"
"I can't marry. I can't and won't."
She stood up. "Why did you talk?" she cried, "couldn't you SEE?"
She seemed to have something it was impossible to say.
She came to the table beside my bed and pulled the Michaelmas
daisies awry. "Why did you talk like that?" she said in a tone
of infinite bitterness. "To begin like that!"
"But what is it?" I said. "Is it some circumstance--my social
position?"
"Oh, DAMN your social position!" she cried.
She went and stood at the further window, staring out at the
rain. For a long time we were absolutely still. The wind and
rain came in little gusts upon the pane. She turned to me
abruptly.
"You didn't ask me if I loved you," she said.
"Oh, if it's THAT!" said I.
"It's not that," she said. "But if you want to know--" She
paused.
"I do," she said.
We stared at one another.
"I do--with all my heart, if you want to know."
"Then, why the devil--?" I asked.
She made no answer. She walked across the room to the piano and
began to play, rather noisily and rapidly, with odd gusts of
emphasis, the shepherd's pipe music from the last act in "Tristan
and Isolde." Presently she missed a note, failed again, ran her
finger heavily up the scale, struck the piano passionately with
her fist, making a feeble jar in the treble, jumped up, and went
out of the room....
The nurse found me still wearing my helmet of bandages, partially
dressed, and pottering round the room to find the rest of my
clothes. I was in a state of exasperated hunger for Beatrice,
and I was too inflamed and weakened to conceal the state of my
mind. I was feebly angry because of the irritation of dressing,
and particularly of the struggle to put on my trousers without
being able to see my legs. I was staggering about, and once I
had fallen over a chair and I had upset the jar of Michaelmas
daisies.
I must have been a detestable spectacle. "I'll go back to bed,"
said I, "if I may have a word with Miss Beatrice. I've got
something to say to her. That's why I'm dressing."
My point was conceded, but there were long delays. Whether the
household had my ultimatum or whether she told Beatrice directly
I do not know, and what Lady Osprey can have made of it in the
former case I don't imagine.
At last Beatrice came and stood by my bedside. "Well?" she said.
"All I want to say," I said with the querulous note of a
misunderstood child, "is that I can't take this as final. I want
to see you and talk when I'm better, and write. I can't do
anything now. I can't argue."
I was overtaken with self-pity and began to snivel, "I can't
rest. You see? I can't do anything."
She sat down beside me again and spoke softly. "I promise I will
talk it all over with you again. When you are well. I promise I
will meet you somewhere so that we can talk. You can't talk now.
I asked you not to talk now. All you want to know you shall
know... Will that do?"
"I'd like to know"
She looked round to see the door was closed, stood up and went to
it.
Then she crouched beside me and began whispering very softly and
rapidly with her face close to me.
"Dear," she said, "I love you. If it will make you happy to
marry me, I will marry you. I was in a mood just now--a stupid,
inconsiderate mood. Of course I will marry you. You are my
prince, my king. Women are such things of mood--or I would have
behaved differently. We say 'No' when we mean 'Yes'--and fly
into crises. So now, Yes--yes--yes. I will. I can't even kiss
you. Give me your hand to kiss that. Understand, I am yours.
Do you understand? I am yours just as if we had been married
fifty years. Your wife--Beatrice. Is that enough? Now--now
will you rest?"
"Yes," I said, "but why?"
"There are complications. There are difficulties. When you are
better you will be able to--understand them. But now they don't
matter. Only you know this must be secret--for a time.
Absolutely secret between us. Will you promise that?"
"Yes," I said, "I understand. I wish I could kiss you."
She laid her head down beside mine for a moment and then she
kissed my hand.
"I don't care what difficulties there are," I said, and I shut my
eyes.
VII
But I was only beginning to gauge the unaccountable elements in
Beatrice. For a week after my return to Lady Grove I had no sign
of her, and then she called with Lady Osprey and brought a huge
bunch of perennial sunflowers and Michaelmas daisies, "just the
old flowers there were in your room," said my aunt, with a
relentless eye on me. I didn't get any talk alone with Beatrice
then, and she took occasion to tell us she was going to London
for some indefinite number of weeks. I couldn't even pledge her
to write to me, and when she did it was a brief, enigmatical,
friendly letter with not a word of the reality between us.
I wrote back a love letter--my first love letter--and she made no
reply for eight days. Then came a scrawl: "I can't write
letters. Wait till we can talk. Are you better?"
I think the reader would be amused if he could see the papers on
my desk as I write all this, the mangled and disfigured pages,
the experimental arrangements of notes, the sheets of suggestions
balanced in constellations, the blottesque intellectual
battlegrounds over which I have been fighting. I find this
account of my relations to Beatrice quite the most difficult part
of my story to write. I happen to be a very objective-minded
person, I forget my moods, and this was so much an affair of
moods. And even such moods and emotions as I recall are very
difficult to convey. To me it is about as difficult as
describing a taste or a scent.
Then the objective story is made up of little things that are
difficult to set in a proper order. And love in an hysterical
passion, now high, now low, now exalted, and now intensely
physical. No one has ever yet dared to tell a love story
completely, its alternations, its comings and goings, its
debased moments, its hate. The love stories we tell, tell only
the net consequence, the ruling effect....
How can I rescue from the past now the mystical quality of
Beatrice; my intense longing for her; the overwhelming,
irrational, formless desire? How can I explain how intimately
that worship mingled with a high, impatient resolve to make her
mine, to take her by strength and courage, to do my loving in a
violent heroic manner? And then the doubts, the puzzled arrest
at the fact of her fluctuations, at her refusal to marry me, at
the fact that even when at last she returned to Bedley Corner she
seemed to evade me?
That exasperated me and perplexed me beyond measure.
I felt that it was treachery. I thought of every conceivable
explanation, and the most exalted and romantic confidence in her
did not simply alternate, but mingled with the basest misgivings.
And into the tangle of memories comes the figure of Carnaby,
coming out slowly from the background to a position of
significance, as an influence, as a predominant strand in the
nets that kept us apart, as a rival. What were the forces that
pulled her away from me when it was so clearly manifest she loved
me? Did she think of marrying him? Had I invaded some
long-planned scheme? It was evident he did not like me, that in
some way I spoilt the world for him. She returned to Bedley
Corner, and for some weeks she was flitting about me, and never
once could I have talk with her alone. When she came to my sheds
Carnaby was always with her, jealously observant. (Why the devil
couldn't she send him about his business?) The days slipped by
and my anger gathered.
All this mingles with the making of Lord Roberts B. I had
resolved upon that one night as I lay awake at Bedley Corner; I
got it planned out before the bandages were off my face. I
conceived this second navigable balloon in a grandiose manner.
It was to be a second Lord Roberts A, only more so; it was to be
three times as big, large enough to carry three men, and it was
to be an altogether triumphant vindication of my claims upon the
air. The framework was to be hollow like a bird's bones,
airtight, and the air pumped in or out, and the weight of fuel I
carried changed. I talked much and boasted to Cothope--whom I
suspected of scepticisms about this new type--of what it would
do, and it progressed--slowly. It progressed slowly because I
was restless and uncertain. At times I would go away to London
to snatch some chance of seeing Beatrice there, at times nothing
but a day of gliding and hard and dangerous exercise would
satisfy me. And now in the newspapers, in conversation, in
everything about me, arose a new invader of my mental states.
Something was happening to the great schemes of my uncle's
affairs; people were beginning to doubt, to question. It was the
first quiver of his tremendous insecurity, the first wobble of
that gigantic credit top he had kept spinning so long.
There were comings and goings, November and December slipped by.
I had two unsatisfactory meetings with Beatrice, meetings that
had no privacy--in which we said things of the sort that need
atmosphere, baldly and furtively. I wrote to her several times
and she wrote back notes that I would sometimes respond to
altogether, sometimes condemn as insincere evasions. "You don't
understand. I can't just now explain. Be patient with me.
Leave things a little while to me." She wrote.
I would talk aloud to these notes and wrangle over them in my
workroom--while the plans of Lord Roberts B waited.
"You don't give me a chance!" I would say. "Why don't you let me
know the secret? That's what I'm for--to settle difficulties!
to tell difficulties to!"
And at last I could hold out no longer against these accumulating
pressures.
I took an arrogant, outrageous line that left her no loopholes; I
behaved as though we were living in a melodrama.
"You must come and talk to me," I wrote, "or I will come and take
you. I want you--and the time runs away."
We met in a ride in the upper plantations. It must have been
early in January, for there was snow on the ground and on the
branches of the trees. We walked to and fro for an hour or more,
and from the first I pitched the key high in romance and made
understandings impossible. It was our worst time together. I
boasted like an actor, and she, I know not why, was tired and
spiritless.
Now I think over that talk in the light of all that has happened
since, I can imagine how she came to me full of a human appeal I
was too foolish to let her make. I don't know. I confess I have
never completely understood Beatrice. I confess I am still
perplexed at many things she said and did. That afternoon,
anyhow, I was impossible. I posed and scolded. I was--I said
it--for "taking the Universe by the throat!"
"If it was only that," she said, but though I heard, I did not
heed her.
At last she gave way to me and talked no more. Instead she
looked at me--as a thing beyond her controlling, but none the
less interesting--much as she had looked at me from behind the
skirts of Lady Drew in the Warren when we were children together.
Once even I thought she smiled faintly.
"What are the difficulties" I cried. "there's no difficulty I
will not overcome for you! Do your people think I'm no equal for
you? Who says it? My dear, tell me to win a title! I'll do it
in five years!...
"Here am I just grown a man at the sight of you. I have wanted
something to fight for. Let me fight for you!...
"I'm rich without intending it. Let me mean it, give me an
honourable excuse for it, and I'll put all this rotten old Warren
of England at your feet!"
I said such things as that. I write them down here in all their
resounding base pride. I said these empty and foolish things,
and they are part of me. Why should I still cling to pride and
be ashamed? I shouted her down.
I passed from such megalomania to petty accusations.
"You think Carnaby is a better man than I?" I said.
"No!" she cried, stung to speech. "No!"
"You think we're unsubstantial. You've listened to all these
rumours Boom has started because we talked of a newspaper of our
own. When you are with me you know I'm a man; when you get away
from me you think I'm a cheat and a cad.... There's not a word
of truth in the things they say about us. I've been slack. I've
left things. But we have only to exert ourselves. You do not
know how wide and far we have spread our nets. Even now we have
a coup--an expedition--in hand. It will put us on a footing."...
Her eyes asked mutely and asked in vain that I would cease to
boast of the very qualities she admired in me.
In the night I could not sleep for thinking of that talk and the
vulgar things I had said in it. I could not understand the drift
my mind had taken. I was acutely disgusted. And my unwonted
doubts about myself spread from a merely personal discontent to
our financial position. It was all very well to talk as I had
done of wealth and power and peerages, but what did I know
nowadays of my uncle's position? Suppose in the midst of such
boasting and confidence there came some turn I did not suspect,
some rottenness he had concealed from me? I resolved I had been
playing with aeronautics long enough; that next morning I would
go to him and have things clear between us.
I caught an early train and went up to the Hardingham.
I went up to the Hardingham through a dense London fog to see how
things really stood. Before I had talked to my uncle for ten
minutes I felt like a man who has just awakened in a bleak,
inhospitable room out of a grandiose dream.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
HOW I STOLE THE HEAPS OF QUAP FROM MORDET ISLAND
I
"We got to make a fight for it," said my uncle. "We got to face
the music!"
I remember that even at the sight of him I had a sense of
impending calamity. He sat under the electric light with the
shadow of his hair making bars down his face. He looked
shrunken, and as though his skin had suddenly got loose and
yellow. The decorations of the room seemed to have lost
freshness, and outside the blinds were up--there was not so much
fog as a dun darkness. One saw the dingy outlines of the
chimneys opposite quite distinctly, and then a sky of such brown
as only London can display.
"I saw a placard," I said: "'More Ponderevity.'"
"That's Boom," he said. "Boom and his damned newspapers. He's
trying to fight me down. Ever since I offered to buy the Daily
Decorator he's been at me. And he thinks consolidating Do Ut cut
down the ads. He wants everything, damn him! He's got no sense
of dealing. I'd like to bash his face!"
"Well," I said, "what's to be done?"
"Keep going," said my uncle.
"I'll smash Boom yet," he said, with sudden savagery.
"Nothing else?" I asked.
"We got to keep going. There's a scare on. Did you notice the
rooms? Half the people out there this morning are reporters.
And if I talk they touch it up!... They didn't used to touch
things up! Now they put in character touches--insulting you.
Don't know what journalism's coming to. It's all Boom's doing."
He cursed Lord Boom with considerable imaginative vigour.
"Well," said I, "what can he do?"
"Shove us up against time, George; make money tight for us. We
been handling a lot of money--and he tightens us up."
"We're sound?"
"Oh, we're sound, George. Trust me for that! But all the same--
There's such a lot of imagination in these things.... We're
sound enough. That's not it."
He blew. "Damn Boom!" he said, and his eyes over his glasses met
mine defiantly.
"We can't, I suppose, run close hauled for a bitstop
expenditure?"
"Where?"
"Well,--Crest Hill"
"What!" he shouted. "Me stop Crest Hill for Boom!" He waved a
fist as if to hit his inkpot, and controlled himself with
difficulty. He spoke at last in a reasonable voice. "If I did,"
he said, "he'd kick up a fuss. It's no good, even if I wanted
to. Everybody's watching the place. If I was to stop building
we'd be down in a week."
He had an idea. "I wish I could do something to start a strike
or something. No such luck. Treat those workmen a sight too
well. No, sink or swim, Crest Hill goes on until we're under
water."
I began to ask questions and irritated him instantly.
"Oh, dash these explanations, George!" he cried; "You only make
things look rottener than they are. It's your way. It isn't a
case of figures. We're all right--there's only one thing we got
to do."
"Yes?"
"Show value, George. That's where this quap comes in; that's why
I fell in so readily with what you brought to me week before
last. Here we are, we got our option on the perfect filament,
and all we want's canadium. Nobody knows there's more canadium
in the world than will go on the edge of a sixpence except me and
you. Nobody has an idee the perfect filament's more than just a
bit of theorising. Fifty tons of quap and we'd turn that bit of
theorising into something. We'd make the lamp trade sit on its
tail and howl. We'd put Ediswan and all of 'em into a parcel
withour last year's trousers and a hat, and swap 'em off for a
pot ofgeraniums. See? We'd do it through Business
Organisations, and there you are! See? Capern's Patent Filament!
The Ideal and the Real! George, we'll do it! We'll bring it
off! And then we'll give such a facer to Boom, he'll think for
fifty years. He's laying up for our London and African meeting.
Let him. He can turn the whole paper on to us. He says the
Business Organisations shares aren't worth fifty-two and we quote
'em at eighty-four. Well, here we are gettin' ready for
him--loading our gun."
His pose was triumphant.
"Yes," I said, "that's all right. But I can't help thinking
where should we be if we hadn't just by accident got Capern's
Perfect Filament. Because, you know it was an accident--my
buying up that."
He crumpled up his nose into an expression of impatient distaste
at my unreasonableness.
"And after all, the meeting's in June, and you haven't begun to
get the quap! After all, we've still got to load our gun."
"They start on Toosday."
"Have they got the brig?"
"They've got a brig."
"Gordon-Nasmyth!" I doubted.
"Safe as a bank," he said. "More I see of that man the more I
like him. All I wish is we'd got a steamer instead of a sailing
ship"
"And," I went on, "you seem to overlook what used to weigh with
us a bit. This canadium side of the business and the Capern
chance has rushed you off your legs. After all--it's stealing,
and in its way an international outrage. They've got two
gunboats on the coast."
I jumped up and went and stared out at the fog.
"And, by Jove, it's about our only chance! I didn't dream."
I turned on him. "I've been up in the air," I said.
"Heaven knows where I haven't been. And here's our only
chance--and you give it to that adventurous lunatic to play in
his own way--in a brig!"
"Well, you had a voice--"
"I wish I'd been in this before. We ought to have run out a
steamer to Lagos or one of those West Coast places and done it
from there. Fancy a brig in the channel at this time of year, if
it blows southwest!"
"I dessay you'd have shoved it, George. Still you know,
George.... I believe in him."
"Yes," I said. "Yes, I believe in him, too. In a way. Still--"
We took up a telegram that was lying on his desk and opened it.
His face became a livid yellow. He put the flimsy paper down
with a slow, reluctant movement and took off his glasses.
"George," he said, "the luck's against us."
"What?"
He grimaced with his mouth--in the queerest way at the telegram.
"That."
I took it up and read:
"Motor smash compound fracture of the leg gordon nasmyth what
price mordet now"
For a moment neither of us spoke.
"That's all right," I said at last.
"Eh?" said my uncle.
"I'M going. I'll get that quap or bust."
II
I had a ridiculous persuasion that I was "saving the situation."
"I'm going," I said quite consciously and dramatically. I saw
the whole affair--how shall I put it?--in American colours.
I sat down beside him. "Give me all the data you've got," I
said, "and I'll pull this thing off."
"But nobody knows exactly where--"
"Nasmyth does, and he'll tell me."
"He's been very close," said my uncle, and regarded me.
"He'll tell me all right, now he's smashed."
He thought. "I believe he will."
"George," he said, "if you pull this thing off--Once or twice
before you've stepped in--with that sort of Woosh of yours--"
He left the sentence unfinished.
"Give me that note-book," I said, "and tell me all you know.
Where's the ship? Where's Pollack? And where's that telegram
from? If that quap's to be got, I'll get it or bust. If you'll
hold on here until I get back with it."...
And so it was I jumped into the wildest adventure of my life.
I requisitioned my uncle's best car forthwith. I went down that
night to the place of despatch named on Nasmyth's telegram,
Bampton S.O. Oxon, routed him out with a little trouble from
that centre, made things right with him and got his explicit
directions; and I was inspecting the Maud Mary with young
Pollack, his cousin and aide, the following afternoon. She was
rather a shock to me and not at all in my style, a beast of a
brig inured to the potato trade, and she reeked from end to end
with the faint, subtle smell of raw potatoes so that it prevailed
even over the temporary smell of new paint. She was a beast of a
brig, all hold and dirty framework, and they had ballasted her
with old iron and old rails and iron sleepers, and got a
miscellaneous lot of spades and iron wheelbarrows against the
loading of the quap. I thought her over with Pollack, one of
those tall blond young men who smoke pipes and don't help much,
and then by myself, and as a result I did my best to sweep
Gravesend clean of wheeling planks, and got in as much cord and
small rope as I could for lashing. I had an idea we might need
to run up a jetty. In addition to much ballast she held,
remotely hidden in a sort of inadvertent way a certain number of
ambiguous cases which I didn't examine, but which I gathered were
a provision against the need of a trade.
