Tono Bungay
by H.G. Wells
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

by H.G Wells

BOOK THE FIRST

THE DAYS BEFORE TONO-BUNGAY WAS INVENTED

CHAPTER THE FIRST

OF BLADESOVER HOUSE, AND MY MOTHER; AND THE CONSTITUTION OF SOCIETY

I

Most people in this world seem to live "in character"; they have
a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one
with another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak
of them as being of this sort of people or that. They are, as
theatrical people say, no more (and no less) than "character
actors."  They have a class, they have a place, they know what is
becoming in them and what is due to them, and their proper size
of tombstone tells at last how properly they have played the
part. But there is also another kind of life that is not so much
living as a miscellaneous tasting of life. One gets hit by some
unusual transverse force, one is jerked out of one's stratum and
lives crosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a
succession of samples. That has been my lot, and that is what
has set me at last writing something in the nature of a novel. I
have got an unusual series of impressions that I want very
urgently to tell. I have seen life at very different levels, and
at all these levels I have seen it with a sort of intimacy and in
good faith. I have been a native in many social countries. I
have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker, my cousin, who
has since died in the Chatham infirmary; I have eaten illegal
snacks--the unjustifiable gifts of footmen--in pantries, and been
despised for my want of style (and subsequently married and
divorced) by the daughter of a gasworks clerk; and--to go to my
other extreme--I was once--oh, glittering days!--an item in the
house-party of a countess.  She was, I admit, a countess with a
financial aspect, but still, you know, a countess. I've seen
these people at various angles. At the dinner-table I've met not
simply the titled but the great. On one occasion--it is my
brightest memory--I upset my champagne over the trousers of the
greatest statesman in the empire--Heaven forbid I should be so
invidious as to name him!--in the warmth of our mutual
admiration.

And once (though it is the most incidental thing in my life) I
murdered a man....

Yes, I've seen a curious variety of people and ways of living
altogether. Odd people they all are great and small, very much
alike at bottom and curiously different on their surfaces. I
wish I had ranged just a little further both up and down, seeing
I have ranged so far. Royalty must be worth knowing and very
great fun. But my contacts with princes have been limited to
quite public occasions, nor at the other end of the scale have I
had what I should call an inside acquaintance with that dusty but
attractive class of people who go about on the high-roads drunk
but enfamille (so redeeming the minor lapse), in the summertime,
with a perambulator, lavender to sell, sun-brown children, a
smell, and ambiguous bundles that fire the imagination. Navvies,
farm-labourers, sailormen and stokers, all such as sit in 1834
beer-houses, are beyond me also, and I suppose must remain so now
for ever. My intercourse with the ducal rank too has been
negligible; I once went shooting with a duke, and in an outburst
of what was no doubt snobbishness, did my best to get him in the
legs. But that failed.

I'm sorry I haven't done the whole lot though....

You will ask by what merit I achieved this remarkable  social
range, this extensive cross-section of the British social
organism. It was the Accident of Birth. It always is in
England.

Indeed, if I may make the remark so cosmic, everything is. But
that is by the way. I was my uncle's nephew, and my uncle was no
less a person than Edward Ponderevo, whose comet-like transit of
the financial heavens happened--it is now ten years ago! Do you
remember the days of Ponderevo, the great days, I mean, of
Ponderevo? Perhaps you had a trifle in some world-shaking
enterprise! Then you know him only too well. Astraddle on
Tono-Bungay,  he flashed athwart the empty heavens--like a
comet--rather, like a stupendous rocket!--and overawed investors
spoke of his star. At his zenith he burst into a cloud of the
most magnificent promotions. What a time that was! The Napoleon
of domestic conveniences!

I was his nephew, his peculiar and intimate nephew. I was hanging
on to his coat-tails all the way through. I made pills with him
in the chemist's shop at Wimblehurst  before he began. I was,
you might say, the stick of his rocket; and after our tremendous
soar, after he had played with millions, a golden rain in the
sky, after my bird's-eye view of the modern world, I fell again,
a little scarred and blistered perhaps, two and twenty years
older, with my youth gone, my manhood eaten in upon, but greatly
edified, into this Thames-side yard, into these white heats and
hammerings, amidst the fine realites of steel--to think it all
over in my leisure and jot down the notes and inconsecutive
observations that make this book. It was more, you know, than a
figurative soar. The zenith of that career was surely our flight
across the channel in the Lord Roberts B....

