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Tono-Bungay

by H. G. Wells · English · Gutenberg #718 · 771,765 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Tono-Bungay

Author: H. G. Wells


        
Release date: March 18, 2006 [eBook #718]
                Most recently updated: April 17, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/718

Credits: John Bean; Diane Bean and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TONO-BUNGAY ***


[Illustration]




Tono-Bungay

by H.G. Wells


Contents

 BOOK THE FIRST
 CHAPTER THE FIRST
 CHAPTER THE SECOND
 CHAPTER THE THIRD

 BOOK THE SECOND
 CHAPTER THE FIRST
 CHAPTER THE SECOND
 CHAPTER THE THIRD
 CHAPTER THE FOURTH

 BOOK THE THIRD
 CHAPTER THE FIRST
 CHAPTER THE SECOND
 CHAPTER THE THIRD
 CHAPTER THE FOURTH

 BOOK THE FOURTH
 CHAPTER THE FIRST
 CHAPTER THE SECOND
 CHAPTER THE THIRD




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 _en famille_ (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 β....

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 Xenōphen—and please note
the quantity of the ō. 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 façade 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-âtrice! Beeee-e-âtrice!”

“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_-â-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 _rôles_, 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-à-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
façade 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 naïve 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 _ménage_ 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 façade 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

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 £70 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

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