The captain was a most extraordinary creature, under the
impression we were after copper ore; he was a Roumanian Jew,
with twitching, excitable features, who had made his way to a
certificate after some preliminary naval experiences in the Black
Sea. The mate was an Essex man of impenetrable reserve. The
crew were astoundingly ill-clad and destitute and dirty; most of
them youths, unwashed, out of colliers. One, the cook was a
mulatto; and one, the best-built fellow of them all, was a
Breton. There was some subterfuge about our position on board--I
forget the particulars now--I was called the supercargo and
Pollack was the steward. This added to the piratical flavour
that insufficient funds and Gordon-Nasmyth's original genius had
already given the enterprise.
Those two days of bustle at Gravesend, under dingy skies, in
narrow, dirty streets, were a new experience for me. It is like
nothing else in my life. I realised that I was a modern and a
civilised man. I found the food filthy and the coffee horrible;
the whole town stank in my nostrils, the landlord of the Good
Intent on the quay had a stand-up quarrel with us before I could
get even a hot bath, and the bedroom I slept in was infested by a
quantity of exotic but voracious flat parasites called locally
"bugs," in the walls, in the woodwork, everywhere. I fought
them with insect powder, and found them comatose in the morning.
I was dipping down into the dingy underworld of the contemporary
state, and I liked it no better than I did my first dip into it
when I stayed with my Uncle Nicodemus Frapp at the bakery at
Chatham--where, by-the-by, we had to deal with cockroaches of a
smaller, darker variety, and also with bugs of sorts.
Let me confess that through all this time before we started I was
immensely self-conscious, and that Beatrice played the part of
audience in my imagination throughout. I was, as I say, "saving
the situation," and I was acutely aware of that. The evening
before we sailed, instead of revising our medicine-chest as I
had intended, I took the car and ran across country to Lady Grove
to tell my aunt of the journey I was making, dress, and astonish
Lady Osprey by an after dinner call.
The two ladies were at home and alone beside a big fire that
seemed wonderfully cheerful after the winter night. I remember
the effect of the little parlour in which they sat as very bright
and domestic. Lady Osprey, in a costume of mauve and lace, sat
on a chintz sofa and played an elaborately spread-out patience
by the light of a tall shaded lamp; Beatrice, in a whiteness
that showed her throat, smoked a cigarette in an armchair and
read with a lamp at her elbow. The room was white-panelled and
chintz-curtained. About those two bright centres of light were
warm dark shadow, in which a circular mirror shone like a pool of
brown water. I carried off my raid by behaving like a slave of
etiquette. There were moments when I think I really made Lady
Osprey believe that my call was an unavoidable necessity, that
it would have been negligent of me not to call just how and when
I did. But at the best those were transitory moments.
They received me with disciplined amazement. Lady Osprey was
interested in my face and scrutinised the scar. Beatrice stood
behind her solicitude. Our eyes met, and in hers I could see
startled interrogations.
"I'm going," I said, "to the west coast of Africa."
They asked questions, but it suited my mood to be vague.
"We've interests there. It is urgent I should go. I don't know
when I may return."
After that I perceived Beatrice surveyed me steadily.
The conversation was rather difficult. I embarked upon lengthy
thanks for their kindness to me after my accident. I tried to
understand Lady Osprey's game of patience, but it didn't appear
that Lady Osprey was anxious for me to understand her patience.
I came to the verge of taking my leave
"You needn't go yet," said Beatrice, abruptly.
She walked across to the piano, took a pile of music from the
cabinet near, surveyed Lady Osprey's back, and with a gesture to
me dropped it all deliberately on to the floor.
"Must talk," she said, kneeling close to me as I helped her to
pick it up. "Turn my pages. At the piano."
"I can't read music."
"Turn my pages."
Presently we were at the piano, and Beatrice was playing with
noisy inaccuracy. She glanced over her shoulder and Lady Osprey
had resumed her patience. The old lady was very pink, and
appeared to be absorbed in some attempt to cheat herself without
our observing it.
"Isn't West Africa a vile climate?" "Are you going to live
there?" "Why are you going?"
Beatrice asked these questions in a low voice and gave me no
chance to answer. Then taking a rhythm from the music before
her, she said--
"At the back of the house is a garden--a door in the wall--on the
lane. Understand?"
I turned over the pages without any effect on her playing.
"When?" I asked.
She dealt in chords. "I wish I COULD play this!" she said.
"Midnight."
She gave her attention to the music for a time.
"You may have to wait."
"I'll wait."
She brought her playing to an end by--as school boys
say--"stashing it up."
"I can't play to-night," she said, standing up and meeting my
eyes. "I wanted to give you a parting voluntary."
"Was that Wagner, Beatrice?" asked Lady Osprey looking up from
her cards. "It sounded very confused."
I took my leave. I had a curious twinge of conscience as I
parted from Lady Osprey. Either a first intimation of
middle-age or my inexperience in romantic affairs was to blame,
but I felt a very distinct objection to the prospect of invading
this good lady's premises from the garden door. I motored up to
the pavilion, found Cothope reading in bed, told him for the
first time of West Africa, spent an hour with him in settling all
the outstanding details of Lord Roberts B, and left that in his
hands to finish against my return. I sent the motor back to Lady
Grove, and still wearing my fur coat--for the January night was
damp and bitterly cold--walked to Bedley Corner. I found the
lane to the back of the Dower House without any difficulty, and
was at the door in the wall with ten minutes to spare. I lit a
cigar and fell to walking up and down. This queer flavour of
intrigue, this nocturnal garden-door business, had taken me by
surprise and changed my mental altitudes. I was startled out of
my egotistical pose and thinking intently of Beatrice, of that
elfin quality in her that always pleased me, that always took me
by surprise, that had made her for example so instantly conceive
this meeting.
She came within a minute of midnight; the door opened softly and
she appeared, a short, grey figure in a motor-coat of sheepskin,
bareheaded to the cold drizzle. She flitted up to me, and her
eyes were shadows in her dusky face.
"Why are you going to West Africa?" she asked at once.
"Business crisis. I have to go."
"You're not going--? You're coming back?"
"Three or four months," I said, "at most."
"Then, it's nothing to do with me?"
"Nothing," I said. "Why should it have?"
"Oh, that's all right. One never knows what people think or what
people fancy." She took me by the arm, "Let's go for a walk,"
she said.
I looked about me at darkness and rain.
"That's all right," she laughed. "We can go along the lane and
into the Old Woking Road. Do you mind? Of course you don't. My
head. It doesn't matter. One never meets anybody."
"How do you know?"
"I've wandered like this before.... Of course. Did you
think"--she nodded her head back at her home--"that's all?"
"No, by Jove!" I cried; "it's manifest it isn't."
She took my arm and turned me down the lane. "Night's my time,"
she said by my side. "There's a touch of the werewolf in my
blood. One never knows in these old families.... I've wondered
often.... Here we are, anyhow, alone in the world. Just
darkness and cold and a sky of clouds and wet. And we--together.
I like the wet on my face and hair, don't you? When do you
sail?"
I told her to-morrow.
"Oh, well, there's no to-morrow now. You and I!" She stopped
and confronted me.
"You don't say a word except to answer!"
"No," I said.
"Last time you did all the talking."
"Like a fool. Now--"
We looked at each other's two dim faces. "You're glad to be
here?"
"I'm glad--I'm beginning to be--it's more than glad."
She put her hands on my shoulders and drew me down to kiss her.
"Ah!" she said, and for a moment or so we just clung to one
another.
"That's all," she said, releasing herself. "What bundles of
clothes we are to-night. I felt we should kiss some day again.
Always. The last time was ages ago."
"Among the fern stalks."
"Among the bracken. You remember. And your lips were cold.
Were mine? The same lips--after so long--after so much!... And
now let's trudge through this blotted-out world together for a
time. Yes, let me take your arm. Just trudge. See? Hold tight
to me because I know the way--and don't talk--don't talk. Unless
you want to talk.... Let me tell you things! You see, dear, the
whole world is blotted out--it's dead and gone, and we're in this
place. This dark wild place.... We're dead. Or all the world
is dead. No! We're dead. No one can see us. We're shadows.
We've got out of our positions, out of our bodies--and together.
That's the good thing of it--together. But that's why the world
can't see us and why we hardly see the world. Sssh! Is it all
right?"
"It's all right," I said.
We stumbled along for a time in a close silence. We passed a
dim-lit, rain-veiled window.
"The silly world," she said, "the silly world! It eats and
sleeps. If the wet didn't patter so from the trees we'd hear it
snoring. It's dreaming such stupid things--stupid judgments. It
doesn't know we are passing, we two--free of it--clear of it.
You and I!"
We pressed against each other reassuringly.
"I'm glad we're dead," she whispered. "I'm glad we're dead. I
was tired of it, dear. I was so tired of it, dear, and so
entangled."
She stopped abruptly.
We splashed through a string of puddles. I began to remember
things I had meant to say.
"Look here!" I cried. "I want to help you beyond measure. You
are entangled. What is the trouble? I asked you to marry me.
You said you would. But there's something."
My thoughts sounded clumsy as I said them.
"Is it something about my position?... Or is it
something--perhaps--about some other man?"
There was an immense assenting silence.
"You've puzzled me so. At first--I mean quite early--I thought
you meant to make me marry you."
"I did."
"And then?"
"To-night," she said after a long pause, "I can't explain. No!
I can't explain. I love you! But--explanations! To-night my
dear, here we are in the world alone--and the world doesn't
matter. Nothing matters. Here I am in the cold with you and my
bed away there deserted. I'd tell you--I will tell you when
things enable me to tell you, and soon enough they will. But
to-night--I won't--I won't."
She left my side and went in front of me.
She turned upon me. "Look here," she said, "I insist upon your
being dead. Do you understand? I'm not joking. To-night you
and I are out of life. It's our time together. There may be
other times, but this we won't spoil. We're--in Hades if you
like. Where there's nothing to hide and nothing to tell. No
bodies even. No bothers. We loved each other--down there--and
were kept apart, but now it doesn't matter. It's over.... If
you won't agree to that--I will go home."
"I wanted," I began.
"I know. Oh! my dear, if you'd only understand I understand. If
you'd only not care--and love me to-night."
"I do love you," I said.
"Then LOVE me," she answered, "and leave all the things that
bother you. Love me! Here I am!"
"But!--"
"No!" she said.
"Well, have your way."
So she carried her point, and we wandered into the night together
and Beatrice talked to me of love....
I'd never heard a woman before in all my life who could talk of
love, who could lay bare and develop and touch with imagination
all that mass of fine emotion every woman, it may be, hides. She
had read of love, she had thought of love, a thousand sweet
lyrics had sounded through her brain and left fine fragments in
her memory; she poured it out, all of it, shamelessly, skilfully,
for me. I cannot give any sense of that talk, I cannot even tell
how much of the delight of it was the magic of her voice, the
glow of her near presence. And always we walked swathed warmly
through a chilly air, along dim, interminable greasy roads--with
never a soul abroad it seemed to us, never a beast in the fields.
"Why do people love each other?" I said.
"Why not?"
"But why do I love you? Why is your voice better than any voice,
your face sweeter than any face?"
"And why do I love you?" she asked; "not only what is fine in
you, but what isn't? Why do I love your dullness, your
arrogance? For I do. To--night I love the very raindrops on the
fur of your coat!"...
So we talked; and at last very wet, still glowing but a little
tired, we parted at the garden door. We had been wandering for
two hours in our strange irrational community of happiness, and
all the world about us, and particularly Lady Osprey and her
household, had been asleep--and dreaming of anything rather than
Beatrice in the night and rain.
She stood in the doorway, a muffled figure with eyes that glowed.
"Come back," she whispered. "I shall wait for you."
She hesitated.
She touched the lapel of my coat. "I love you NOW," she said,
and lifted her face to mine.
I held her to me and was atremble from top to toe. "O God!" I
cried. "And I must go!"
She slipped from my arms and paused, regarding me. For an
instant the world seemed full of fantastic possibilities.
"Yes, GO!" she said, and vanished and slammed the door upon me,
leaving me alone like a man new fallen from fairyland in the
black darkness of the night.
III
That expedition to Mordet Island stands apart from all the rest
of my life, detached, a piece by itself with an atmosphere of
its own. It would, I suppose, make a book by itself--it has made
a fairly voluminous official report--but so far as this novel of
mine goes it is merely an episode, a contributory experience, and
I mean to keep it at that.
Vile weather, an impatient fretting against unbearable slowness
and delay, sea--sickness, general discomfort and humiliating
self--revelation are the master values of these memories.
I was sick all through the journey out. I don't know why. It
was the only time I was ever sea-sick, and I have seen some
pretty bad weather since I became a boat-builder. But that
phantom smell of potatoes was peculiarly vile to me. Coming back
on the brig we were all ill, every one of us, so soon as we got
to sea, poisoned, I firmly believe, by quap. On the way out
most of the others recovered in a few days, but the stuffiness
below, the coarse food, the cramped dirty accommodation kept me,
if not actually sea-sick, in a state of acute physical
wretchedness the whole time. The ship abounded in cockroaches
and more intimate vermin. I was cold all the time until after we
passed Cape Verde, then I became steamily hot; I had been too
preoccupied with Beatrice and my keen desire to get the Maud Mary
under way at once, to consider a proper wardrobe for myself, and
in particular I lacked a coat. Heavens! how I lacked that coat!
And, moreover, I was cooped up with two of the worst bores in
Christendom, Pollack and the captain. Pollack, after conducting
his illness in a style better adapted to the capacity of an opera
house than a small compartment, suddenly got insupportably well
and breezy, and produced a manly pipe in which he smoked a
tobacco as blond as himself, and divided his time almost equally
between smoking it and trying to clean it. "There's only three
things you can clean a pipe with," he used to remark with a twist
of paper in hand. "The best's a feather, the second's a straw,
and the third's a girl's hairpin. I never see such a ship. You
can't find any of 'em. Last time I came this way I did find
hairpins anyway, and found 'em on the floor of the captain's
cabin. Regular deposit. Eh?... Feelin' better?"
At which I usually swore.
"Oh, you'll be all right soon. Don't mind my puffin' a bit?
Eh?"
He never tired of asking me to "have a hand at Nap. Good game.
Makes you forget it, and that's half the battle."
He would sit swaying with the rolling of the ship and suck at his
pipe of blond tobacco and look with an inexpressibly sage but
somnolent blue eye at the captain by the hour together.
"Captain's a Card," he would say over and over again as the
outcome of these meditations. "He'd like to know what we're up
to. He'd like to know--no end."
That did seem to be the captain's ruling idea. But he also
wanted to impress me with the notion that he was a gentleman of
good family and to air a number of views adverse to the English,
to English literature, to the English constitution, and the like.
He had learnt the sea in the Roumanian navy, and English out of a
book; he would still at times pronounce the e's at the end of
"there" and "here"; he was a naturalised Englishman, and he drove
me into a reluctant and uncongenial patriotism by his everlasting
carping at things English. Pollack would set himself to "draw
him out." Heaven alone can tell how near I came to murder.
Fifty-three days I had outward, cooped up with these two and a
shy and profoundly depressed mate who read the Bible on Sundays
and spent the rest of his leisure in lethargy, three and fifty
days of life cooped up in a perpetual smell, in a persistent sick
hunger that turned from the sight of food, in darkness, cold and
wet, in a lightly ballasted ship that rolled and pitched and
swayed. And all the time the sands in the hour-glass of my
uncle's fortunes were streaming out. Misery! Amidst it all I
remember only one thing brightly, one morning of sunshine in the
Bay of Biscay and a vision of frothing waves, sapphire green, a
bird following our wake and our masts rolling about the sky.
Then wind and rain close in on us again.
You must not imagine they were ordinary days, days, I mean, of an
average length; they were not so much days as long damp slabs of
time that stretched each one to the horizon, and much of that
length was night. One paraded the staggering deck in a borrowed
sou'-wester hour after hour in the chilly, windy, splashing and
spitting darkness, or sat in the cabin, bored and ill, and
looked at the faces of those inseparable companions by the help
of a lamp that gave smell rather than light. Then one would see
going up, up, up, and then sinking down, down, down, Pollack,
extinct pipe in mouth, humorously observant, bringing his mind
slowly to the seventy-seventh decision that the captain was a
Card, while the words flowed from the latter in a nimble
incessant good. "Dis England eet is not a country aristocratic,
no! Eet is a glorified bourgeoisie! Eet is plutocratic. In
England dere is no aristocracy since de Wars of Roses. In the
rest of Europe east of the Latins, yes; in England, no.
"Eet is all middle-class, youra England. Everything you look
at, middle-class. Respectable! Everything good--eet is, you
say, shocking. Madame Grundy! Eet is all limited and computing
and self-seeking. Dat is why your art is so limited, youra
fiction, your philosophin, why you are all so inartistic. You
want nothing but profit! What will pay! What would you?"...
He had all those violent adjuncts to speech we Western Europeans
have abandoned, shruggings of the shoulders, waving of the arms,
thrusting out of the face, wonderful grimaces and twiddlings of
the hands under your nose until you wanted to hit them away. Day
after day it went on, and I had to keep any anger to myself, to
reserve myself for the time ahead when it would be necessary to
see the quap was got aboard and stowed--knee deep in this man's
astonishment. I knew he would make a thousand objections to all
we had before us. He talked like a drugged man. It ran glibly
over his tongue. And all the time one could see his seamanship
fretting him, he was gnawed by responsibility, perpetually
uneasy about the ship's position, perpetually imagining dangers.
If a sea hit us exceptionally hard he'd be out of the cabin in an
instant making an outcry of inquiries, and he was pursued by a
dread of the hold, of ballast shifting, of insidious wicked
leaks. As we drew near the African coast his fear of rocks and
shoals became infectious.