I warn you this book is going to be something of an
agglomeration. I want to trace my social trajectory (and my
uncle's) as the main line of my story, but as this is my first
novel and almost certainly my last, I want to get in, too, all
sorts of things that struck me, things that amused me and
impressions I got--even although they don't minister directly to
my narrative at all. I want to set out my own queer love
experiences too, such as they are, for they troubled and
distressed and swayed me hugely, and they still seem to me to
contain all sorts of irrational and debatable elements that I
shall be the clearer-headed for getting on paper. And possibly I
may even flow into descriptions of people who are really no more
than people seen in transit, just because it amuses me to recall
what they said and did to us, and more particularly how they
behaved in the brief but splendid glare of Tono-Bungay and its
still more glaring offspring. It lit some of them up, I can
assure you! Indeed, I want to get in all sorts of things. My
ideas of a novel all through are comprehensive rather than
austere....

Tono-Bungay still figures on the hoardings, it stands in rows in
every chemist's storeroom, it still assuages the coughs of age
and brightens the elderly eye and loosens the elderly tongue; but
its social glory, its financial illumination, have faded from the
world for ever. And I, sole scorched survivor from the blaze,
sit writing of it here in an air that is never still for the
clang and thunder of machines, on a table littered with working
drawings, and amid fragments of models and notes about velocities
and air and water pressures and trajectories--of an altogether
different sort from that of Tono-Bungay.

II

I write that much and look at it, and wonder whether, after all,
this is any fair statement of what I am attempting in this book.
I've given, I see, an impression that I want to make simply a
hotch-potch of anecdotes and experiences with my uncle swimming
in the middle as the largest lump of victual. I'll own that
here, with the pen already started, I realise what a fermenting
mass of things learnt and emotions experienced and theories
formed I've got to deal with, and how, in a sense, hopeless my
book must be from the very outset. I suppose what I'm really
trying to render is nothing more nor less than Life--as one man
has found it. I want to tell--MYSELF, and my impressions of the
thing as a whole, to say things I have come to feel intensely of
the laws, traditions, usages, and ideas we call society, and how
we poor individuals get driven and lured and stranded among these
windy, perplexing shoals and channels. I've got, I suppose, to a
time of life when things begin to take on shapes that have an air
of reality, and become no longer material for dreaming, but
interesting in themselves. I've reached the criticising,
novel-writing age, and here I am writing mine--my one
novel--without having any of the discipline to refrain and omit
that I suppose the regular novel-writer acquires.

I've read an average share of novels and made some starts before
this beginning, and I've found the restraints  and rules of the
art (as I made them out) impossible for me. I like to write, I
am keenly interested  in writing, but it is not my technique.
I'm an engineer with a patent or two and a set of ideas; most of
whatever artist there is in me has been given to turbine machines
and boat building and the problem of flying, and do what I will I
fail to see how I can be other than a lax, undisciplined
story-teller. I must sprawl and flounder, comment and theorise,
if I am to get the thing out I have in mind. And it isn't a
constructed  tale I have to tell, but unmanageable realities. My
love-story--and if only I can keep up the spirit of truth-telling
all through as strongly as I have now, you shall have it
all--falls into no sort of neat scheme of telling. It involves
three separate feminine persons. It's all mixed up with the
other things....

But I've said enough, I hope, to excuse myself for the method or
want of method in what follows, and I think I had better tell
without further delay of my boyhood and my early impressions in
the shadow of Bladesover House.

III

There came a time when I realised that Bladesover House was not
all it seemed, but when I was a little boy I took the place with
the entirest faith as a complete authentic microcosm. I
believed that the Bladesover system was a little
working-model--and not so very little either--of the whole world.

Let me try and give you the effect of it.

Bladesover lies up on the Kentish Downs, eight miles perhaps from
Ashborough; and its old pavilion, a little wooden parody of the
temple of Vesta at Tibur, upon the hill crest behind the house,
commands in theory at least a view of either sea, of the Channel
southward and the Thames to the northeast. The park is the
second largest in Kent, finely wooded with well-placed beeches,
many elms and some sweet chestnuts, abounding in little valleys
and hollows of bracken, with springs and a stream and three fine
ponds and multitudes of fallow deer. The house was built in the
eighteenth century, it is of pale red brick in the style of a
French chateau, and save for one pass among the crests which
opens to blue distances, to minute, remote, oast-set farm-houses
and copses and wheat fields and the occasional gleam of water,
its hundred and seventeen windows look on nothing but its own
wide and handsome territories.  A semi-circular screen of great
beeches masks the church and village, which cluster picturesquely
about the high road along the skirts of the great park.
Northward,  at the remotest corner of that enclosure, is a second
dependent village, Ropedean, less fortunate in its greater
distance and also on account of a rector. This divine was indeed
rich, but he was vindictively economical because of some
shrinkage of his tithes; and by reason of his use of the word
Eucharist for the Lord's Supper he had become altogether
estranged from the great ladies of Bladesover. So that Ropedean
was in the shadows through all that youthful time.

Now the unavoidable suggestion of that wide park and that fair
large house, dominating church, village and the country side, was
that they represented the thing that mattered supremely in the
world, and that all other things had significance only in
relation to them. They represented the Gentry, the Quality, by
and through and for whom the rest of the world, the farming folk
and the labouring folk, the trades-people of Ashborough, and the
upper servants and the lower servants and the servants of the
estate, breathed and lived and were permitted. And the Quality
did it so quietly and thoroughly, the great house mingled so
solidly and effectually earth and sky, the contrast of its
spacious hall and saloon and galleries, its airy housekeeper's
room and warren of offices with the meagre dignities of the
vicar, and the pinched and stuffy rooms of even the post-office
people and the grocer, so enforced these suggestions, that it was
only when I was a boy of thirteen or fourteen and some queer
inherited strain of scepticism had set me doubting whether Mr.
Bartlett, the vicar, did really know with certainty all about
God, that as a further and deeper step in doubting I began to
question the final rightness of the gentlefolks, their primary
necessity in the scheme of things. But once that scepticism had
awakened it took me fast and far. By fourteen I had achieved
terrible blasphemies and sacrilege; I had resolved  to marry a
viscount's daughter, and I had blacked the left eye--I think it
was the left--of her half-brother, in open and declared
rebellion.

But of that in its place.

The great house, the church, the village, and the labourers and
the servants in their stations and degrees, seemed to me, I say,
to be a closed and complete social system. About us were other
villages and great estates, and from house to house, interlacing,
correlated, the Gentry, the fine Olympians, came and went. The
country towns seemed mere collections of ships, marketing places
for the tenantry, centres for such education as they needed, as
entirely dependent on the gentry as the village and scarcely less
directly so. I thought this was the order of the whole world. I
thought London  was only a greater country town where the
gentle-folk kept town-houses and did their greater shopping under
the magnificent shadow of the greatest of all fine gentlewomen,
the Queen. It seemed to be in the divine order. That all this
fine appearance was already sapped, that there were forces at
work that might presently carry all this elaborate social system
in which my mother instructed me so carefully that I might
understand my "place," to Limbo, had scarcely dawned upon me even
by the time that Tono-Bungay was fairly launched upon the world.

There are many people in England to-day upon whom it has not yet
dawned. There are times when I doubt whether any but a very
inconsiderable minority of English people realise how extensively
this ostensible order has even now passed away. The great houses
stand in the parks still, the cottages cluster respectfully on
their borders, touching their eaves with their creepers, the
English countryside--you can range through Kent from Bladesover
northward and see persists obstinately in looking what it was.
It is like an early day in a fine October. The hand of change
rests on it all, unfelt, unseen; resting for awhile, as it were
half reluctantly, before it grips and ends the thing for ever.
One frost and the whole face of things will be bare, links snap,
patience end, our fine foliage of pretences lie glowing in the
mire.

For that we have still to wait a little while. The new order may
have gone far towards shaping itself, but just as in that sort of
lantern show that used to be known in the village as the
"Dissolving Views," the scene that is going remains upon the
mind, traceable and evident, and the newer picture is yet
enigmatical long after the lines that are to replace those former
ones have grown bright and strong, so that the new England of our
children's children is still a riddle to me. The ideas of
democracy, of equality, and above all of promiscuous fraternity
have certainly never really entered into the English mind. But
what IS coming into it? All this book, I hope, will bear a
little on that. Our people never formulates; it keeps words for
jests and ironies. In the meanwhile the old shapes, the old
attitudes remain, subtly changed and changing still, sheltering
strange tenants. Bladesover House is now let furnished to Sir
Reuben Lichtenstein, and has been since old Lady Drew died; it
was my odd experience to visit there, in the house of which my
mother had been housekeeper, when my uncle was at the climax of
Tono-Bungay. It was curious to notice then the little
differences that had come to things with this substitution. To
borrow an image from my mineralogical days, these Jews were not
so much a new British gentry as "pseudomorphous" after the
gentry. They are a very clever people, the Jews, but not clever
enough to suppress their cleverness. I wished I could have gone
downstairs to savour the tone of the pantry. It would have been
very different I know. Hawksnest, over beyond, I noted, had its
pseudomorph too; a newspaper proprietor of the type that hustles
along with stolen ideas from one loud sink-or-swim enterprise to
another, had bought the place outright; Redgrave was in the hands
of brewers.

But the people in the villages, so far as I could detect, saw no
difference in their world. Two little girls bobbed and an old
labourer touched his hat convulsively  as I walked through the
village. He still thought he knew his place--and mine. I did
not know him, but I would have liked dearly to have asked him if
he remembered my mother, if either my uncle or old Lichtenstein
had been man enough to stand being given away like that.