"I do not know dis coast," he used to say. "I cama hera because
Gordon-Nasmyth was coming too. Den he does not come!"
"Fortunes of war," I said, and tried to think in vain if any
motive but sheer haphazard could have guided Gordon-Nasmyth in
the choice of these two men. I think perhaps Gordon-Nasmyth had
the artistic temperament and wanted contrasts, and also that the
captain helped him to express his own malignant Anti-Britishism.
He was indeed an exceptionally inefficient captain. On the whole
I was glad I had come even at the eleventh hour to see to things.
(The captain, by-the-by, did at last, out of sheer nervousness,
get aground at the end of Mordet's Island, but we got off in an
hour or so with a swell and a little hard work in the boat.)
I suspected the mate of his opinion of the captain long before he
expressed it. He was, I say, a taciturn man, but one day speech
broke through him. He had been sitting at the table with his
arms folded on it, musing drearily, pipe in mouth, and the voice
of the captain drifted down from above.
The mate lifted his heavy eyes to me and regarded me for a
moment. Then he began to heave with the beginnings of speech.
He disembarrassed himself of his pipe. I cowered with
expectation. Speech was coming at last. Before he spoke he
nodded reassuringly once or twice.
"E--"
He moved his head strangely and mysteriously, but a child might
have known he spoke of the captain.
"E's a foreigner."
He regarded me doubtfully for a time, and at last decided for the
sake of lucidity to clench the matter.
"That's what E is--a DAGO!"
He nodded like a man who gives a last tap to a nail, and I could
see he considered his remark well and truly laid. His face,
though still resolute, became as tranquil and uneventful as a
huge hall after a public meeting has dispersed out of it, and
finally he closed and locked it with his pipe.
"Roumanian Jew, isn't he?" I said.
He nodded darkly and almost forbiddingly.
More would have been too much. The thing was said. But from
that time forth I knew I could depend upon him and that he and I
were friends. It happens I never did have to depend upon him,
but that does not affect our relationship.
Forward the crew lived lives very much after the fashion of ours,
more crowded, more cramped and dirty, wetter, steamier, more
verminous. The coarse food they had was still not so coarse but
that they did not think they were living "like fighting cocks."
So far as I could make out they were all nearly destitute men;
hardly any of them had a proper sea outfit, and what small
possessions they had were a source of mutual distrust. And as
we pitched and floundered southward they gambled and fought, were
brutal to one another, argued and wrangled loudly, until we
protested at the uproar.
There's no romance about the sea in a small sailing ship as I saw
it. The romance is in the mind of the landsman dreamer. These
brigs and schooners and brigantines that still stand out from
every little port are relics from an age of petty trade, as
rotten and obsolescent as a Georgian house that has sunken into a
slum. They are indeed just floating fragments of slum, much as
icebergs are floating fragments of glacier. The civilised man who
has learnt to wash, who has developed a sense of physical
honour, of cleanly temperate feeding, of time, can endure them no
more. They pass, and the clanking coal-wasting steamers will
follow them, giving place to cleaner, finer things....
But so it was I made my voyage to Africa, and came at last into a
world of steamy fogs and a hot smell of vegetable decay, and into
sound and sight of surf and distant intermittent glimpses of the
coast. I lived a strange concentrated life through all that
time, such a life as a creature must do that has fallen in a
well. All my former ways ceased, all my old vistas became
memories.
The situation I was saving was very small and distant now; I felt
its urgency no more. Beatrice and Lady Grove, my uncle and the
Hardingham, my soaring in the air and my habitual wide vision of
swift effectual things, became as remote as if they were in some
world I had left for ever....
IV
All these African memories stand by themselves. It was for me an
expedition into the realms of undisciplined nature out of the
world that is ruled by men, my first bout with that hot side of
our mother that gives you the jungle--that cold side that gives
you the air-eddy I was beginning to know passing well. They are
memories woven upon a fabric of sunshine and heat and a constant
warm smell of decay. They end in rain--such rain as I had never
seen before, a vehement, a frantic downpouring of water, but our
first slow passage through the channels behind Mordet's Island
was in incandescent sunshine.
There we go in my memory still, a blistered dirty ship with
patched sails and a battered mermaid to present Maud Mary,
sounding and taking thought between high ranks of forest whose
trees come out knee-deep at last in the water. There we go
with a little breeze on our quarter, Mordet Island rounded and
the quap, it might be within a day of us.
Here and there strange blossoms woke the dank intensities of
green with a trumpet call of colour. Things crept among the
jungle and peeped and dashed back rustling into stillness.
Always in the sluggishly drifting, opaque water were eddyings
and stirrings; little rushes of bubbles came chuckling up
light-heartedly from this or that submerged conflict and
tragedy; now and again were crocodiles like a stranded fleet of
logs basking in the sun. Still it was by day, a dreary stillness
broken only by insect sounds and the creaking and flapping of our
progress, by the calling of the soundings and the captain's
confused shouts; but in the night as we lay moored to a clump of
trees the darkness brought a thousand swampy things to life and
out of the forest came screaming and howlings, screaming and
yells that made us glad to be afloat. And once we saw between
the tree stems long blazing fires. We passed two or three
villages landward, and brown-black women and children came and
stared at us and gesticulated, and once a man came out in a boat
from a creek and hailed us in an unknown tongue; and so at last
we came to a great open place, a broad lake rimmed with a
desolation of mud and bleached refuse and dead trees, free from
crocodiles or water birds or sight or sound of any living thing,
and saw far off, even as Nasmyth had described, the ruins of the
deserted station, and hard by two little heaps of buff-hued
rubbish under a great rib of rock, the quap! The forest receded.
The land to the right of us fell away and became barren, and far
on across notch in its backbone was surf and the sea.
We took the ship in towards those heaps and the ruined jetty
slowly and carefully. The captain came and talked.
"This is eet?" he said.
"Yes," said I.
"Is eet for trade we have come?"
This was ironical.
"No," said I.
"Gordon-Nasmyth would haf told me long ago what it ees for we
haf come."
"I'll tell you now," I said. "We are going to lay in as close as
we can to those two heaps of stuff--you see them?--under the
rock. Then we are going to chuck all our ballast overboard and
take those in. Then we're going home."
"May I presume to ask--is eet gold?"
"No," I said incivilly, "it isn't."
"Then what is it?"
"It's stuff--of some commercial value."
"We can't do eet," he said.
"We can," I answered reassuringly.
"We can't," he said as confidently. "I don't mean what you mean.
You know so liddle--But--dis is forbidden country."
I turned on him suddenly angry and met bright excited eyes. For
a minute we scrutinised one another. Then I said, "That's our
risk. Trade is forbidden. But this isn't trade.... This thing's
got to be done."
His eyes glittered and he shook his head....
The brig stood in slowly through the twilight toward this strange
scorched and blistered stretch of beach, and the man at the wheel
strained his ears to listening the low-voiced angry argument
that began between myself and the captain, that was presently
joined by Pollack. We moored at last within a hundred yards of
our goal, and all through our dinner and far into the night we
argued intermittently and fiercely with the captain about our
right to load just what we pleased. "I will haf nothing to do
with eet," he persisted. "I wash my hands." It seemed that
night as though we argued in vain. "If it is not trade," he
said, "it is prospecting and mining. That is worse. Any one who
knows anything--outside England--knows that is worse."
We argued and I lost my temper and swore at him. Pollack kept
cooler and chewed his pipe watchfully with that blue eye of his
upon the captain's gestures. Finally I went on deck to cool.
The sky was overcast I discovered all the men were in a knot
forward, staring at the faint quivering luminosity that had
spread over the heaps of quap, a phosphorescence such as one sees
at times on rotting wood. And about the beach east and west
there were patches and streaks of something like diluted
moonshine....
In the small hours I was still awake and turning over scheme
after scheme in my mind whereby I might circumvent the captain's
opposition. I meant to get that quap aboard if I had to kill
some one to do it. Never in my life had I been so thwarted!
After this intolerable voyage! There came a rap at my cabin door
and then it opened and I made out a bearded face. "Come in," I
said, and a black voluble figure I could just see obscurely came
in to talk in my private ear and fill my cabin with its
whisperings and gestures. It was the captain. He, too, had been
awake and thinking things over. He had come to
explain--enormously. I lay there hating him and wondering if I
and Pollack could lock him in his cabin and run the ship without
him. "I do not want to spoil dis expedition," emerged from a
cloud of protestations, and then I was able to disentangle "a
commission--shush a small commission--for special risks!"
"Special risks" became frequent. I let him explain himself out.
It appeared he was also demanding an apology for something I had
said. No doubt I had insulted him generously. At last came
definite offers. I broke my silence and bargained.
"Pollack!" I cried and hammered the partition.
"What's up?" asked Pollack.
I stated the case concisely.
There came a silence.
"He's a Card," said Pollack. "Let's give him his commission. I
don't mind."
"Eh?" I cried.
"I said he was a Card, that's all," said Pollack. "I'm coming."
He appeared in my doorway a faint white figure joined our
vehement whisperings.
We had to buy the captain off; we had to promise him ten per
cent. of our problematical profits. We were to give him ten per
cent. on what we sold the cargo for over and above his
legitimate pay, and I found in my out-bargained and disordered
state small consolation in the thought that I, as the
Gordon-Nasmyth expedition, was to sell the stuff to myself as
Business Organisations. And he further exasperated me by
insisting on having our bargain in writing. "In the form of a
letter," he insisted.
"All right," I acquiesced, "in the form of a letter. Here goes!
Get a light!"
"And the apology," he said, folding up the letter.
"All right," I said; "Apology."
My hand shook with anger as I wrote, and afterwards I could not
sleep for hate of him. At last I got up. I suffered, I found,
from an unusual clumsiness. I struck my toe against my cabin
door, and cut myself as I shaved. I found myself at last pacing
the deck under the dawn in a mood of extreme exasperation. The
sun rose abruptly and splashed light blindingly into my eyes and
I swore at the sun. I found myself imagining fresh obstacles
with the men and talking aloud in anticipatory rehearsal of the
consequent row.
The malaria of the quap was already in my blood.
V
Sooner or later the ridiculous embargo that now lies upon all the
coast eastward of Mordet Island will be lifted and the reality of
the deposits of quap ascertained. I am sure that we were merely
taking the outcrop of a stratum of nodulated deposits that dip
steeply seaward. Those heaps were merely the crumbled out
contents of two irregular cavities in the rock; they are as
natural as any talus or heap of that kind, and the mud along the
edge of the water for miles is mixed with quap, and is
radio-active and lifeless and faintly phosphorescent at night.
But the reader will find the full particulars of my impression of
all this in the Geological Magazine for October, l905, and to
that I must refer him. There, too, he will find my unconfirmed
theories of its nature. If I am right it is something far more
significant from the scientific point of view than those
incidental constituents of various rare metals, pitchblende,
rutile, and the like, upon which the revolutionary discoveries of
the last decade are based. Those are just little molecular
centres of disintegration, of that mysterious decay and rotting
of those elements, elements once regarded as the most stable
things in nature. But there is something--the only word that
comes near it is CANCEROUS--and that is not very near, about
the whole of quap, something that creeps and lives as a disease
lives by destroying; an elemental stirring and disarrangement,
incalculably maleficent and strange.
This is no imaginative comparison of mine. To my mind
radio-activity is a real disease of matter. Moreover, it is a
contagious disease. It spreads. You bring those debased and
crumbling atoms near others and those too presently catch the
trick of swinging themselves out of coherent existence. It is
in matter exactly what the decay of our old culture is in
society, a loss of traditions and distinctions and assured
reactions. When I think of these inexplicable dissolvent centres
that have come into being in our globe--these quap heaps are
surely by far the largest that have yet been found in the world;
the rest as yet mere specks in grains and crystals--I am haunted
by a grotesque fancy of the ultimate eating away and dry-rotting
and dispersal of all our world. So that while man still
struggles and dreams his very substance will change and crumble
from beneath him. I mention this here as a queer persistent
fancy. Suppose, indeed, that is to be the end of our planet; no
splendid climax and finale, no towering accumulation of
achievements, but just--atomic decay! I add that to the ideas of
the suffocating comet, the dark body out of space, the burning
out of the sun, the distorted orbit, as a new and far more
possible end--as Science can see ends--to this strange by-play
of matter that we call human life. I do not believe this can be
the end; no human soul can believe in such an end and go on
living, but to it science points as a possible thing, science and
reason alike. If single human beings--if one single ricketty
infant--can be born as it were by accident and die futile, why
not the whole race? These are questions I have never answered,
that now I never attempt to answer, but the thought of quap and
its mysteries brings them back to me.
I can witness that the beach and mud for two miles or more either
way was a lifeless beach--lifeless as I could have imagined no
tropical mud could ever be, and all the dead branches and leaves
and rotting dead fish and so forth that drifted ashore became
presently shrivelled and white. Sometimes crocodiles would come
up out of the water and bask, and now and then water birds would
explore the mud and rocky ribs that rose out of it, in a mood of
transitory speculation. That was its utmost admiration. And
the air felt at once hot and austere, dry and blistering, and
altogether different the warm moist embrace that had met us at
our first African landfall and to which we had grown accustomed.
I believe that the primary influence of the quap upon us was to
increase the conductivity of our nerves, but that is a mere
unjustifiable speculation on my part. At any rate it gave a sort
of east wind effect to life. We all became irritable, clumsy,
languid and disposed to be impatient with our languor. We moored
the brig to the rocks with difficulty, and got aground on mud and
decided to stick there and tow off when we had done--the bottom
was as greasy as butter. Our efforts to fix up planks and
sleepers in order to wheel the quap aboard were as ill-conceived
as that sort of work can be--and that sort of work can at times
be very ill-conceived. The captain had a superstitious fear of
his hold: he became wildly gesticulatory and expository and
incompetent at the bare thought of it. His shouts still echo in
my memory, becoming as each crisis approached less and less like
any known tongue.
But I cannot now write the history of those days of blundering
and toil: of how Milton, one of the boys, fell from a plank to
the beach, thirty feet perhaps, with his barrow and broke his arm
and I believe a rib, of how I and Pollack set the limb and nursed
him through the fever that followed, of how one man after another
succumbed to a feverish malaria, and how I--by virtue of my
scientific reputation--was obliged to play the part of doctor and
dose them with quinine, and then finding that worse than nothing,
with rum and small doses of Easton's Syrup, of which there
chanced to be a case of bottles aboard--Heaven and
Gordon-Nasmyth know why. For three long days we lay in misery
and never shipped a barrow-load. Then, when they resumed, the
men's hands broke out into sores. There were no gloves
available; and I tried to get them, while they shovelled and
wheeled, to cover their hands with stockings or greased rags.
They would not do this on account of the heat and discomfort.
This attempt of mine did, however, direct their attention to the
quap as the source of their illness and precipitated what in the
end finished our lading, an informal strike. "We've had enough
of this," they said, and they meant it. They came aft to say as
much. They cowed the captain.
Through all these days the weather was variously vile, first a
furnace heat under a sky of a scowling intensity of blue, then a
hot fog that stuck in one's throat like wool and turned the men
on the planks into colourless figures of giants, then a wild
burst of thunderstorms, mad elemental uproar and rain. Through
it all, against illness, heat, confusion of mind, one master
impetus prevailed with me, to keep the shipping going, to
maintain one motif at least, whatever else arose or ceased, the
chuff of the spades, the squeaking and shriek of the barrows, the
pluppa, pluppa, pluppa, as the men came trotting along the
swinging high planks, and then at last, the dollop, dollop, as
the stuff shot into the hold. "Another barrow-load, thank God!
Another fifteen hundred, or it may be two thousand pounds, for
the saving of Ponderevo!...!"
I found out many things about myself and humanity in those weeks
of effort behind Mordet Island. I understand now the heart of
the sweater, of the harsh employer, of the nigger-driver. I had
brought these men into a danger they didn't understand, I was
fiercely resolved to overcome their opposition and bend and use
them for my purpose, and I hated the men. But I hated all
humanity during the time that the quap was near me.
And my mind was pervaded, too, by a sense of urgency and by the
fear that we should be discovered and our proceedings stopped. I
wanted to get out to sea again--to be beating up northward with
our plunder. I was afraid our masts showed to seaward and might
betray us to some curious passer on the high sea. And one
evening near the end I saw a canoe with three natives far off
down the lake; I got field-glasses from the captain and
scrutinised them, and I could see them staring at us. One man
might have been a half-breed and was dressed in white. They
watched us for some time very quietly and then paddled off into
some channel in the forest shadows.
And for three nights running, so that it took a painful grip
upon my inflamed imagination, I dreamt of my uncle's face, only
that it was ghastly white like a clown's, and the throat was cut
from ear to ear--a long ochreous cut. "Too late," he said; "Too
late!..."
VI
A day or so after we had got to work upon the quap I found myself
so sleepless and miserable that the ship became unendurable.
Just before the rush of sunrise I borrowed Pollack's gun, walked
down the planks, clambered over the quap heaps and prowled along
the beach. I went perhaps a mile and a half that day and some
distance beyond the ruins of the old station. I became
interested in the desolation about me, and found when I returned
that I was able to sleep for nearly an hour. It was delightful
to have been alone for so long,--no captain, no Pollack, no one.
Accordingly I repeated this expedition the next morning and the
next until it became a custom with me. There was little for me
to do once the digging and wheeling was organised, and so these
prowlings of mine grew longer and longer, and presently I began
to take food with me.
I pushed these walks far beyond the area desolated by the quap.
On the edges of that was first a zone of stunted vegetation, then
a sort of swampy jungle that was difficult to penetrate, and then
the beginnings of the forest, a scene of huge tree stems and
tangled creeper ropes and roots mingled with oozy mud. Here I
used to loaf in a state between botanising and reverie--always
very anxious to know what was up above in the sunlight--and here
it was I murdered a man.
It was the most unmeaning and purposeless murder imaginable.
Even as I write down its well-remembered particulars there comes
again the sense of its strangeness, its pointlessness, its
incompatibility with any of the neat and definite theories people
hold about life and the meaning of the world. I did this thing
and I want to tell of my doing it, but why I did it and
particularly why I should be held responsible for it I cannot
explain.