In that English countryside of my boyhood every human being had a
"place."  It belonged to you from your birth like the colour of
your eyes, it was inextricably  your destiny. Above you were
your betters, below you were your inferiors, and there were even
an unstable questionable few, cases so disputable that you might
for the rough purposes of every day at least, regard them as your
equals. Head and centre of our system was Lady Drew, her
"leddyship," shrivelled, garrulous, with a wonderful memory for
genealogies and very, very old, and beside her and nearly as old,
Miss Somerville, her cousin and companion. These two old souls
lived like dried-up kernels in the great shell of Bladesover
House, the shell that had once been gaily full of fops, of fine
ladies in powder and patches and courtly gentlemen with swords;
and when there was no company they spent whole days in the corner
parlour just over the housekeeper's room, between reading and
slumber and caressing their two pet dogs. When I was a boy I
used always to think of these two poor old creatures as superior
beings living, like God, somewhere through the ceiling.
Occasionally they bumped about a bit and one even heard them
overhead, which gave them a greater effect of reality without
mitigating their vertical predominance. Sometimes too I saw
them. Of course if I came upon them in the park or in the
shrubbery (where I was a trespasser) I hid or fled in pious
horror, but I was upon due occasion taken into the Presence by
request. I remember her "leddyship" then as a thing of black
silks and a golden chain, a quavering injunction to me to be a
good boy, a very shrunken loose-skinned face and neck, and a ropy
hand that trembled a halfcrown into mine. Miss Somerville
hovered behind, a paler thing of broken lavender and white and
black, with screwed up, sandy-lashed eyes. Her hair was yellow
and her colour bright, and when we sat in the housekeeper's room
of a winter's night warming our toes and sipping elder wine, her
maid would tell us the simple secrets of that belated flush....
After my fight with young Garvell I was of course banished, and I
never saw those poor old painted goddesses again.

Then there came and went on these floors over our respectful
heads, the Company; people I rarely saw, but whose tricks and
manners were imitated and discussed  by their maids and valets in
the housekeeper's room and the steward's room--so that I had them
through a medium at second hand. I gathered that none of the
company were really Lady Drew's equals, they were greater and
lesser after the manner of all things in our world. Once I
remember there was a Prince, with a real live gentleman in
attendance, and that was a little above our customary levels and
excited us all, and perhaps raised our expectations unduly.
Afterwards, Rabbits, the butler, came into my mother's room
downstairs, red with indignation and with tears in his eyes.
"Look at that!" gasped Rabbits. My mother was speechless with
horror. That was a sovereign, a mere sovereign, such as you
might get from any commoner!

After Company, I remember, came anxious days, for the poor old
women upstairs were left tired and cross and vindictive, and in a
state of physical and emotional indigestion after their social
efforts....

On the lowest fringe of these real Olympians hung the vicarage
people, and next to them came those ambiguous  beings who are
neither quality nor subjects. The vicarage people certainly hold
a place by themselves in the typical English scheme; nothing is
more remarkable than the progress the Church has
made--socially--in the last two hundred years. In the early
eighteenth century the vicar was rather under than over the
house-steward, and was deemed a fitting match for the housekeeper
or any not too morally discredited discard. The eighteenth
century literature is full of his complaints that he might not
remain at table to share the pie. He rose above these
indignities because of the abundance of younger sons. When I
meet the large assumptions of the contemporary cleric, I am apt
to think of these things. It is curious to note that to-day that
down-trodden, organ-playing creature, the Church of England
village Schoolmaster, holds much the same position as the
seventeenth century parson. The doctor in Bladesover ranked
below the vicar but above the "vet," artists and summer visitors
squeezed in above or below this point according to their
appearance  and expenditure, and then in a carefully arranged
scale came the tenantry, the butler and housekeeper, the village
shopkeeper, the head keeper, the cook, the publican, the second
keeper, the blacksmith (whose status was complicated by his
daughter keeping the post-office--and a fine hash she used to
make of telegrams too!) the village shopkeeper's eldest son, the
first footman, younger sons of the village shopkeeper, his first
assistant, and so forth.

All these conceptions and applications of a universal precedence
and much else I drank in at Bladesover, as I listened to the talk
of valets, ladies'-maids, Rabbits the butler and my mother in the
much-cupboarded, white-painted, chintz-brightened housekeeper's
room where the upper servants assembled, or of footmen and
Rabbits and estate men of all sorts among the green baize and
Windsor chairs of the pantry--where Rabbits, being above the law,
sold beer without a license or any compunction--or of housemaids
and still-room maids in the bleak, matting-carpeted still-room or
of the cook and her kitchen maids and casual friends among the
bright copper and hot glow of the kitchens.