That morning I had come upon a track in the forest, and it had
occurred to me as a disagreeable idea that this was a human
pathway. I didn't want to come upon any human beings. The less
our expedition saw of the African population the better for its
prospects. Thus far we had been singularly free from native
pestering. So I turned back and was making my way over mud and
roots and dead fronds and petals scattered from the green world
above when abruptly I saw my victim.
I became aware of him perhaps forty feet off standing quite
still and regarding me.
He wasn't by any means a pretty figure. He was very black and
naked except for a dirty loin-cloth, his legs were ill-shaped
and his toes spread wide and the upper edge of his cloth and a
girdle of string cut his clumsy abdomen into folds. His forehead
was low, his nose very flat and his lower lip swollen and
purplish-red. His hair was short and fuzzy, and about his neck
was a string and a little purse of skin. He carried a musket,
and a powder-flask was stuck in his girdle. It was a curious
confrontation. There opposed to him stood I, a little soiled,
perhaps, but still a rather elaborately civilised human being,
born, bred and trained in a vague tradition. In my hand was an
unaccustomed gun. And each of us was essentially a teeming,
vivid brain, tensely excited by the encounter, quite unaware of
the other's mental content or what to do with him.
He stepped back a pace or so, stumbled and turned to run.
"Stop," I cried; "stop, you fool!" and started to run after him,
shouting such things in English. But I was no match for him over
the roots and mud.
I had a preposterous idea. "He mustn't get away and tell them!"
And with that instantly I brought both feet together, raised my
gun, aimed quite coolly, drew the trigger carefully and shot him
neatly in the back.
I saw, and saw with a leap of pure exaltation, the smash of my
bullet between his shoulder blades. "Got him," said I, dropping
my gun and down he flopped and died without a groan. "By Jove!"
I cried with note of surprise, "I've killed him!" I looked about
me and then went forward cautiously, in a mood between curiosity
and astonishment, to look at this man whose soul I had flung so
unceremoniously out of our common world. I went to him, not as
one goes to something one has made or done, but as one approaches
something found.
He was frightfully smashed out in front; he must have died in the
instant. I stooped and raised him by his shoulder and realised
that. I dropped him, and stood about and peered about me through
the trees. "My word!" I said. He was the second dead human
being--apart, I mean, from surgical properties and mummies and
common shows of that sort--that I have ever seen. I stood over
him wondering, wondering beyond measure.
A practical idea came into that confusion. Had any one heard the
gun?
I reloaded.
After a time I felt securer, and gave my mind again to the dead I
had killed. What must I do?
It occurred to me that perhaps I ought to bury him. At any rate,
I ought to hide him. I reflected coolly, and then put my gun
within easy reach and dragged him by the arm towards a place
where the mud seemed soft, and thrust him in. His powder-flask
slipped from his loin-cloth, and I went back to get it. Then I
pressed him down with the butt of my rifle.
Afterwards this all seemed to me most horrible, but at the time
it was entirely a matter-of-fact transaction. I looked round
for any other visible evidence of his fate, looked round as one
does when one packs one's portmanteau in an hotel bedroom.
When I got my bearings, and carefully returned towards the ship.
I had the mood of grave concentration of a boy who has lapsed
into poaching. And the business only began to assume proper
proportions for me as I got near the ship, to seem any other kind
of thing than the killing of a bird or rabbit.
In the night, however, it took on enormous and portentous
forms. "By God!" I cried suddenly, starting wide awake; "but it
was murder!"
I lay after that wide awake, staring at my memories. In some odd
way these visions mixed up with my dream of in my uncle in his
despair. The black body which saw now damaged and partly buried,
but which, nevertheless, I no longer felt was dead but acutely
alive and perceiving, I mixed up with the ochreous slash under my
uncle's face. I tried to dismiss this horrible obsession from my
mind, but it prevailed over all my efforts.
The next day was utterly black with my sense of that ugly
creature's body. I am the least superstitious of men, but it
drew me. It drew me back into those thickets to the very place
where I had hidden him.
Some evil and detestable beast had been at him, and he lay
disinterred.
Methodically I buried his swollen and mangled carcass again, and
returned to the ship for another night of dreams. Next day for
all the morning I resisted the impulse to go to him, and played
nap with Pollack with my secret gnawing at me, and in the evening
started to go and was near benighted. I never told a soul of
them of this thing I had done.
Next day I went early, and he had gone, and there were human
footmarks and ugly stains round the muddy hole from which he had
been dragged.
I returned to the ship, disconcerted and perplexed. That day it
was the men came aft, with blistered hands and faces, and sullen
eyes. When they proclaimed, through Edwards, their spokesman,
"We've had enough of this, and we mean it," I answered very
readily, "So have I. Let's go."
VII
We were none too soon. People had been reconnoitring us, the
telegraph had been at work, and we were not four hours at sea
before we ran against the gunboat that had been sent down the
coast to look for us and that would have caught us behind the
island like a beast in a trap. It was a night of driving cloud
that gave intermittent gleams of moonlight; the wind and sea were
strong and we were rolling along through a drift of rails and
mist. Suddenly the world was white with moonshine. The gunboat
came out as a long dark shape wallowing on the water to the east.
She sighted the Maud Mary at once, and fired some sort of popgun
to arrest us.
The mate turned to me.
"Shall I tell the captain?"
"The captain be damned" said I, and we let him sleep through two
hours of chase till a rainstorm swallowed us up. Then we
changed our course and sailed right across them, and by morning
only her smoke was showing.
We were clear of Africa--and with the booty aboard I did not see
what stood between us and home.
For the first time since I had fallen sick in the Thames my
spirits rose. I was sea-sick and physically disgusted, of
course, but I felt kindly in spite of my qualms. So far as I
could calculate then the situation was saved. I saw myself
returning triumphantly into the Thames, and nothing on earth to
prevent old Capern's Perfect Filament going on the market in
fortnight. I had the monopoly of electric lamps beneath my
feet.
I was released from the spell of that bloodstained black body all
mixed up with grey-black mud. I was going back to baths and
decent food and aeronautics and Beatrice. I was going back to
Beatrice and my real life again--out of this well into which I
had fallen. It would have needed something more than
sea-sickness and quap fever to prevent my spirits rising.
I told the captain that I agreed with him that the British were
the scum of Europe, the westward drift of all the people, a
disgusting rabble, and I lost three pounds by attenuated retail
to Pollack at ha'penny nap and euchre.
And then you know, as we got out into the Atlantic this side of
Cape Verde, the ship began to go to pieces. I don't pretend for
one moment to understand what happened. But I think
Greiffenhagen's recent work on the effects of radium upon
ligneous tissue does rather carry out my idea that emanations
from quap have rapid rotting effect upon woody fibre.
From the first there had been a different feel about the ship,
and as the big winds and waves began to strain her she commenced
leaking. Soon she was leaking--not at any particular point, but
everywhere. She did not spring a leak, I mean, but water came in
first of all near the decaying edges of her planks, and then
through them.
I firmly believe the water came through the wood. First it began
to ooze, then to trickle. It was like trying to carry moist
sugar in a thin paper bag. Soon we were taking in water as
though we had opened a door in her bottom.
Once it began, the thing went ahead beyond all fighting. For a
day or so we did our best, and I can still remember in my
limbs and back the pumping--the fatigue in my arms and the
memory of a clear little dribble of water that jerked as one
pumped, and of knocking off and the being awakened to go on
again, and of fatigue piling up upon fatigue. At last we ceased
to think of anything but pumping; one became a thing of torment
enchanted, doomed to pump for ever. I still remember it as pure
relief when at last Pollack came to me pipe in mouth.
"The captain says the damned thing's going down right now;' he
remarked, chewing his mouthpiece. "Eh?"
"Good idea!" I said. "One can't go on pumping for ever."
And without hurry or alacrity, sullenly and wearily we got into
the boats and pulled away from the Maud Mary until we were
clear of her, and then we stayed resting on our oars, motionless
upon a glassy sea, waiting for her to sink. We were all silent,
even the captain was silent until she went down. And then he
spoke quite mildly in an undertone.
"Dat is the first ship I haf ever lost.... And it was not a fair
game! It wass not a cargo any man should take. No!"
I stared at the slow eddies that circled above the departed
Maud Mary, and the last chance of Business Organisations. I
felt weary beyond emotion. I thought of my heroics to Beatrice
and my uncle, of my prompt "I'LL go," and of all the ineffectual
months I had spent after this headlong decision. I was moved to
laughter at myself and fate.
But the captain and the men did not laugh. The men scowled at me
and rubbed their sore and blistered hands, and set themselves to
row....
As all the world knows we were picked up by the Union Castle
liner, Portland Castle.
The hairdresser aboard was a wonderful man, and he even
improvised me a dress suit, and produced a clean shirt and warm
underclothing. I had a hot bath, and dressed and dined and drank
a bottle of Burgundy.
"Now," I said, "are there any newspapers? I want to know what's
been happening in the world."
My steward gave me what he had, but I landed at Plymouth still
largely ignorant of the course of events. I shook off Pollack,
and left the captain and mate in an hotel, and the men in a
Sailor's Home until I could send to pay them off, and I made my
way to the station.
The newspapers I bought, the placards I saw, all England indeed
resounded to my uncle's bankruptcy.
BOOK THE FOURTH
THE AFTERMATH OF TONO-BUNGAY
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE STICK OF THE ROCKET
I
That evening I talked with my uncle in the Hardingham for the
last time. The atmosphere of the place had altered quite
shockingly. Instead of the crowd of importunate courtiers there
were just half a dozen uninviting men, journalists waiting for
an interview. Ropper the big commissionaire was still there, but
now indeed he was defending my uncle from something more than
time-wasting intrusions. I found the little man alone in the
inner office pretending to work, but really brooding. He was
looking yellow and deflated.
"Lord!" he said at the sight of me. "You're lean, George. It
makes that scar of yours show up."
We regarded each other gravely for a time.
"Quap," I said, "is at the bottom of the Atlantic. There's some
bills--We've got to pay the men."
"Seen the papers?"
"Read 'em all in the train."
"At bay," he said. "I been at bay for a week.... Yelping round
me.... And me facing the music. I'm feelin' a bit tired."
He blew and wiped his glasses.
"My stomack isn't what it was," he explained. "One finds
it--these times. How did it all happen, George? Your
Marconigram--it took me in the wind a bit."
I told him concisely. He nodded to the paragraphs of my
narrative and at the end he poured something from a medicine
bottle into a sticky little wineglass and drank it. I became
aware of the presence of drugs, of three or four small bottles
before him among his disorder of papers, of a faint elusively
familiar odour in the room.
"Yes," he said, wiping his lips and recorking the bottle.
"You've done your best, George. The luck's been against us."
He reflected, bottle in hand. "Sometimes the luck goes with you
and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it doesn't. And then where
are you? Grass in the oven! Fight or no fight."
He asked a few questions and then his thoughts came back to his
own urgent affairs. I tried to get some comprehensive account of
the situation from him, but he would not give it.
"Oh, I wish I'd had you. I wish I'd had you, George. I've had a
lot on my hands. You're clear headed at times."
"What has happened?"
"Oh! Boom!--infernal things."
"Yes, but--how? I'm just off the sea, remember."
"It'd worry me too much to tell you now. It's tied up in a
skein."
He muttered something to himself and mused darkly, and roused
himself to say--
"Besides--you'd better keep out of it. It's getting tight. Get
'em talking. Go down to Crest Hill and fly. That's YOUR
affair."
For a time his manner set free queer anxieties in my brain again.
I will confess that that Mordet Island nightmare of mine
returned, and as I looked at him his hand went out for the drug
again. "Stomach, George," he said.
"I been fightin' on that. Every man fights on some thing--gives
way somewheres--head, heart, liver--something. Zzzz. Gives way
somewhere. Napoleon did at last. All through the Waterloo
campaign, his stomach--it wasn't a stomach! Worse than mine, no
end."
The mood of depression passed as the drug worked within him. His
eyes brightened. He began to talk big. He began to dress up the
situation for my eyes, to recover what he had admitted to me.
He put it as a retreat from Russia. There were still the chances
of Leipzig.
"It's a battle, George--a big fight. We're fighting for
millions. I've still chances. There's still a card or so. I
can't tell all my plans--like speaking on the stroke."
"You might," I began.
"I can't, George. It's like asking to look at some embryo. You
got to wait. I know. In a sort of way, I know. But to tell
it-- No! You been away so long. And everything's got
complicated."
My perception of disastrous entanglements deepened with the rise
of his spirits. It was evident that I could only help to tie him
up in whatever net was weaving round his mind by forcing
questions and explanations upon him. My thoughts flew off at
another angle. "How's Aunt Susan?" said I.
I had to repeat the question. His busy whispering lips stopped
for a moment, and he answered in the note of one who repeats a
formula.
"She'd like to be in the battle with me. She'd like to be here
in London. But there's corners I got to turn alone." His eye
rested for a moment on the little bottle beside him. "And things
have happened.
"You might go down now and talk to her," he said, in a directer
voice. "I shall be down to-morrow night, I think."
He looked up as though he hoped that would end our talk.
"For the week-end?" I asked.
"For the week-end. Thank God for week-ends, George!"
II
My return home to Lady Grove was a very different thing from what
I had anticipated when I had got out to sea with my load of quap
and fancied the Perfect-Filament was safe within my grasp. As I
walked through the evening light along the downs, the summer
stillness seemed like the stillness of something newly dead.
There were no lurking workmen any more, no cyclists on the high
road.
Cessation was manifest everywhere. There had been, I learnt from
my aunt, a touching and quite voluntary demonstration when the
Crest Hill work had come to an end and the men had drawn their
last pay; they had cheered my uncle and hooted the contractors
and Lord Boom.
I cannot now recall the manner in which my aunt and I greeted one
another. I must have been very tired there, but whatever
impression was made has gone out of my memory. But I recall very
clearly how we sat at the little round table near the big window
that gave on the terrace, and dined and talked. I remember her
talking of my uncle.
She asked after him, and whether he seemed well. "I wish I could
help," she said. "But I've never helped him much, never. His
way of doing things was never mine. And since--since--. Since
he began to get so rich, he's kept things from me. In the old
days--it was different....
"There he is--I don't know what he's doing. He won't have me
near him....
"More's kept from me than anyone. The very servants won't let
me know. They try and stop the worst of the papers--Boom's
things--from coming upstairs.... I suppose they've got him in a
corner, George. Poor old Teddy! Poor old Adam and Eve we are!
Ficial Receivers with flaming swords to drive us out of our
garden! I'd hoped we'd never have another Trek. Well--anyway,
it won't be Crest Hill.... But it's hard on Teddy. He must be in
such a mess up there. Poor old chap. I suppose we can't help
him. I suppose we'd only worry him. Have some more soup
George--while there is some?..."
The next day was one of those days of strong perception that
stand out clear in one's memory when the common course of days is
blurred. I can recall now the awakening in the large familiar
room that was always kept for me, and how I lay staring at its
chintz-covered chairs, its spaced fine furniture, its glimpse
of the cedars without, and thought that all this had to end.
I have never been greedy for money, I have never wanted to be
rich, but I felt now an immense sense of impending deprivation.
I read the newspapers after breakfast--I and my aunt
together--and then I walked up to see what Cothope had done in
the matter of Lord Roberts B. Never before had I appreciated so
acutely the ample brightness of the Lady Grove gardens, the
dignity and wide peace of all about me. It was one of those warm
mornings in late May that have won all the glory of summer
without losing the gay delicacy of spring. The shrubbery was
bright with laburnum and lilac, the beds swarmed with daffodils
and narcissi and with lilies of the valley in the shade.
I went along the well-kept paths among the rhododendra and
through the private gate into the woods where the bluebells and
common orchid were in profusion. Never before had I tasted so
completely the fine sense of privilege and ownership. And all
this has to end, I told myself, all this has to end.
Neither my uncle nor I had made any provision for disaster; all
we had was in the game, and I had little doubt now of the
completeness of our ruin. For the first time in my life since he
had sent me that wonderful telegram of his I had to consider that
common anxiety of mankind,--Employment. I had to come off my
magic carpet and walk once more in the world.
And suddenly I found myself at the cross drives where I had seen
Beatrice for the first time after so many years. It is strange,
but so far as I can recollect I had not thought of her once since
I had landed at Plymouth. No doubt she had filled the background
of my mind, but I do not remember one definite, clear thought. I
had been intent on my uncle and the financial collapse.
It came like a blow in the face now; all that, too, had to end!
Suddenly I was filled with the thought of her and a great longing
for her. What would she do when she realised our immense
disaster? What would she do? How would she take it? It filled
me with astonishment to realise how little I could tell....
Should I perhaps presently happen upon her?
I went on through the plantations and out upon the downs, and
thence I saw Cothope with a new glider of his own design soaring
down wind to my old familiar "grounding" place. To judge by its
long rhythm it was a very good glider. "Like Cothope's cheek,"
thought I, "to go on with the research. I wonder if he's keeping
notes.... But all this will have to stop."
He was sincerely glad to see me. "It's been a rum go," he said.
He had been there without wages for a month, a man forgotten in
the rush of events.
"I just stuck on and did what I could with the stuff. I got a bit
of money of my own--and I said to myself, 'Well, here you are
with the gear and no one to look after you. You won't get such a
chance again, my boy, not in all your born days. Why not make
what you can with it? '"
"How's Lord Roberts B?"
Cothope lifted his eyebrows. "I've had to refrain," he said.
"But he's looking very handsome."
"Gods!" I said, "I'd like to get him up just once before we
smash. You read the papers? You know we're going to smash?"
"Oh! I read the papers. It's scandalous, sir, such work as ours
should depend on things like that. You and I ought to be under
the State, sir, if you'll excuse me"
"Nothing to excuse," I said. "I've always been a Socialist--of a
sort--in theory. Let's go and have a look at him. How is he?
Deflated?"
"Just about quarter full. That last oil glaze of yours holds the
gas something beautiful. He's not lost a cubic metre a week."...
Cothope returned to Socialism as we went toward the sheds.
"Glad to think you're a Socialist, sir," he said, "it's the only
civilised state. I been a Socialist some years--off the
Clarion. It's a rotten scramble, this world. It takes the
things we make and invent and it plays the silly fool with 'em.