Of course their own ranks and places came by implication  to
these people, and it was with the ranks and places of the
Olympians that the talk mainly concerned itself. There was an
old peerage and a Crockford together with the books of recipes,
the Whitaker's Almanack, the Old Moore's Almanack, and the
eighteenth century dictionary, on the little dresser that broke
the cupboards on one side of my mother's room; there was another
peerage, with the covers off, in the pantry; there was a new
peerage in the billiard-room, and I seem to remember another in
the anomalous apartment  that held the upper servants' bagatelle
board and in which, after the Hall dinner, they partook of the
luxury of sweets. And if you had asked any of those upper
servants how such and such a Prince of Battenberg was related
to, let us say, Mr. Cunninghame Graham or the Duke of Argyle, you
would have been told upon the nail. As a boy, I heard a great
deal of that sort of thing, and if to this day I am still a
little vague about courtesy titles and the exact application of
honorifics, it is, I can assure you, because I hardened my heart,
and not from any lack of adequate opportunity  of mastering these
succulent particulars.

Dominating all these memories is the figure of my mother--my
mother who did not love me because I grew liker my father every
day--and who knew with inflexible decision her place and the
place of every one in the world--except the place that concealed
my father--and in some details mine. Subtle points were put to
her. I can see and hear her saying now, "No, Miss Fison, peers
of England go in before peers of the United Kingdom, and he is
merely a peer of the United Kingdom."  She had much exercise in
placing people's servants about her tea-table, where the
etiquette  was very strict. I wonder sometimes if the etiquette
of housekeepers' rooms is as strict to-day, and what my mother
would have made of a chauffeur....

On the whole I am glad that I saw so much as I did of
Bladesover--if for no other reason than because seeing it when I
did, quite naively, believing in it thoroughly, and then coming
to analyse it, has enabled me to understand much that would be
absolutely incomprehensible in the structure of English society.
Bladesover is, I am convinced, the clue to almost all that is
distinctively British and perplexing to the foreign inquirer in
England and the English-speaking peoples. Grasp firmly that
England was all Bladesover two hundred years ago; that it has had
Reform Acts indeed, and such--like changes of formula, but no
essential revolution since then; that all that is modern and
different has come in as a thing intruded or as a gloss upon
this predominant formula, either impertinently or apologetically;
and you will perceive at once the reasonableness, the necessity,
of that snobbishness which is the distinctive quality of English
thought. Everybody who is not actually in the shadow of a
Bladesover is as it were perpetually seeking after lost
orientations. We have never broken with our tradition, never
even symbolically hewed it to pieces, as the French did in
quivering fact in the Terror. But all the organizing ideas have
slackened, the old habitual bonds have relaxed or altogether
come undone. And America too, is, as it were, a detached,
outlying part of that estate which has expanded in queer ways.
George Washington, Esquire, was of the gentlefolk, and he came
near being a King. It was Plutarch, you know, and nothing
intrinsically American that prevented George Washington being a
King....

IV

I hated teatime in the housekeeper's room more than anything else
at Bladesover. And more particularly I hated it when Mrs.
Mackridge and Mrs. Booch and Mrs. Latude-Fernay were staying in
the house. They were, all three of them, pensioned-off servants.

Old friends of Lady Drew's had rewarded them posthumously for a
prolonged devotion to their minor comforts, and Mrs. Booch was
also trustee for a favourite Skye terrier. Every year Lady Drew
gave them an invitation--a reward and encouragement of virtue
with especial reference to my mother and Miss Fison, the maid.
They sat about in black and shiny and flouncey clothing adorned
with gimp and beads, eating great quantities of cake, drinking
much tea in a stately manner and reverberating remarks.

I remember these women as immense. No doubt they were of
negotiable size, but I was only a very little chap and they have
assumed nightmare proportions in my mind. They loomed, they
bulged, they impended. Mrs. Mackridge was large and dark; there
was a marvel about her head, inasmuch as she was bald. She wore
a dignified cap, and in front of that upon her brow, hair was
PAINTED. I have never seen the like since. She had been maid to
the widow of Sir Roderick Blenderhasset Impey, some sort of
governor or such-like portent in the East Indies, and from her
remains--in Mrs. Mackridge--I judge Lady Impey was a very
stupendous and crushing creature indeed. Lady Impey had been of
the Juno type, haughty, unapproachable, given to irony and a
caustic wit. Mrs. Mackridge had no wit, but she had acquired the
caustic voice and gestures along with the old satins and
trimmings of the great lady. When she told you it was a fine
morning, she seemed also to be telling you you were a fool and
a low fool to boot; when she was spoken to, she had a way of
acknowledging your poor tinkle of utterance with a voluminous,
scornful "Haw!" that made you want to burn her alive. She also
had a way of saying "Indade!" with a droop of the eyelids.

Mrs. Booch was a smaller woman, brown haired, with queer little
curls on either side of her face, large blue eyes and a small set
of stereotyped remarks that constituted her entire mental range.
Mrs. Latude-Fernay has left, oddly enough, no memory at all
except her name and the effect of a green-grey silk dress, all
set with gold and blue buttons. I fancy she was a large blonde.
Then there was Miss Fison, the maid who served both Lady Drew and
Miss Somerville, and at the end of the table opposite my mother,
sat Rabbits the butler. Rabbits, for a butler, was an unassuming
man, and at tea he was not as you know butlers, but in a morning
coat and a black tie with blue spots. Still, he was large, with
side whiskers, even if his clean-shaven mouth was weak and
little. I sat among these people on a high, hard, early
Gregorian chair, trying to exist, like a feeble seedling amidst
great rocks, and my mother sat with an eye upon me, resolute to
suppress the slightest manifestation of vitality. It was hard on
me, but perhaps it was also hard upon these rather over-fed,
ageing, pretending people, that my youthful restlessness and
rebellious unbelieving eyes should be thrust in among their
dignities.

Tea lasted for nearly three-quarters of an hour, and I sat it out
perforce; and day after day the talk was exactly the same.

"Sugar, Mrs. Mackridge?" my mother used to ask.

"Sugar, Mrs. Latude-Fernay?"

The word sugar would stir the mind of Mrs. Mackridge. "They
say," she would begin, issuing her proclamation--at least half
her sentences began "they say"--"sugar is fatt-an-ing, nowadays.
Many of the best people do not take it at all."

"Not with their tea, ma'am," said Rabbits intelligently.

"Not with anything," said Mrs. Mackridge, with an air of crushing
repartee, and drank.

"What won't they say next?" said Miss Fison.

"They do say such things!" said Mrs. Booch.

"They say," said Mrs. Mackridge, inflexibly, "the doctors are not
recomm-an-ding it now."

My Mother: "No, ma'am?"

Mrs. Mackridge: "No, ma'am."

Then, to the table at large: "Poor Sir Roderick, before he died,
consumed great quan-ta-ties of sugar. I have sometimes fancied
it may have hastened his end."

This ended the first skirmish. A certain gloom of manner and a
pause was considered due to the sacred memory of Sir Roderick.

"George," said my mother, "don't kick the chair!"

Then, perhaps, Mrs. Booch would produce a favourite piece from
her repertoire. "The evenings are drawing out nicely," she would
say, or if the season was decadent, "How the evenings draw in!"
It was an invaluable remark to her; I do not know how she would
have got along without it.

My mother, who sat with her back to the window, would always
consider it due to Mrs. Booch to turn about and regard the
evening in the act of elongation or contraction, whichever phase
it might be.

A brisk discussion of how long we were to the longest or shortest
day would ensue, and die away at last exhausted.

Mrs. Mackridge, perhaps, would reopen. She had many intelligent
habits; among others she read the paper--The Morning Post. The
other ladies would at times tackle that sheet, but only to read
the births, marriages, and deaths on the front page. It was, of
course, the old Morning Post that cost threepence, not the brisk
coruscating young thing of to-day. "They say," she would open,
"that Lord Tweedums is to go to Canada."

"Ah!" said Mr. Rabbits; "dew they?"

"Isn't he," said my mother, "the Earl of Slumgold's cousin?"  She
knew he was; it was an entirely irrelevant  and unnecessary
remark, but still, something to say.

"The same, ma'am," said Mrs. Mackridge. "They say he was
extremelay popular in New South Wales. They looked up to him
greatlay. I knew him, ma'am, as a young man. A very nice
pleasant young fella."

Interlude of respect.

"'Is predecessor," said Rabbits, who had acquired from some
clerical model a precise emphatic articulation without acquiring
at the same time the aspirates that would have graced it, "got
into trouble at Sydney."

"Haw!" said Mrs. Mackridge, scornfully, "so am tawled."

"'E came to Templemorton after 'e came back, and I remember them
talking 'im over after 'e'd gone again."

"Haw?" said Mrs. Mackridge, interrogatively.

"'Is fuss was quotin' poetry, ma'am. 'E said--what was it 'e
said--'They lef' their country for their country's good,'--which
in some way was took to remind them of their being originally
convic's, though now reformed. Every one I 'eard speak, agreed
it was takless of 'im."

"Sir Roderick used to say," said Mrs. Mackridge, "that the First
Thing,"--here Mrs. Mackridge paused and looked dreadfully at
me--"and the Second Thing"--here she fixed me again--"and the
Third Thing"--now I was released--"needed in a colonial governor
is Tact."  She became aware of my doubts again, and added
predominantly, "It has always struck me that that was a
Singularly True Remark."

I resolved that if ever I found this polypus of Tact growing up
in my soul, I would tear it out by the roots, throw it forth and
stamp on it.

"They're queer people--colonials," said Rabbits, "very queer.
When I was at Templemorton I see something of 'em. Queer
fellows, some of 'em. Very respectful of course, free with their
money in a spasammy sort of way, but-- Some of 'em, I must
confess, make me nervous. They have an eye on you. They watch
you--as you wait. They let themselves appear to be lookin' at
you..."