We scientific people, we'll have to take things over and stop all
this financing and advertisement and that. It's too silly.
It's a noosance. Look at us!"
Lord Roberts B, even in his partially deflated condition in his
shed, was a fine thing to stare up at. I stood side by side with
Cothope regarding him, and it was borne in upon me more acutely
than ever that all this had to end. I had a feeling just like
the feeling of a boy who wants to do wrong, that I would use up
the stuff while I had it before the creditors descended. I had a
queer fancy, too, I remember, that if I could get into the air it
would advertise my return to Beatrice.
"We'll fill her," I said concisely.
"It's all ready," said Cothope, and added as an afterthought,
"unless they cut off the gas."...
I worked and interested myself with Cothope all the morning and
for a time forgot my other troubles. But the thought of Beatrice
flooded me slowly and steadily. It became an unintelligent sick
longing to see her. I felt that I could not wait for the filling
of Lord Roberts B, that I must hunt her up and see her soon. I
got everything forward and lunched with Cothope, and then with
the feeblest excuses left him in order to prowl down through the
woods towards Bedley Corner. I became a prey to wretched
hesitations and diffidence. Ought I to go near her now? I asked
myself, reviewing all the social abasements of my early years.
At last, about five, I called at the Dower House. I was greeted
by their Charlotte--with a forbidding eye and a cold
astonishment.
Both Beatrice and Lady Osprey were out.
There came into my head some prowling dream of meeting her. I
went along the lane towards Woking, the lane down which we had
walked five months ago in the wind and rain.
I mooned for a time in our former footsteps, then swore and
turned back across the fields, and then conceived a distaste for
Cothope and went Downward. At last I found myself looking down on
the huge abandoned masses of the Crest Hill house.
That gave my mind a twist into a new channel. My uncle came
uppermost again. What a strange, melancholy emptiness of
intention that stricken enterprise seemed in the even evening
sunlight, what vulgar magnificence and crudity and utter
absurdity! It was as idiotic as the pyramids. I sat down on the
stile, staring at it as though I had never seen that forest of
scaffold poles, that waste of walls and bricks and plaster and
shaped stones, that wilderness of broken soil and wheeling
tracks and dumps before. It struck me suddenly as the compactest
image and sample of all that passes for Progress, of all the
advertisement-inflated spending, the aimless building up and
pulling down, the enterprise and promise of my age. This was
our fruit, this was what he had done, I and my uncle, in the
fashion of our time. We were its leaders and exponents, we were
the thing it most flourishingly produced. For this futility in
its end, for an epoch of such futility, the solemn scroll of
history had unfolded....
"Great God!" I cried, "but is this Life?"
For this the armies drilled, for this the Law was administered
and the prisons did their duty, for this the millions toiled and
perished in suffering, in order that a few of us should build
palaces we never finished, make billiard-rooms under ponds, run
imbecile walls round irrational estates, scorch about the world
in motor-cars, devise flying-machines, play golf and a dozen
such foolish games of ball, crowd into chattering dinner parties,
gamble and make our lives one vast, dismal spectacle of witless
waste! So it struck me then, and for a time I could think of no
other interpretation. This was Life! It came to me like a
revelation, a revelation at once incredible and indisputable of
the abysmal folly of our being.
III
I was roused from such thoughts by the sound of footsteps behind
me.
I turned half hopeful--so foolish is a lover's imagination, and
stopped amazed. It was my uncle. His face was white--white as I
had seen it in my dream.
"Hullo!" I said, and stared. "Why aren't you in London?"
"It's all up," he said....
"Adjudicated?"
"No!"
I stared at him for a moment, and then got off the stile.
We stood swaying and then came forward with a weak motion of his
arms like a man who cannot see distinctly, and caught at and
leant upon the stile. For a moment we were absolutely still. He
made a clumsy gesture towards the great futility below and
choked. I discovered that his face was wet with tears, that his
wet glasses blinded him. He put up his little fat hand and
clawed them off clumsily, felt inefficiently for his
pocket-handkerchief, and then, to my horror, as he clung to me,
he began to weep aloud, this little, old worldworn swindler. It
wasn't just sobbing or shedding tears, it was crying as a child
cries. It was oh! terrible!
"It's cruel," he blubbered at last. "They asked me questions.
They KEP' asking me questions, George."
He sought for utterance, and spluttered.
"The Bloody bullies!" he shouted. "The Bloody Bullies."
He ceased to weep. He became suddenly rapid and explanatory.
"It's not a fair game, George. They tire you out. And I'm not
well. My stomach's all wrong. And I been and got a cold. I
always been li'ble to cold, and this one's on my chest. And then
they tell you to speak up. They bait you--and bait you, and bait
you. It's torture. The strain of it. You can't remember what
you said. You're bound to contradict yourself. It's like
Russia, George.... It isn't fair play.... Prominent man. I've
been next at dinners with that chap, Neal; I've told him
stories--and he's bitter! Sets out to ruin me. Don't ask a
civil question--bellows." He broke down again. "I've been
bellowed at, I been bullied, I been treated like a dog. Dirty
cads they are! Dirty cads! I'd rather be a Three-Card Sharper
than a barrister; I'd rather sell cat's-meat in the streets.
"They sprung things on me this morning, things I didn't expect.
They rushed me! I'd got it all in my hands and then I was
jumped. By Neal! Neal I've given city tips to! Neal! I've helped
Neal....
"I couldn't swallow a mouthful--not in the lunch hour. I
couldn't face it. It's true, George--I couldn't face it. I said
I'd get a bit of air and slipped out and down to the Embankment,
and there I took a boat to Richmond. Some idee. I took a rowing
boat when I got there and I rowed about on the river for a bit.
A lot of chaps and girls there was on the bank laughed at my
shirt-sleeves and top hat. Dessay they thought it was a
pleasure trip. Fat lot of pleasure! I rowed round for a bit and
came in. Then I came on here. Windsor way. And there they are
in London doing what they like with me.... I don't care!"
"But" I said, looking down at him, perplexed.
"It's abscondin'. They'll have a warrant."
"I don't understand," I said.
"It's all up, George--all up and over.
"And I thought I'd live in that place, George and die a lord!
It's a great place, reely, an imperial--if anyone has the sense
to buy it and finish it. That terrace--"
I stood thinking him over.
"Look here!" I said. "What's that about--a warrant? Are you
sure they'll get a warrant? I'm sorry uncle; but what have you
done?"
"Haven't I told you?"
"Yes, but they won't do very much to you for that. They'll only
bring you up for the rest of your examination."
He remained silent for a time. At last he spoke--speaking with
difficulty.
"It's worse than that. I've done something. They're bound to
get it out. Practically they HAVE got it out."
"What?"
"Writin' things down--I done something."
For the first time in his life, I believe, he felt and looked
ashamed. It filled me with remorse to see him suffer so.
"We've all done things," I said. "It's part of the game the
world makes us play. If they want to arrest you--and you've got
no cards in your hand--! They mustn't arrest you."
"No. That's partly why I went to Richmond. But I never
thought--"
His little bloodshot eyes stared at Crest Hill.
"That chap Wittaker Wright," he said, "he had his stuff ready. I
haven't. Now you got it, George. That's the sort of hole I'm
in."
IV
That memory of my uncle at the gate is very clear and full. I am
able to recall even the undertow of my thoughts while he was
speaking. I remember my pity and affection for him in his misery
growing and stirring within me, my realisation that at any risk I
must help him. But then comes indistinctness again. I was
beginning to act. I know I persuaded him to put himself in my
hands, and began at once to plan and do. I think that when we
act most we remember least, that just in the measure that the
impulse of our impressions translates itself into schemes and
movements, it ceases to record itself in memories. I know I
resolved to get him away at once, and to use the Lord Roberts B
in effecting that. It was clear he was soon to be a hunted man,
and it seemed to me already unsafe for him to try the ordinary
Continental routes in his flight. I had to evolve some scheme,
and evolve it rapidly, how we might drop most inconspicuously
into the world across the water. My resolve to have one flight
at least in my airship fitted with this like hand to glove. It
seemed to me we might be able to cross over the water in the
night, set our airship adrift, and turn up as pedestrian tourists
in Normandy or Brittany, and so get away. That, at any rate, was
my ruling idea.
I sent off Cothope with a dummy note to Woking, because I did
not want to implicate him, and took my uncle to the pavilion. I
went down to my aunt, and made a clean breast of the situation.
She became admirably competent. We went into his dressing-room
and ruthlessly broke his locks. I got a pair of brown boots, a
tweed suit and a cap of his, and indeed a plausible walking
outfit, and a little game bag for his pedestrian gear; and, in
addition, a big motoring overcoat and a supply of rugs to add to
those I had at the pavilion. I also got a flask of brandy, and
she made sandwiches. I don't remember any servants appearing,
and I forget where she got those sandwiches. Meanwhile we
talked. Afterwards I thought with what a sure confidence we
talked to each other
"What's he done?" she said.
"D'you mind knowing?"
"No conscience left, thank God!"
"I think--forgery!"
There was just a little pause. "Can you carry this bundle?" she
asked.
I lifted it.
"No woman ever has respected the law--ever," she said. "It's too
silly.... The things it lets you do! And then pulls you up--like
a mad nurse minding a child."
She carried some rugs for me through the shrubbery in the
darkling.
"They'll think we're going mooning," she said, jerking her head
at the household. "I wonder what they make of us--criminals."
... An immense droning note came as if in answer to that. It
startled us both for a moment. "The dears!" she said. "It's the
gong for dinner!... But I wish I could help little Teddy,
George. It's awful to think of him there with hot eyes, red and
dry. And I know--the sight of me makes him feel sore. Things I
said, George. If I could have seen, I'd have let him have an
omnibusful of Scrymgeours. I cut him up. He'd never thought I
meant it before.... I'll help all I can, anyhow."
I turned at something in her voice, and got a moon light gleam of
tears upon her face.
"Could SHE have helped?" she asked abruptly.
"SHE?"
"That woman."
"My God!" I cried, "HELPED! Those--things don't help!"
"Tell me again what I ought to do," she said after a silence.
I went over the plans I had made for communicating, and the
things I thought she might do. I had given her the address of a
solicitor she might put some trust in.
"But you must act for yourself," I insisted.
"Roughly," I said, "it's a scramble. You must get what you can
for us, and follow as you can."
She nodded.
She came right up to the pavilion and hovered for a time shyly,
and then went away.
I found my uncle in my sitting-room in an arm-chair, with his
feet upon the fender of the gas stove, which he had lit, and now
he was feebly drunken with my whisky, and very weary in body and
spirit, and inclined to be cowardly.
"I lef' my drops," he said.
He changed his clothes slowly and unwillingly. I had to bully
him, I had almost to shove him to the airship and tuck him up
upon its wicker flat. Single-handed I made but a clumsy start;
we scraped along the roof of the shed and bent a van of the
propeller, and for a time I hung underneath without his offering
a hand to help me to clamber up. If it hadn't been for a sort of
anchoring trolley device of Cothope's, a sort of slip anchor
running on a rail, we should never have got clear at all.
V
The incidents of our flight in Lord Roberts B do not arrange
themselves in any consecutive order. To think of that adventure
is like dipping haphazard into an album of views. One is
reminded first of this and then of that. We were both lying down
on a horizontal plate of basketwork; for Lord Roberts B had none
of the elegant accommodation of a balloon. I lay forward, and my
uncle behind me in such a position that he could see hardly
anything of our flight. We were protected from rolling over
simply by netting between the steel stays. It was impossible for
us to stand up at all; we had either to lie or crawl on all fours
over the basket work. Amidships were lockers made of Watson's
Aulite material,--and between these it was that I had put my
uncle, wrapped in rugs. I wore sealskin motoring boots and
gloves, and a motoring fur coat over my tweeds, and I controlled
the engine by Bowden wires and levers forward.
The early part of that night's experience was made up of warmth,
of moonlit Surrey and Sussex landscape, and of a rapid and
successful flight, ascending and swooping, and then ascending
again southward. I could not watch the clouds because the
airship overhung me; I could not see the stars nor gauge the
meteorological happening, but it was fairly clear to me that a
wind shifting between north and northeast was gathering strength,
and after I had satisfied myself by a series of entirely
successful expansions and contractions of the real air-worthiness
of Lord Roberts B, I stopped the engine to save my petrol, and
let the monster drift, checking its progress by the dim landscape
below. My uncle lay quite still behind me, saying little and
staring in front of him, and I was left to my own thoughts and
sensations.
My thoughts, whatever they were, have long since faded out of
memory, and my sensations have merged into one continuous memory
of an countryside lying, as it seemed, under snow, with square
patches of dimness, white phantoms of roads, rents and pools of
velvety blackness, and lamp-jewelled houses. I remember a train
boring its way like a hastening caterpillar of fire across the
landscape, and how distinctly I heard its clatter. Every town
and street was buttoned with street lamps. I came quite close to
the South Downs near Lewes, and all the lights were out in the
houses, and the people gone to bed. We left the land a little to
the east of Brighton, and by that time Brighton was well abed.
and the brightly lit sea-front deserted. Then I let out the gas
chamber to its fullest extent and rose. I like to be high above
water.
I do not clearly know what happened in the night. I think I must
have dozed, and probably my uncle slept. I remember that once or
twice I heard him talking in an eager, muffled voice to himself,
or to an imaginary court. But there can be no doubt the wind
changed right round into the east, and that we were carried far
down the Channel without any suspicion of the immense leeway we
were making. I remember the kind of stupid perplexity with which
I saw the dawn breaking over a grey waste of water, below, and
realised that something was wrong. I was so stupid that it was
only after the sunrise I really noticed the trend of the foam
caps below, and perceived we were in a severe easterly gale. Even
then, instead of heading southeasterly, I set the engine going,
headed south, and so continued a course that must needs have
either just hit Ushant, or carry us over the Bay of Biscay. I
thought I was east of Cherbourg, when I was far to the west and
stopped my engine in that belief, and then set it going again. I
did actually sight the coast of Brittany to the southeast in the
late afternoon, and that it was woke me up to the gravity of our
position. I discovered it by accident in the southeast, when I
was looking for it in the southwest. I turned about east and
faced the wind for some time, and finding I had no chance in its
teeth, went high, where it seemed less violent, and tried to make
a course southeast. It was only then that I realised what a gale
I was in. I had been going westward, and perhaps even in gusts
north of west, at a pace of fifty or sixty miles an hour.
Then I began what I suppose would be called a Fight against the
east wind. One calls it a Fight, but it was really almost as
unlike a fight as plain sewing. The wind tried to drive me
westwardly, and I tried to get as much as I could eastwardly,
with the wind beating and rocking us irregularly, but by no
means unbearably, for about twelve hours. My hope lay in the
wind abating, and our keeping in the air and eastward of
Finisterre until it did, and the chief danger was the exhaustion
of our petrol. It was a long and anxious and almost meditative
time; we were fairly warm, and only slowly getting hungry, and
except that my uncle grumbled a little and produced some
philosophical reflections, and began to fuss about having a
temperature, we talked very little. I was tired and sulky, and
chiefly worried about the engine. I had to resist a tendency to
crawl back and look at it. I did not care to risk contracting
our gas chamber for fear of losing gas. Nothing was less like a
fight. I know that in popular magazines, and so forth, all such
occasions as this are depicted in terms of hysteria. Captains
save their ships engineers complete their bridges, generals
conduct their battles, in a state of dancing excitement, foaming
recondite technicalities at the lips. I suppose that sort of
thing works up the reader, but so far as it professes to
represent reality, I am convinced it is all childish nonsense.
schoolboys of fifteen, girls of eighteen, and literary men all
their lives, may have these squealing fits, but my own experience
is that most exciting scenes are not exciting, and most of the
urgent moments in life are met by steady-headed men.
Neither I nor my uncle spent the night in ejaculations, nor in
humorous allusions, nor any of these things. We remained lumpish.
My uncle stuck in his place and grumbled about his stomach, and
occasionally rambled off into expositions of his financial
position and denunciations of Neal--he certainly struck out one
or two good phrases for Neal--and I crawled about at rare
intervals in a vague sort of way and grunted, and our basketwork
creaked continually, and the wind on our quarter made a sort of
ruffled flapping in the wall of the gas chamber. For all our
wraps we got frightfully cold as the night wore on.
I must have dozed, and it was still dark when I realised with a
start that we were nearly due south of, and a long way from, a
regularly-flashing lighthouse, standing out before the glow of
some great town, and then that the thing that had awakened me was
the cessation of our engine, and that we were driving back to the
west.
Then, indeed, for a time I felt the grim thrill of life. I
crawled forward to the cords of the release valves, made my uncle
crawl forward too, and let out the gas until we were falling down
through the air like a clumsy glider towards the vague greyness
that was land.
Something must have intervened here that I have forgotten.
I saw the lights of Bordeaux when it was quite dark, a nebulous
haze against black; of that I am reasonably sure. But certainly
our fall took place in the cold, uncertain light of early dawn.
I am, at least, equally sure of that. And Mimizan, near where we
dropped, is fifty miles from Bordeaux, whose harbour lights I
must have seen.
I remember coming down at last with a curious indifference, and
actually rousing myself to steer. But the actual coming to earth
was exciting enough. I remember our prolonged dragging landfall,
and the difficulty I had to get clear, and how a gust of wind
caught Lord Roberts B as my uncle stumbled away from the ropes
and litter, and dropped me heavily, and threw me on to my knees.
Then came the realisation that the monster was almost consciously
disentangling itself for escape, and then the light leap of its
rebound. The rope slipped out of reach of my hand. I remember
running knee-deep in a salt pool in hopeless pursuit of the
airship.
As it dragged and rose seaward, and how only after it had escaped
my uttermost effort to recapture it, did I realise that this was
quite the best thing that could have happened. It drove swiftly
over the sandy dunes, lifting and falling, and was hidden by a
clump of windbitten trees. Then it reappeared much further off,
and still receding. It soared for a time, and sank slowly, and
after that I saw it no more. I suppose it fell into the sea and
got wetted with salt water and heavy, and so became deflated and
sank.
It was never found, and there was never a report of anyone seeing
it after it escaped from me.