My mother said nothing in that discussion. The word colonies
always upset her. She was afraid, I think, that if she turned
her mind in that direction my errant father might suddenly and
shockingly be discovered, no doubt conspicuously bigamic and
altogether  offensive and revolutionary. She did not want to
rediscover my father at all.

It is curious that when I was a little listening boy I had such
an idea of our colonies that I jeered in my heart at Mrs.
Mackridge's colonial ascendancy. These brave emancipated
sunburnt English of the open, I thought, suffer these
aristocratic invaders as a quaint anachronism, but as for being
gratified--!

I don't jeer now. I'm not so sure.

V

It is a little difficult to explain why I did not come to do what
was the natural thing for any one in my circumstances to do, and
take my world for granted. A certain innate scepticism, I think,
explains it and a certain inaptitude for sympathetic
assimilation. My father, I believe, was a sceptic; my mother was
certainly a hard woman.

I was an only child, and to this day I do not know whether my
father is living or dead. He fled my mother's virtues before my
distincter memories began. He left no traces in his flight, and
she, in her indignation,  destroyed every vestige that she could
of him. Never a photograph nor a scrap of his handwriting have I
seen; and it was, I know, only the accepted code of virtue and
discretion that prevented her destroying  her marriage
certificate and me, and so making a clean sweep of her
matrimonial humiliation. I suppose I must inherit something of
the moral stupidity that would enable her to make a holocaust of
every little personal thing she had of him. There must have been
presents made by him as a lover, for example--books with kindly
inscriptions, letters perhaps, a flattened  flower, a ring, or
such-like gage. She kept her wedding-ring, of course, but all
the others she destroyed. She never told me his christian name
or indeed spoke a word to me of him; though at times I came near
daring to ask her: add what I have of him--it isn't much--I got
from his brother, my hero, my uncle Ponderevo. She wore her
ring; her marriage certificate she kept in a sealed envelope in
the very bottom of her largest trunk, and me she sustained at a
private school among the Kentish hills. You must not think I was
always at Bladesover--even in my holidays. If at the time these
came round, Lady Drew was vexed by recent Company, or for any
other reason wished to take it out of my mother, then she used to
ignore the customary reminder my mother gave her, and I "stayed
on" at the school.

But such occasions were rare, and I suppose that between ten and
fourteen I averaged fifty days a year at Bladesover.

Don't imagine I deny that was a fine thing for me. Bladesover, in
absorbing the whole countryside, had not altogether missed
greatness. The Bladesover system has at least done one good
thing for England, it has abolished the peasant habit of mind.
If many of us still live and breathe pantry and housekeeper's
room, we are quit of the dream of living by economising
parasitically on hens and pigs.... About that park there were
some elements of a liberal education; there was a great space of
greensward not given over to manure and food grubbing; there was
mystery, there was matter for the imagination. It was still a
park of deer. I saw something of the life of these dappled
creatures, heard the belling of stags, came upon young fawns
among the bracken, found bones, skulls, and antlers in lonely
places. There were corners that gave a gleam of meaning to the
word forest, glimpses of unstudied natural splendour. There was
a slope of bluebells in the broken sunlight under the newly green
beeches in the west wood that is now precious sapphire in my
memory; it was the first time that I knowingly met Beauty.

And in the house there were books. The rubbish old Lady Drew
read I never saw; stuff of the Maria Monk type, I have since
gathered, had a fascination for her; but back in the past there
had been a Drew of intellectual enterprise, Sir Cuthbert, the son
of Sir Matthew who built the house; and thrust away, neglected
and despised, in an old room upstairs, were books and treasures
of his that my mother let me rout among during a spell of wintry
wet. Sitting under a dormer window on a shelf above great stores
of tea and spices, I became familiar with much of Hogarth in a
big portfolio, with Raphael, there was a great book of
engravings from the stanzas of Raphael in the Vatican--and with
most of the capitals of Europe as they had looked about 1780, by
means of several pig iron-moulded books of views. There was also
a broad eighteenth century atlas with huge wandering maps that
instructed me mightily. It had splendid adornments about each
map title; Holland showed a fisherman and his boat;  Russia a
Cossack; Japan, remarkable people attired in pagodas--I say it
deliberately, "pagodas."  There were Terrae Incognitae in every
continent then, Poland, Sarmatia, lands since lost; and many a
voyage I made with a blunted pin about that large, incorrect and
dignified world. The books in that little old closet had been
banished, I suppose, from the saloon during the Victorian revival
of good taste and emasculated orthodoxy, but my mother had no
suspicion of their character. So I read and understood the good
sound rhetoric of Tom Paine's "Rights of Man," and his "Common
Sense," excellent books, once praised by bishops and since
sedulously lied about. Gulliver was there unexpurgated, strong
meat for a boy perhaps but not too strong I hold--I have never
regretted that I escaped niceness in these affairs. The satire
of Traldragdubh made my blood boil as it was meant to do, but I
hated Swift for the Houyhnhnms and never quite liked a horse
afterwards. Then I remember also a translation of Voltaire's
"Candide," and "Rasselas;" and, vast book though it was, I really
believe I read, in a muzzy sort of way of course, from end to
end, and even with some reference now and then to the Atlas,
Gibbon--in twelve volumes.