VI
But if I find it hard to tell the story of our long flight
through the air overseas, at least that dawn in France stands
cold and clear and full. I see again almost as if I saw once
more with my bodily eyes the ridges of sand rising behind ridges
of sand, grey and cold and black-browed, with an insufficient
grass. I feel again the clear, cold chill of dawn, and hear the
distant barking of a dog. I find myself asking again, "What
shall we do now?" and trying to scheme with brain tired beyond
measure.
At first my uncle occupied my attention. He was shivering a good
deal, and it was all I could do to resist my desire to get him
into a comfortable bed at once. But I wanted to appear plausibly
in this part of the world. I felt it would not do to turn up
anywhere at dawn and rest, it would be altogether too
conspicuous; we must rest until the day was well advanced, and
then appear as road-stained pedestrians seeking a meal. I gave
him most of what was left of the biscuits, emptied our flasks,
and advised him to sleep, but at first it was too cold, albeit I
wrapped the big fur rug around him.
I was struck now by the flushed weariness of his face, and the
look of age the grey stubble on his unshaved chin gave him. He
sat crumpled up, shivering and coughing, munching reluctantly,
but drinking eagerly, and whimpering a little, a dreadfully
pitiful figure to me. But we had to go through with it; there
was no way out for us.
Presently the sun rose over the pines, and the sand grew rapidly
warm. My uncle had done eating, and sat with his wrists resting
on his knees, the most hopeless looking of lost souls.
"I'm ill," he said, "I'm damnably ill! I can feel it in my skin!"
Then--it was horrible to me--he cried, "I ought to be in bed; I
ought to be in bed... instead of flying about," and suddenly he
burst into tears.
I stood up. "Go to sleep, man!" I said, and took the rug from
him, and spread it out and rolled him up in it.
"It's all very well," he protested; "I'm not young enough--"
"Lift up your head," I interrupted, and put his knapsack under
it.
"They'll catch us here, just as much as in an inn," he grumbled
and then lay still.
Presently, after a long time, I perceived he was asleep. His
breath came with peculiar wheezings, and every now and again he
would cough. I was very stiff and tired myself, and perhaps I
dozed. I don't remember. I remember only sitting, as it
seemed, nigh interminably, beside him, too weary even to think in
that sandy desolation.
No one came near us; no creature, not even a dog. I roused myself
at last, feeling that it was vain to seek to seem other than
abnormal, and with an effort that was like lifting a sky of lead,
we made our way through the wearisome sand to a farmhouse. There
I feigned even a more insufficient French than I possess
naturally, and let it appear that we were pedestrians from
Biarritz who had lost our way along the shore and got benighted.
This explained us pretty well, I thought, and we got most
heartening coffee and a cart to a little roadside station. My
uncle grew more and more manifestly ill with every stage of our
journey. I got him to Bayonne, where he refused at first to eat,
and was afterwards very sick, and then took him shivering and
collapsed up a little branch line to a frontier place called
Luzon Gare.
We found one homely inn with two small bedrooms, kept by a kindly
Basque woman. I got him to bed, and that night shared his room,
and after an hour or so of sleep he woke up in a raging fever and
with a wandering mind, cursing Neal and repeating long,
inaccurate lists of figures. He was manifestly a case for a
doctor, and in the morning we got one in. He was a young man
from Montpelier, just beginning to practise, and very mysterious
and technical and modern and unhelpful. He spoke of cold and
exposure, and la grippe and pneumonia. He gave many explicit
and difficult directions.... I perceived it devolved upon me to
organise nursing and a sick-room. I installed a religieuse
in the second bedroom of the inn, and took a room for myself in
the inn of Port de Luzon, a quarter of a mile away.
VII
And now my story converges on what, in that queer corner of
refuge out of the world, was destined to be my uncle's deathbed.
There is a background of the Pyrenees, of blue hills and sunlit
houses, of the old castle of Luzon and a noisy cascading river,
and for a foreground the dim, stuffy room whose windows both the
religieuse and hostess conspired to shut, with its waxed floor,
its four-poster bed, its characteristically French chairs and
fireplace, its champagne bottles and dirty basins and used towels
and packets of Somatose on the table. And in the sickly air of
the confined space in behind the curtains of the bed lay my
little uncle, with an effect of being enthroned and secluded, or
sat up, or writhed and tossed in his last dealings of life. One
went and drew back the edge of the curtains if one wanted to
speak to him or look at him.
Usually he was propped up against pillows, because so he breathed
more easily. He slept hardly at all.
I have a confused memory of vigils and mornings and afternoons
spent by that bedside, and how the religieuse hovered about me,
and how meek and good and inefficient she was, and how horribly
black were her nails. Other figures come and go, and
particularly the doctor, a young man plumply rococo, in bicycling
dress, with fine waxen features, a little pointed beard, and the
long black frizzy hair and huge tie of a minor poet. Bright and
clear-cut and irrelevant are memories of the Basque hostess of
my uncle's inn and of the family of Spanish people who
entertained me and prepared the most amazingly elaborate meals
for me, with soup and salad and chicken and remarkable sweets.
They were all very kind and sympathetic people, systematically
so. And constantly, without attracting attention, I was trying
to get newspapers from home.
My uncle is central to all these impressions.
I have tried to make you picture him, time after time, as the
young man of the Wimblehurst chemist's shop, as the shabby
assistant in Tottenham Court Road, as the adventurer of the early
days of Tono-Bungay, as the confident, preposterous plutocrat.
And now I have to tell of him strangely changed under the shadow
of oncoming death, with his skin lax and yellow and glistening
with sweat, his eyes large and glassy, his countenance
unfamiliar through the growth of a beard, his nose pinched and
thin. Never had he looked so small as now. And he talked to me
in a whispering, strained voice of great issues, of why his life
had been, and whither he was going. Poor little man! that last
phase is, as it were, disconnected from all the other phases. It
was as if he crawled out from the ruins of his career, and looked
about him before he died. For he had quite clear-minded states
in the intervals of his delirium.
He knew he was almost certainly dying. In a way that took the
burthen of his cares off his mind. There was no more Neal to
face, no more flights or evasions, no punishments.
"It has been a great career, George," he said, "but I shall be
glad to rest. Glad to rest!... Glad to rest."
His mind ran rather upon his career, and usually, I am glad to
recall, with a note of satisfaction and approval. In his
delirious phases he would most often exaggerate this
self-satisfaction, and talk of his splendours. He would pluck
at the sheet and stare before him, and whisper half-audible
fragments of sentences.
"What is this great place, these cloud-capped towers, these any
pinnacles?... Ilion. Sky-pointing.... Ilion House, the
residence of one of our great merchant princes.... Terrace above
terrace. Reaching to the heavens.... Kingdoms Caesar never
knew.... A great poet, George. Zzzz. Kingdoms Caesar never
knew.... Under entirely new management.
"Greatness....Millions... Universities.... He stands on the
terrace--on the upper terrace--directing--directing--by the
globe--directing--the trade."
It was hard at times to tell when his sane talk ceased and his
delirium began. The secret springs of his life, the vain
imaginations were revealed. I sometimes think that all the life
of man sprawls abed, careless and unkempt, until it must needs
clothe and wash itself and come forth seemly in act and speech
for the encounter with one's fellow-men. I suspect that all
things unspoken in our souls partake somewhat of the laxity of
delirium and dementia. Certainly from those slimy, tormented
lips above the bristling grey beard came nothing but dreams and
disconnected fancies....
Sometimes he raved about Neal, threatened Neal. "What has he got
invested?" he said. "Does he think he can escape me?... If I
followed him up.... Ruin. Ruin.... One would think _I_ had taken
his money."
And sometimes he reverted to our airship flight. "It's too long,
George, too long and too cold. I'm too old a man--too old--for
this sort of thing.... You know you're not saving--you're killing
me."
Towards the end it became evident our identity was discovered. I
found the press, and especially Boom's section of it, had made a
sort of hue and cry for us, sent special commissioners to hunt
for us, and though none of these emissaries reached us until my
uncle was dead, one felt the forewash of that storm of energy.
The thing got into the popular French press. People became
curious in their manner towards us, and a number of fresh faces
appeared about the weak little struggle that went on in the
closeness behind the curtains of the bed. The young doctor
insisted on consultations, and a motor-car came up from Biarritz,
and suddenly odd people with questioning eyes began to poke in
with inquiries and help. Though nothing was said, I could feel
that we were no longer regarded as simple middle-class tourists;
about me, as I went, I perceived almost as though it trailed
visibly, the prestige of Finance and a criminal notoriety. Local
personages of a plump and prosperous quality appeared in the inn
making inquiries, the Luzon priest became helpful, people watched
our window, and stared at me as I went to and fro; and then we
had a raid from a little English clergyman and his amiable,
capable wife in severely Anglican blacks, who swooped down upon
us like virtuous but resolute vultures from the adjacent village
of Saint Jean de Pollack.
The clergyman was one of those odd types that oscillate between
remote country towns in England and the conduct of English Church
services on mutual terms in enterprising hotels abroad, a
tremulous, obstinate little being with sporadic hairs upon his
face, spectacles, a red button nose, and aged black raiment. He
was evidently enormously impressed by my uncle's monetary
greatness, and by his own inkling of our identity, and he shone
and brimmed over with tact and fussy helpfulness. He was eager
to share the watching of the bedside with me, he proffered
services with both hands, and as I was now getting into touch
with affairs in London again, and trying to disentangle the
gigantic details of the smash from the papers I had succeeded in
getting from Biarritz, I accepted his offers pretty generously,
and began the studies in modern finance that lay before me. I
had got so out of touch with the old traditions of religion that
I overlooked the manifest possibility of his attacking my poor,
sinking vestiges of an uncle with theological solicitudes. My
attention was called to that, however, very speedily by a polite
but urgent quarrel between himself and the Basque landlady as to
the necessity of her hanging a cheap crucifix in the shadow over
the bed, where it might catch my uncle's eye, where, indeed, I
found it had caught his eye.
"Good Lord!" I cried; "is THAT still going on!"
That night the little clergyman watched, and in the small hours
he raised a false alarm that my uncle was dying, and made an
extraordinary fuss. He raised the house. I shall never forget
that scene, I think, which began with a tapping at my bedroom
door just after I had fallen asleep, and his voice--
"If you want to see your uncle before he goes, you must come
now."
The stuffy little room was crowded when I reached it, and lit by
three flickering candles. I felt I was back in the eighteenth
century. There lay my poor uncle amidst indescribably tumbled
bedclothes, weary of life beyond measure, weary and rambling, and
the little clergyman trying to hold his hand and his attention,
and repeating over and over again:
"Mr. Ponderevo, Mr. Ponderevo, it is all right. It is all right.
Only Believe! 'Believe on me, and ye shall be saved'!"
Close at hand was the doctor with one of those cruel and idiotic
injection needles modern science puts in the hands of these
half-educated young men, keeping my uncle flickeringly alive for
no reason whatever. The religieuse hovered sleepily in the
background with an overdue and neglected dose. In addition, the
landlady had not only got up herself, but roused an aged crone of
a mother and a partially imbecile husband, and there was also a
fattish, stolid man in grey alpaca, with an air of
importance--who he was and how he got there, I don't know. I
rather fancy the doctor explained him to me in French I did not
understand. And they were all there, wearily nocturnal, hastily
and carelessly dressed, intent upon the life that flickered and
sank, making a public and curious show of its going, queer shapes
of human beings lit by three uncertain candles, and every soul of
them keenly and avidly resolved to be in at the death. The
doctor stood, the others were all sitting on chairs the landlady
had brought in and arranged for them.
And my uncle spoilt the climax, and did not die.
I replaced the little clergyman on the chair by the bedside, and
he hovered about the room.
"I think," he whispered to me mysteriously, as he gave place to
me, "I believe--it is well with him."
I heard him trying to render the stock phrases of Low Church
piety into French for the benefit of the stolid man in grey
alpaca. Then he knocked a glass off the table, and scrabbled for
the fragments. From the first I doubted the theory of an
immediate death. I consulted the doctor in urgent whispers. I
turned round to get champagne, and nearly fell over the
clergyman's legs. He was on his knees at the additional chair
the Basque landlady had got on my arrival, and he was praying
aloud, "Oh, Heavenly Father, have mercy on this thy Child...." I
hustled him up and out of the way, and in another minute he was
down at another chair praying again, and barring the path of the
religieuse, who had found me the corkscrew. Something put into
my head that tremendous blasphemy of Carlyle's about "the last
mew of a drowning kitten." He found a third chair vacant
presently; it was as if he was playing a game.
"Good Heavens!" I said, "we must clear these people out," and
with a certain urgency I did.
I had a temporary lapse of memory, and forgot all my French. I
drove them out mainly by gesture, and opened the window, to the
universal horror. I intimated the death scene was postponed,
and, as a matter of fact, my uncle did not die until the next
night.
I did not let the little clergyman come near him again, and I was
watchful for any sign that his mind had been troubled. But he
made none. He talked once about "that parson chap."
"Didn't bother you?" I asked.
"Wanted something," he said.
I kept silence, listening keenly to his mutterings. I
understood him to say, "They wanted too much." His face puckered
like a child's going to cry. "You can't get a safe six
per cent.," he said. I had for a moment a wild suspicion that
those urgent talks had not been altogether spiritual, but that, I
think, was a quite unworthy and unjust suspicion. The little
clergyman was as simple and honest as the day. My uncle was
simply generalising about his class.
But it may have been these talks that set loose some long dormant
string of ideas in my uncle's brain, ideas the things of this
world had long suppressed and hidden altogether. Near the end he
suddenly became clearminded and lucid, albeit very weak, and his
voice was little, but clear.
"George," he said.
"I'm here," I said, "close beside you."
"George. You have always been responsible for the science.
George. You know better than I do. Is--Is it proved?"
"What proved?"
"Either way?"
"I don't understand."
"Death ends all. After so much--Such splendid beginnin's.
Somewhere. Something."
I stared at him amazed. His sunken eyes were very grave.
"What do you expect?" I said in wonder.
He would not answer. "Aspirations," he whispered. He fell into
a broken monologue, regardless of me. "Trailing clouds of glory,"
he said, and "first-rate poet, first-rate....George was always
hard. Always."
For a long time there was silence.
Then he made a gesture that he wished to speak.
"Seems to me, George"
I bent my head down, and he tried to lift his hand to my
shoulder. I raised him a little on his pillows, and listened.
"It seems to me, George, always--there must be something in
me--that won't die."
He looked at me as though the decision rested with me.
"I think," he said; "--something."
Then, for a moment, his mind wandered. "Just a little link," he
whispered almost pleadingly, and lay quite still, but presently
he was uneasy again.
"Some other world"
"Perhaps," I said. "Who knows?"
"Some other world."
"Not the same scope for enterprise," I said.
"No."
He became silent. I sat leaning down to him, and following out
my own thoughts, and presently the religieuse resumed her
periodic conflict with the window fastening. For a time he
struggled for breath.... It seemed such nonsense that he should
have to suffer so--poor silly little man!
"George," he whispered, and his weak little hand came out.
"PERHAPS--"
He said no more, but I perceived from the expression of his eyes
that he thought the question had been put.
"Yes, I think so;" I said stoutly.
"Aren't you sure?"
"Oh--practically sure," said I, and I think he tried to squeeze
my hand. And there I sat, holding his hand tight, and trying to
think what seeds of immortality could be found in all his being,
what sort of ghost there was in him to wander out into the bleak
immensities. Queer fancies came to me.... He lay still for a
long time, save for a brief struggle or so for breath and ever
and again I wiped his mouth and lips.
I fell into a pit of thought. I did not remark at first the
change that was creeping over his face. He lay back on his
pillow, made a faint zzzing sound that ceased, and presently and
quite quietly he died--greatly comforted by my assurance. I do
not know when he died. His hand relaxed insensibly. Suddenly,
with a start, with a shock, I found that his mouth had fallen
open, and that he was dead....
VIII
It was dark night when I left his deathbed and went back to my
own inn down the straggling street of Luzon.
That return to my inn sticks in my memory also as a thing apart,
as an experience apart. Within was a subdued bustle of women, a
flitting of lights, and the doing of petty offices to that queer,
exhausted thing that had once been my active and urgent little
uncle. For me those offices were irksome and impertinent. I
slammed the door, and went out into the warm, foggy drizzle of
the village street lit by blurred specks of light in great voids
of darkness, and never a soul abroad. That warm veil of fog
produced an effect of vast seclusion. The very houses by the
roadside peered through it as if from another world. The
stillness of the night was marked by an occasional remote baying
of dogs; all these people kept dogs because of the near
neighbourhood of the frontier.
Death!
It was one of those rare seasons of relief, when for a little
time one walks a little outside of and beside life. I felt as I
sometimes feel after the end of a play. I saw the whole business
of my uncle's life as something familiar and completed. It was
done, like a play one leaves, like a book one closes. I thought
of the push and the promotions, the noise of London, the crowded,
various company of people through which our lives had gone, the
public meetings, the excitements, the dinners and disputations,
and suddenly it appeared to me that none of these things existed.
It came to me like a discovery that none of these things existed.
Before and after I have thought and called life a phantasmagoria,
but never have I felt its truth as I did that night.... We had
parted; we two who had kept company so long had parted. But
there was, I knew, no end to him or me. He had died a dream
death, and ended a dream; his pain dream was over. It seemed to
me almost as though I had died, too. What did it matter, since
it was unreality, all of it, the pain and desire, the beginning
and the end? There was no reality except this solitary road,
this quite solitary road, along which one went rather puzzled,
rather tired....
Part of the fog became a big mastiff that came towards me and
stopped and slunk round me, growling, barked gruffly, and shortly
and presently became fog again.
My mind swayed back to the ancient beliefs and fears of our race.
My doubts and disbeliefs slipped from me like a loosely fitting
garment. I wondered quite simply what dogs bayed about the path
of that other walker in the darkness, what shapes, what lights,
it might be, loomed about him as he went his way from our last
encounter on earth--along the paths that are real, and the way
that endures for ever?
IX
Last belated figure in that grouping round my uncle's deathbed
is my aunt. When it was beyond all hope that my uncle could live
I threw aside whatever concealment remained to us and telegraphed
directly to her. But she came too late to see him living. She
saw him calm and still, strangely unlike his habitual garrulous
animation, an unfamiliar inflexibility.
"It isn't like him," she whispered, awed by this alien dignity.
I remember her chiefly as she talked and wept upon the bridge
below the old castle. We had got rid of some amateurish
reporters from Biarritz, and had walked together in the hot
morning sunshine down through Port Luzon. There, for a time, we
stood leaning on the parapet of the bridge and surveying the
distant peeks, the rich blue masses of the Pyrenees. For a long
time we said nothing, and then she began talking.
"Life's a rum Go, George!" she began. "Who would have thought,
when I used to darn your stockings at old Wimblehurst, that this
would be the end of the story? It seems far away now--that
little shop, his and my first home. The glow of the bottles, the
big coloured bottles! Do you remember how the light shone on the
mahogany drawers? The little gilt letters! Ol Amjig, and
Snap! I can remember it all--bright and shining--like a Dutch
picture. Real! And yesterday. And here we are in a dream. You
a man--and me an old woman, George. And poor little Teddy, who
used to rush about and talk--making that noise he did--Oh!"
She choked, and the tears flowed unrestrained. She wept, and I
was glad to see her weeping.
She stood leaning over the bridge; her tear-wet handkerchief
gripped in her clenched hand.
"Just an hour in the old shop again--and him talking. Before
things got done. Before they got hold of him. And fooled him.
"Men oughtn't to be so tempted with business and things....
"They didn't hurt him, George?" she asked suddenly.
For a moment I was puzzled.
"Here, I mean," she said.
"No," I lied stoutly, suppressing the memory of that foolish
injection needle I had caught the young doctor using.
"I wonder, George, if they'll let him talk in Heaven...."
She faced me. "Oh! George, dear, my heart aches, and I don't
know what I say and do. Give me your arm to lean on--it's good
to have you, dear, and lean upon you.... Yes, I know you care
for me. That's why I'm talking. We've always loved one another,
and never said anything about it, and you understand, and I
understand. But my heart's torn to pieces by this, torn to rags,
and things drop out I've kept in it. It's true he wasn't a
husband much for me at the last. But he was my child, George, he
was my child and all my children, my silly child, and life has
knocked him about for me, and I've never had a say in the matter;
never a say; it's puffed him up and smashed him--like an old
bag--under my eyes. I was clever enough to see it, and not
clever enough to prevent it, and all I could do was to jeer.
I've had to make what I could of it. Like most people. Like
most of us.... But it wasn't fair, George. It wasn't fair. Life
and Death--great serious things--why couldn't they leave him
alone, and his lies and ways? If WE could see the lightness of
it--
"Why couldn't they leave him alone?" she repeated in a whisper as
we went towards the inn.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
LOVE AMONG THE WRECKAGE
I
When I came back I found that my share in the escape and death of
my uncle had made me for a time a notorious and even popular
character. For two weeks I was kept in London "facing the
music," as he would have said, and making things easy for my
aunt, and I still marvel at the consideration with which the
world treated me. For now it was open and manifest that I and my
uncle were no more than specimens of a modern species of brigand,
wasting the savings of the public out of the sheer wantonness of
enterprise. I think that in a way, his death produced a reaction
in my favour and my flight, of which some particulars now
appeared stuck in the popular imagination. It seemed a more
daring and difficult feat than it was, and I couldn't very well
write to the papers to sustain my private estimate. There can be
little doubt that men infinitely prefer the appearance of dash
and enterprise to simple honesty. No one believed I was not an
arch plotter in his financing. Yet they favoured me. I even
got permission from the trustee to occupy my chalet for a
fortnight while I cleared up the mass of papers, calculations,
notes of work, drawings and the like, that I left in disorder
when I started on that impulsive raid upon the Mordet quap heaps.
I was there alone. I got work for Cothope with the Ilchesters,
for whom I now build these destroyers. They wanted him at once,
and he was short of money, so I let him go and managed very
philosophically by myself.
But I found it hard to fix my attention on aeronautics, I had
been away from the work for a full half-year and more, a
half-year crowded with intense disconcerting things. For a time
my brain refused these fine problems of balance and adjustment
altogether; it wanted to think about my uncle's dropping jaw, my
aunt's reluctant tears, about dead negroes and pestilential
swamps, about the evident realities of cruelty and pain, about
life and death. Moreover, it was weary with the frightful pile
of figures and documents at the Hardingham, a task to which this
raid to Lady Grove was simply an interlude. And there was
Beatrice.
On the second morning, as I sat out upon the veranda recalling
memories and striving in vain to attend to some too succinct
pencil notes of Cothope's, Beatrice rode up suddenly from behind
the pavilion, and pulled rein and became still; Beatrice, a
little flushed from riding and sitting on a big black horse.
I did not instantly rise. I stared at her. "YOU!" I said.
She looked at me steadily. "Me," she said
I did not trouble about any civilities. I stood up and asked
point blank a question that came into my head.
"Whose horse is that?" I said.
She looked me in the eyes. "Carnaby's," she answered.
"How did you get here--this way?"
"The wall's down."
"Down? Already?"
"A great bit of it between the plantations."
"And you rode through, and got here by chance?"
"I saw you yesterday. And I rode over to see you." I had now
come close to her, and stood looking up into her face.
"I'm a mere vestige," I said.
She made no answer, but remained regarding me steadfastly with a
curious air of proprietorship.
"You know I'm the living survivor now of the great smash. I'm
rolling and dropping down through all the scaffolding of the
social system.... It's all a chance whether I roll out free at
the bottom, or go down a crack into the darkness out of sight for
a year or two."
"The sun," she remarked irrelevantly,"has burnt you.... I'm
getting down."
She swung herself down into my arms, and stood beside me face to
face.
"Where's Cothope?" she asked.
"Gone."
Her eyes flitted to the pavilion and back to me. We stood close
together, extraordinarily intimate, and extraordinarily apart.
"I've never seen this cottage of yours," she said, "and I want
to."
She flung the bridle of her horse round the veranda post, and I
helped her tie it.
"Did you get what you went for to Africa?" she asked.
"No," I said, "I lost my ship."
"And that lost everything?"
"Everything."
She walked before me into the living-room of the chalet, and I
saw that she gripped her riding-whip very tightly in her hand.
She looked about her for a moment,--and then at me.
"It's comfortable," she remarked.
Our eyes met in a conversation very different from the one upon
our lips. A sombre glow surrounded us, drew us together; an
unwonted shyness kept us apart. She roused herself, after an
instant's pause, to examine my furniture.
"You have chintz curtains. I thought men were too feckless to
have curtains without a woman. But, of course, your aunt did
that! And a couch and a brass fender, and--is that a pianola?
That is your desk. I thought men's desks were always untidy, and
covered with dust and tobacco ash."
She flitted to my colour prints and my little case of books.
Then she went to the pianola. I watched her intently.
"Does this thing play?" she said.
"What?" I asked.
"Does this thing play?"
I roused myself from my preoccupation.
"Like a musical gorilla with fingers all of one length. And a
sort of soul.... It's all the world of music to me."
"What do you play?"
"Beethoven, when I want to clear up my head while I'm working.
He is--how one would always like to work. Sometimes Chopin and
those others, but Beethoven. Beethoven mainly. Yes."
Silence again between us. She spoke with an effort.
"Play me something." She turned from me and explored the rack
of music rolls, became interested and took a piece, the first
part of the Kreutzer Sonata, hesitated. "No," she said, "that!"
She gave me Brahms' Second Concerto, Op. 58, and curled up on the
sofa watching me as I set myself slowly to play....
"I say," he said when I had done, "that's fine. I didn't know
those things could play like that. I'm all astir..."
She came and stood over me, looking at me. "I'm going to have a
concert," she said abruptly, and laughed uneasily and hovered at
the pigeon-holes. "Now--now what shall I have?" She chose more
of Brahms. Then we came to the Kreutzer Sonata. It is queer how
Tolstoy has loaded that with suggestions, debauched it, made it a
scandalous and intimate symbol. When I had played the first part
of that, she came up to the pianola and hesitated over me. I sat
stiffly--waiting.
Suddenly she seized my downcast head and kissed my hair. She
caught at my face between her hands and kissed my lips. I put my
arms about her and we kissed together. I sprang to my feet and
clasped her.
"Beatrice!" I said. "Beatrice!"
"My dear," she whispered, nearly breathless, with her arms about
me. "Oh! my dear!"
II
Love, like everything else in this immense process of social
disorganisation in which we live, is a thing adrift, a fruitless
thing broken away from its connexions. I tell of this love
affair here because of its irrelevance, because it is so
remarkable that it should mean nothing, and be nothing except
itself. It glows in my memory like some bright casual flower
starting up amidst the debris of a catastrophe. For nearly a
fortnight we two met and made love together. Once more this
mighty passion, that our aimless civilisation has fettered and
maimed and sterilised and debased, gripped me and filled me with
passionate delights and solemn joys--that were all, you know,
futile and purposeless. Once more I had the persuasion "This
matters. Nothing else matters so much as this." We were both
infinitely grave in such happiness as we had. I do not remember
any laughter at all between us.
Twelve days it lasted from that encounter in my chalet until our
parting.
Except at the end, they were days of supreme summer, and there
was a waxing moon. We met recklessly day by day. We were so
intent upon each other at first so intent upon expressing
ourselves to each other, and getting at each other, that we
troubled very little about the appearance of our relationship.
We met almost openly.... We talked of ten thousand things, and of
ourselves. We loved. We made love. There is no prose of mine
that can tell of hours transfigured. The facts are nothing.
Everything we touched, the meanest things, became glorious. How
can I render bare tenderness and delight and mutual possession?
I sit here at my desk thinking of untellable things.
I have come to know so much of love that I know now what love
might be. We loved, scarred and stained; we parted--basely and
inevitably, but at least I met love.
I remember as we sat in a Canadian canoe, in a reedy, bush-masked
shallow we had discovered operating out of that pine-shaded
Woking canal, how she fell talking of the things that happened
to her before she met me again....
She told me things, and they so joined and welded together other
things that lay disconnected in my memory, that it seemed to me
I had always known what she told me. And yet indeed I had not
known nor suspected it, save perhaps for a luminous, transitory
suspicion ever and again.
She made me see how life had shaped her. She told me of her
girlhood after I had known her. "We were poor and pretending and
managing. We hacked about on visits and things. I ought to have
married. The chances I had weren't particularly good chances. I
didn't like 'em."
She paused. "Then Carnaby came along."
I remained quite still. She spoke now with downcast eyes, and
one finger just touching the water.
"One gets bored, bored beyond redemption. One does about to
these huge expensive houses I suppose--the scale's immense. One
makes one's self useful to the other women, and agreeable to the
men. One has to dress.... One has food and exercise and leisure,
It's the leisure, and the space, and the blank opportunity it
seems a sin not to fill. Carnaby isn't like the other men. He's
bigger.... They go about making love. Everybody's making love.
I did.... And I don't do things by halves."
She stopped.
"You knew?"--she asked, looking up, quite steadily. I nodded.
"Since when?"
"Those last days.... It hasn't seemed to matter really. I was a
little surprised"
She looked at me quietly. "Cothope knew," she said. "By
instinct. I could feel it."
"I suppose," I began, "once, this would have mattered immensely.
Now--"
"Nothing matters," she said, completing me. "I felt I had to
tell you. I wanted you to understand why I didn't marry
you--with both hands. I have loved you"--she paused--"have loved
you ever since the day I kissed you in the bracken. Only--I
forgot."
And suddenly she dropped her face upon her hands, and sobbed
passionately--
"I forgot--I forgot," she cried, and became still....
I dabbled my paddle in the water. "Look here!" I said; "forget
again! Here am I--a ruined man. Marry me."
She shook her head without looking up.
We were still for a long time. "Marry me!" I whispered.
She looked up, twined back a whisp of hair, and answered
dispassionately--
"I wish I could. Anyhow, we have had this time. It has been a
fine time--has it been--for you also? I haven't nudged you all I
had to give. It's a poor gift--except for what it means and
might have been. But we are near the end of it now."
"Why?" I asked. "Marry me! Why should we two--"
"You think," she said, "I could take courage and come to you and
be your everyday wife--while you work and are poor?"
"Why not?" said I.
She looked at me gravely, with extended finger. "Do you really
think that--of me? Haven't you seen me--all?"
I hesitated.
"Never once have I really meant marrying you," she insisted.
"Never once. I fell in love with you from the first. But when
you seemed a successful man, I told myself I wouldn't. I was
love-sick for you, and you were so stupid, I came near it then.
But I knew I wasn't good enough. What could I have been to you?
A woman with bad habits and bad associations, a woman smirched.
And what could I do for you or be to you? If I wasn't good
enough to be a rich man's wife, I'm certainly not good enough to
be a poor one's. Forgive me for talking sense to you now, but I
wanted to tell you this somehow."
She stopped at my gesture. I sat up, and the canoe rocked with
my movement.
"I don't care," I said. "I want to marry you and make you my
wife!"
"No," she said, "don't spoil things. That is impossible!"
"Impossible!"
"Think! I can't do my own hair! Do you mean you will get me a
maid?"
"Good God!" I cried, disconcerted beyond measure, "won't you
learn to do your own hair for me? Do you mean to say you can
love a man--"
She flung out her hands at me. "Don't spoil it," she cried. "I
have given you all I have, I have given you all I can. If I
could do it, if I was good enough to do it, I would. But I am a
woman spoilt and ruined, dear, and you are a ruined man. When we
are making love we're lovers--but think of the gulf between us in
habits and ways of thought, in will and training, when we are not
making love. Think of it--and don't think of it! Don't think of
it yet. We have snatched some hours. We still may have some
hours!"
She suddenly knelt forward toward me, with a glowing darkness in
her eyes. "Who cares if it upsets?" she cried. "If you say
another word I will kiss you. And go to the bottom clutching you.
I'm not afraid of that. I'm not a bit afraid of that. I'll die
with you. Choose a death, and I'll die with you--readily. Do
listen to me! I love you. I shall always love you. It's
because I love you that I won't go down to become a dirty
familiar thing with you amidst the grime. I've given all I can.
I've had all I can.... Tell me," and she crept nearer, "have I
been like the dusk to you, like the warm dusk? Is there magic
still? Listen to the ripple of water from your paddle. Look at
the warm evening light in the sky. Who cares if the canoe
upsets? Come nearer to me. Oh, my love! come near! So."
She drew me to her and our lips met.
III
I asked her to marry me once again.
It was our last morning together, and we had met very early,
about sunrise, knowing that we were to part. No sun shone that
day. The sky was overcast, the morning chilly and lit by a
clear, cold, spiritless light. A heavy dampness in the air
verged close on rain. When I think of that morning, it has
always the quality of greying ashes wet with rain.
Beatrice too had changed. The spring had gone out of her
movement; it came to me, for the first time, that some day she
might grow old. She had become one flesh with the rest of common
humanity; the softness had gone from her voice and manner, the
dusky magic of her presence had gone. I saw these things with
perfect clearness, and they made me sorry for them and for her.
But they altered my love not a whit, abated it nothing. And when
we had talked awkwardly for half a dozen sentences, I came dully
to my point.
"And now," I cried, "will you marry me?"
"No," she said, "I shall keep to my life here."
I asked her to marry me in a year's time. She shook her head.
"This world is a soft world," I said, "in spite of my present
disasters. I know now how to do things. If I had you to work
for--in a year I could be a prosperous man"
"No," she said, "I will put it brutally, I shall go back to
Carnaby."
"But--!" I did not feel angry. I had no sort of jealousy, no
wounded pride, no sense of injury. I had only a sense of grey
desolation, of hopeless cross-purposes.
"Look here," she said. "I have been awake all night and every
night. I have been thinking of this--every moment when we have
not been together. I'm not answering you on an impulse. I love
you. I love you. I'll say that over ten thousand times. But
here we are--"
"The rest of life together," I said.
"It wouldn't be together. Now we are together. Now we have been
together. We are full of memories I do not feel I can ever
forget a single one."
"Nor I."
"And I want to close it and leave it at that. You see, dear,
what else is there to do?"
She turned her white face to me. "All I know of love, all I have
ever dreamt or learnt of love I have packed into these days for
you. You think we might live together and go on loving. No!
For you I will have no vain repetitions. You have had the best
and all of me. Would you have us, after this, meet again in
London or Paris or somewhere, scuffle to some wretched
dressmaker's, meet in a cabinet particulier?"
"No," I said. "I want you to marry me. I want you to play the
game of life with me as an honest woman should. Come and live
with me. Be my wife and squaw. Bear me children."
I looked at her white, drawn face, and it seemed to me I might
carry her yet. I spluttered for words.
"My God! Beatrice!" I cried; "but this is cowardice and folly!
Are you afraid of life? You of all people! What does it matter
what has been or what we were? Here we are with the world before
us! Start clean and new with me. We'll fight it through! I'm
not such a simple lover that I'll not tell you plainly when you
go wrong, and fight our difference out with you. It's the one
thing I want, the one thing I need--to have you, and more of you
and more! This love-making--it's love-making. It's just a part
of us, an incident--"
She shook her head and stopped me abruptly. "It's all," she
said.
"All!" I protested.
"I'm wiser than you. Wiser beyond words." She turned her eyes
to me and they shone with tears.
"I wouldn't have you say anything--but what you're saying," she
said. "But it's nonsense, dear. You know it's nonsense as you
say it."
I tried to keep up the heroic note, but she would not listen to
it.
"It's no good," she cried almost petulantly. "This little world
has made us what we are. Don't you see--don't you see what
I am? I can make love. I can make love and be loved, prettily.
Dear, don't blame me. I have given you all I have. If I had
anything more--. I have gone through it all over and over
again--thought it out. This morning my head aches, my eyes ache.
The light has gone out of me and I am a sick and tired woman.
But I'm talking wisdom--bitter wisdom. I couldn't be any sort of
helper to you, any sort of wife, any sort of mother. I'm spoilt.
I'm spoilt by this rich idle way of living, until every habit is
wrong, every taste wrong. The world is wrong. People can be
ruined by wealth just as much as by poverty. Do you think I
wouldn't face life with you if I could, if I wasn't absolutely
certain I should be down and dragging in the first half-mile of
the journey? Here I am--damned! Damned! But I won't damn you.
You know what I am! You know. You are too clear and simple not
to know the truth. You try to romance and hector, but you know
the truth. I am a little cad--sold and done. I'm--. My dear,
you think I've been misbehaving, but all these days I've been on
my best behaviour.... You don't understand, because you're a man.
A woman, when she's spoilt, is SPOILT. She's dirty in grain.
She's done."
She walked on weeping.
"You're a fool to want me," she said. "You're a fool to want
me--for my sake just as much as yours. We've done all we can.
It's just romancing--"
She dashed the tears from her eyes and turned upon me. "Don't
you understand?" she challenged. "Don't you know?"
We faced one another in silence for a moment.
"Yes," I said, "I know."
For a long time we spoke never a word, but walked on together,
slowly and sorrowfully, reluctant to turn about towards our
parting. When at last we did, she broke silence again.
"I've had you," she said.
"Heaven and hell," I said, "can't alter that."
"I've wanted--" she went on. "I've talked to you in the nights
and made up speeches. Now when I want to make them I'm
tongue-tied. But to me it's just as if the moments we have had
lasted for ever. Moods and states come and go. To-day my light
is out..."
To this day I cannot determine whether she said or whether I
imagined she said "chloral." Perhaps a half-conscious diagnosis
flashed it on my brain. Perhaps I am the victim of some perverse
imaginative freak of memory, some hinted possibility that
scratched and seared. There the word stands in my memory, as if
it were written in fire.
We came to the door of Lady Osprey's garden at last, and it was
beginning to drizzle.
She held out her hands and I took them.
"Yours," she said, in a weary unimpassioned voice; "all that I
had--such as it was. Will you forget?"
"Never," I answered.
"Never a touch or a word of it?"
"No."
"You will," she said.
We looked at one another in silence, and her face full of fatigue
and misery.
What could I do? What was there to do?
"I wish--" I said, and stopped.
"Good-bye."
IV
That should have been the last I saw of her, but, indeed, I was
destined to see her once again. Two days after I was at Lady
Grove, I forget altogether upon what errand, and as I walked back
to the station believing her to be gone away she came upon me,
and she was riding with Carnaby, just as I had seen them first.
The encounter jumped upon us unprepared. She rode by, her eyes
dark in her white face, and scarcely noticed me. She winced and
grew stiff at the sight of me and bowed her head. But Carnaby,
because he thought I was a broken and discomfited man, saluted me
with an easy friendliness, and shouted some genial commonplace to
me.
They passed out of sight and left me by the roadside....
And then, indeed, I tasted the ultimate bitterness of life. For
the first time I felt utter futility, and was wrung by emotion
that begot no action, by shame and pity beyond words. I had
parted from her dully and I had seen my uncle break and die with
dry eyes and a steady mind, but this chance sight of my lost
Beatrice brought me to tears. My face was wrung, and tears came
pouring down my cheeks. All the magic she had for me had changed
to wild sorrow. "Oh God!" I cried, "this is too much," and
turned my face after her and made appealing gestures to the beech
trees and cursed at fate. I wanted to do preposterous things, to
pursue her, to save her, to turn life back so that she might
begin again. I wonder what would have happened had I overtaken
them in pursuit, breathless with running, uttering incoherent
words, weeping, expostulatory. I came near to doing that.
There was nothing in earth or heaven to respect my curses or
weeping. In the midst of it a man who had been trimming the
opposite hedge appeared and stared at me.
Abruptly, ridiculously, I dissembled before him and went on and
caught my train....
But the pain I felt then I have felt a hundred times; it is with
me as I write. It haunts this book, I see, that is what haunts
this book, from end to end.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
NIGHT AND THE OPEN SEA
I
I have tried throughout all this story to tell things as they
happened to me. In the beginning--the sheets are still here on
the table, grimy and dogs-eared and old-looking--I said I wanted
to tell MYSELF and the world in which I found myself, and I have
done my best. But whether I have succeeded I cannot imagine. All
this writing is grey now and dead and trite and unmeaning to me;
some of it I know by heart. I am the last person to judge it.
As I turn over the big pile of manuscript before me certain
things become clearer to me, and particularly the immense
inconsequences of my experiences. It is, I see now that I have
it all before me, a story of activity and urgency and sterility.
I have called it Tono-Bungay, but I had far better have called it
Waste. I have told of childless Marion, of my childless aunt, of
Beatrice wasted and wasteful and futile. What hope is there for
a people whose women become fruitless? I think of all the energy
I have given to vain things. I think of my industrious scheming
with my uncle, of Crest Hill's vast cessation, of his resonant
strenuous career. Ten thousand men have envied him and wished to
live as he lived. It is all one spectacle of forces running to
waste, of people who use and do not replace, the story of a
country hectic with a wasting aimless fever of trade and
money-making and pleasure-seeking. And now I build destroyers!
Other people may see this country in other terms; this is how I
have seen it. In some early chapter in this heap I compared all
our present colour and abundance to October foliage before the
frosts nip down the leaves. That I still feel was a good image.
Perhaps I see wrongly. It may be I see decay all about me
because I am, in a sense, decay. To others it may be a scene of
achievement and construction radiant with hope. I, too, have a
sort of hope, but it is a remote hope, a hope that finds no
promise in this Empire or in any of the great things of our time.
How they will look in history I do not know, how time and chance
will prove them I cannot guess; that is how they have mirrored
themselves on one contemporary mind.
II
Concurrently with writing the last chapter of this book I have
been much engaged by the affairs of a new destroyer we have
completed. It has been an oddly complementary alternation of
occupations. Three weeks or so ago this novel had to be put
aside in order that I might give all my time day and night to the
fitting and finishing of the engines. Last Thursday X 2, for so
we call her, was done and I took her down the Thames and went out
nearly to Texel for a trial of speed.
It is curious how at times one's impressions will all fuse and
run together into a sort of unity and become continuous with
things that have hitherto been utterly alien and remote. That
rush down the river became mysteriously connected with this book.
As I passed down the Thames I seemed in a new and parallel manner
to be passing all England in review. I saw it then as I had
wanted my readers to see it. The thought came to me slowly as I
picked my way through the Pool; it stood out clear as I went
dreaming into the night out upon the wide North Sea.
It wasn't so much thinking at the time as a sort of photographic
thought that came and grew clear. X2 went ripping through the
dirty oily water as scissors rip through canvas, and the front of
my mind was all intent with getting her through under the bridges
and in and out among the steam-boats and barges and rowing-boats
and piers. I lived with my hands and eyes hard ahead. I thought
nothing then of any appearances but obstacles, but for all that
the back of my mind took the photographic memory of it complete
and vivid....
"This," it came to me, "is England. That is what I wanted to
give in my book. This!"
We started in the late afternoon. We throbbed out of our yard
above Hammersmith Bridge, fussed about for a moment, and headed
down stream. We came at an easy rush down Craven Reach, past
Fulham and Hurlingham, past the long stretches of muddy meadow
And muddy suburb to Battersea and Chelsea, round the cape of tidy
frontage that is Grosvenor Road and under Vauxhall Bridge, and
Westminster opened before us. We cleared a string of coal barges
and there on the left in the October sunshine stood the
Parliament houses, and the flag was flying and Parliament was
sitting.
I saw it at the time unseeingly; afterwards it came into my mind
as the centre of the whole broad panoramic effect of that
afternoon. The stiff square lace of Victorian Gothic with its
Dutch clock of a tower came upon me suddenly and stared and
whirled past in a slow half pirouette and became still, I know,
behind me as if watching me recede. "Aren't you going to respect
me, then?" it seemed to say.
Not I! There in that great pile of Victorian architecture the
landlords and the lawyers, the bishops, the railway men and the
magnates of commerce go to and fro--in their incurable tradition
of commercialised Bladesovery, of meretricious gentry and
nobility sold for riches. I have been near enough to know. The
Irish and the Labour-men run about among their feet, making a
fuss, effecting little, they've got no better plans that I can
see. Respect it indeed! There's a certain paraphernalia of
dignity, but whom does it deceive? The King comes down in a gilt
coach to open the show and wears long robes and a crown; and
there's a display of stout and slender legs in white stockings
and stout and slender legs in black stockings and artful old
gentlemen in ermine. I was reminded of one congested afternoon I
had spent with my aunt amidst a cluster of agitated women's hats
in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords and how I saw the King
going to open Parliament, and the Duke of Devonshire looking like
a gorgeous pedlar and terribly bored with the cap of maintenance
on a tray before him hung by slings from his shoulder. A
wonderful spectacle!
It is quaint, no doubt, this England--it is even dignified in
places--and full of mellow associations. That does not alter the
quality of the realities these robes conceal. The realities are
greedy trade, base profit-- seeking, bold advertisement; and
kingship and chivalry, spite of this wearing of treasured robes,
are as dead among it all as that crusader my uncle championed
against the nettles outside the Duffield church.
I have thought much of that bright afternoon's panorama.
To run down the Thames so is to run one's hand over the pages in
the book of England from end to end. One begins in Craven Reach
and it is as if one were in the heart of old England. Behind us
are Kew and Hampton Court with their memories of Kings and
Cardinals, and one runs at first between Fulham's episcopal
garden parties and Hurlingham's playground for the sporting
instinct of our race. The whole effect is English. There is
space, there are old trees and all the best qualities of the
home-land in that upper reach. Putney, too, looks Anglican on a
dwindling scale. And then for a stretch the newer developments
slop over, one misses Bladesover and there come first squalid
stretches of mean homes right and left and then the dingy
industrialism of the south side, and on the north bank the polite
long front of nice houses, artistic, literary, administrative
people's residences, that stretches from Cheyne Walk nearly to
Westminster and hides a wilderness of slums. What a long slow
crescendo that is, mile after mile, with the houses crowding
closelier, the multiplying succession of church towers, the
architectural moments, the successive bridges, until you come
out into the second movement of the piece with Lambeth's old
palace under your quarter and the houses of Parliament on your
bow! Westminster Bridge is ahead of you then, and through it you
flash, and in a moment the round-faced clock tower cranes up to
peer at you again and New Scotland Yard squares at you, a fat
beef-eater of a policeman disguised miraculously as a Bastille.
For a stretch you have the essential London; you have Charing
Cross railway station, heart of the world, and the Embankment on
the north side with its new hotels overshadowing its Georgian and
Victorian architecture, and mud and great warehouses and
factories, chimneys, shot towers, advertisements on the south.
The northward skyline grows more intricate and pleasing, and more
and more does one thank God for Wren. Somerset House is as
picturesque as the civil war, one is reminded again of the
original England, one feels in the fretted sky the quality of
Restoration Lace.
And then comes Astor's strong box and the lawyers' Inns.
(I had a passing memory of myself there, how once I had trudged
along the Embankment westward, weighing my uncle's offer of
three hundred pounds a year....)
Through that central essential London reach I drove, and X2
bored her nose under the foam regardless of it all like a black
hound going through reeds--on what trail even I who made her
cannot tell.
And in this reach, too, one first meets the seagulls and is
reminded of the sea. Blackfriars one takes--just under these two
bridges and just between them is the finest bridge moment in the
world--and behold, soaring up, hanging in the sky over a rude
tumult of warehouses, over a jostling competition of traders,
irrelevantly beautiful and altogether remote, Saint Paul's! "Of
course!" one says, "Saint Paul's!" It is the very figure of
whatever fineness the old Anglican culture achieved, detached, a
more dignified and chastened Saint Peter's, colder, greyer, but
still ornate; it has never been over thrown, never disavowed,
only the tall warehouses and all the roar of traffic have
forgotten it, every one has forgotten it; the steamships, the
barges, go heedlessly by regardless of it, intricacies of
telephone wires and poles cut blackly into its thin mysteries,
and presently, when in a moment the traffic permits you and you
look round for it, it has dissolved like a cloud into the grey
blues of the London sky.
And then the traditional and ostensible England falls from you
altogether. The third movement begins, the last great movement
in the London symphony, in which the trim scheme of the old order
is altogether dwarfed and swallowed up. Comes London Bridge, and
the great warehouses tower up about you, waving stupendous
cranes, the gulls circle and scream in your ears, large ships lie
among their lighters, and one is in the port of the world. Again
and again in this book I have written of England as a feudal
scheme overtaken by fatty degeneration and stupendous accidents
of hypertrophy.
For the last time I must strike that note as the memory of the
dear neat little sunlit ancient Tower of London lying away in a
gap among the warehouses comes back to me, that little
accumulation of buildings so provincially pleasant and
dignified, overshadowed by the vulgarest, most typical exploit
of modern England, the sham Gothic casings to the ironwork of the
Tower Bridge. That Tower Bridge is the very balance and
confirmation of Westminster's dull pinnacles and tower. That
sham Gothic bridge; in the very gates of our mother of change,
the Sea !
But after that one is in a world of accident and nature. For the
third part of the panorama of London is beyond all law, order,
and precedence; it is the seaport and the sea. One goes down the
widening reaches through a monstrous variety of shipping, great
steamers, great sailing-ships, trailing the flags of all the
world, a monstrous confusion of lighters, witches' conferences
of brown-sailed barges, wallowing tugs, a tumultuous crowding
and jostling of cranes and spars, and wharves and stores, and
assertive inscriptions. Huge vistas of dock open right and left
of one, and here and there beyond and amidst it all are church
towers, little patches of indescribably old-fashioned and
worn-out houses, riverside pubs and the like, vestiges of
townships that were long since torn to fragments and submerged in
these new growths. And amidst it all no plan appears, no
intention, no comprehensive desire. That is the very key of it
all. Each day one feels that the pressure of commerce and
traffic grew, grew insensibly monstrous, and first this man made
a wharf and that erected a crane, and then this company set to
work and then that, and so they jostled together to make this
unassimilable enormity of traffic. Through it we dodged and
drove eager for the high seas.
I remember how I laughed aloud at the glimpse of the name of a
London County Council steamboat that ran across me. Caxton it
was called, and another was Pepys, and another was Shakespeare.
They seemed so wildly out of place, splashing about in that
confusion. One wanted to take them out and wipe them and put
them back in some English gentleman's library. Everything was
alive about them, flash ing, splashing, and passing, ships
moving, tugs panting, hawsers taut, barges going down with men
toiling at the sweeps, the water all a-swirl with the wash of
shipping, scaling into millions of little wavelets, curling and
frothing under the whip of the unceasing wind. Past it all we
drove. And at Greenwich to the south, you know, there stands a
fine stone frontage where all the victories are recorded in a
Painted Hall, and beside it is the "Ship" where once upon a time
those gentlemen of Westminster used to have an annual
dinner--before the port of London got too much for them
altogether. The old facade of the Hospital was just warming to
the sunset as we went by, and after that, right and left, the
river opened, the sense of the sea increased and prevailed, reach
after reach from Northfleet to the Nore.
And out you come at last with the sun behind you into the eastern
sea. You speed up and tear the oily water louder and faster,
siroo, siroo-swish-siroo, and the hills of Kent--over which I
once fled from the Christian teachings of Nicodemus Frapp--fall
away on the right hand and Essex on the left. They fall away and
vanish into blue haze, and the tall slow ships behind the tugs,
scarce moving ships and wallowing sturdy tugs, are all wrought of
wet gold as one goes frothing by. They stand out, bound on
strange missions of life and death, to the killing of men in
unfamiliar lands. And now behind us is blue mystery and the
phantom flash of unseen lights, and presently even these are
gone, and I and my destroyer tear out to the unknown across a
great grey space. We tear into the great spaces of the future
and the turbines fall to talking in unfamiliar tongues. Out to
the open we go, to windy freedom and trackless ways. Light after
light goes down. England and the Kingdom, Britain and the
Empire, the old prides and the old devotions, glide abeam,
astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass--pass. The river
passes--London passes, England passes...
III
This is the note I have tried to emphasise, the note that sounds
clear in my mind when I think of anything beyond the purely
personal aspects of my story.
It is a note of crumbling and confusion, of change and seemingly
aimless swelling, of a bubbling up and medley of futile loves and
sorrows. But through the confusion sounds another note. Through
the confusion something drives, something that is at once human
achievement and the most inhuman of all existing things.
Something comes out of it.... How can I express the values of a
thing at once so essential and so immaterial. It is something
that calls upon such men as I with an irresistible appeal.
I have figured it in my last section by the symbol of my
destroyer, stark and swift, irrelevant to most human interests.
Sometimes I call this reality Science, sometimes I call it
Truth. But it is something we draw by pain and effort ont of the
heart of life, that we disentangle and make clear. Other men
serve it, I know, in art, in literature, in social invention, and
see it in a thousand different figures, under a hundred names. I
see it always as austerity, as beauty. This thing we make clear
is the heart of life. It is the one enduring thing. Men and
nations, epochs and civilisation pass each making its
contribution I do not know what it is, this something, except
that it is supreme. It is, a something, a quality, an element,
one may find now in colours, now in norms, now in sounds, now in
thoughts. It emerges from life with each year one lives and
feels, and generation by generation and age by age, but the how
and why of it are all beyond the compass of my mind....
Yet the full sense of it was with me all that night as I drove,
lonely above the rush and murmur of my engines, out upon the
weltering circle of the sea.
Far out to the northeast there came the flicker of a squadron of
warships waving white swords of light about the sky. I kept them
hull-down, and presently they were mere summer lightning over
the watery edge of the globe.... I fell into thought that was
nearly formless, into doubts and dreams that have no words, and
it seemed good to me to drive ahead and on and or through the
windy starlight, over the long black waves.
IV
It was morning and day before I returned with the four sick and
starving journalists who had got permission to come with me, up
the shining river, and past the old grey Tower....
I recall the back views of those journalists very distinctly,
going with a certain damp weariness of movement, along a side
street away from the river. They were good men and bore me no
malice, and they served me up to the public in turgid degenerate
Kiplingese, as a modest button on the complacent stomach of the
Empire. Though as a matter of fact, X2 isn't intended for the
empire, or indeed for the hands of any European power. We
offered it to our own people first, but they would have nothing
to do with me, and I have long since ceased to trouble much about
such questions. I have come to see myself from the outside, my
country from the outside--without illusions. We make and pass.
We are all things that make and pass striving upon a hidden
mission, out to the open sea.