These readings whetted my taste for more, and surreptitiously I
raided the bookcases in the big saloon. I got through quite a
number of books before my sacrilegious temerity was discovered by
Ann, the old head-housemaid. I remember that among others I
tried a translation of Plato's "Republic" then, and found
extraordinarily little interest in it; I was much too young for
that; but "Vathek"--"Vathek" was glorious stuff. That kicking
affair! When everybody HAD to kick!

The thought of "Vathek" always brings back with it my boyish
memory of the big saloon at Bladesover.

It was a huge long room with many windows opening upon the park,
and each window--there were a dozen or more reaching from the
floor up--had its elaborate silk or satin curtains, heavily
fringed, a canopy (is it?) above, its completely white shutters
folding into the deep thickness of the wall. At either end of
that great still place was an immense marble chimney-piece; the
end by the bookcase showed the wolf and Romulus and Remus, with
Homer and Virgil for supporters; the design of the other end I
have forgotten. Frederick, Prince of Wales, swaggered flatly
over the one, twice life-size, but mellowed by the surface gleam
of oil; and over the other was an equally colossal group of
departed Drews as sylvan deities, scantily clad, against a
storm-rent sky. Down the centre of the elaborate ceiling were
three chandeliers, each bearing some hundreds of dangling glass
lustres, and over the interminable carpet--it impressed me as
about as big as Sarmatia in the store-room Atlas--were islands
and archipelagoes of chintz-covered chairs and couches, tables,
great Sevres vases on pedestals, a bronze man and horse.
Somewhere in this wilderness one came, I remember, upon--a big
harp beside a lyre-shaped music stand, and a grand piano....

The book-borrowing raid was one of extraordinary dash and danger.

One came down the main service stairs--that was legal, and
illegality began in a little landing when, very cautiously, one
went through a red baize door. A little passage led to the hall,
and here one reconnoitered for Ann, the old head-housemaid--the
younger housemaids were friendly and did not count. Ann located,
came a dash across the open space at the foot of that great
staircase that has never been properly descended since powder
went out of fashion, and so to the saloon door. A beast of an
oscillating Chinaman in china, as large as life, grimaced and
quivered to one's lightest steps. That door was the perilous
place; it was double with the thickness of the wall between, so
that one could not listen beforehand  for the whisk of the
feather-brush on the other side. Oddly rat-like, is it not, this
darting into enormous places in pursuit of the abandoned crumbs
of thought?

And I found Langhorne's "Plutarch" too, I remember, on those
shelves. It seems queer to me now to think that I acquired pride
and self-respect, the idea of a state and the germ of public
spirit, in such a furtive fashion; queer, too, that it should
rest with an old Greek, dead these eighteen hundred years to
teach that.

VI

The school I went to was the sort of school the Bladesover system
permitted. The public schools that add comic into existence in
the brief glow of the Renascence had been taken possession of by
the ruling class; the lower classes were not supposed to stand in
need of schools, and our middle stratum got the schools it
deserved, private schools, schools any unqualified pretender was
free to establish. Mine was kept by a man who had had the energy
to get himself a College of Preceptors diploma, and considering
how cheap his charges were, I will readily admit the place might
have been worse. The building was a dingy yellow-brick residence
outside the village, with the schoolroom as an outbuilding of
lath and plaster.

I do not remember that my school-days were unhappy--indeed  I
recall a good lot of fine mixed fun in them--but I cannot without
grave risk of misinterpretation declare that we were at all nice
and refined. We fought much, not sound formal fighting, but
"scrapping" of a sincere and murderous kind, into which one might
bring one's boots--it made us tough at any rate--and several of
us were the sons of London publicans, who distinguished "scraps"
where one meant to hurt from ordered pugilism, practising both
arts, and having, moreover, precocious linguistic gifts. Our
cricket-field was bald about the wickets, and we played without
style and disputed with the umpire; and the teaching was chiefly
in the hands of a lout of nineteen, who wore ready-made clothes
and taught despicably. The head-master and proprietor taught us
arithmetic, algebra, and Euclid, and to the older boys even
trigonometry, himself; he had a strong mathematical bias, and I
think now that by the standard of a British public school he did
rather well by us.

We had one inestimable privilege at that school, and that was
spiritual neglect. We dealt with one another with the forcible
simplicity of natural boys, we "cheeked," and "punched" and
"clouted"; we thought ourselves Red Indians and cowboys and
such-like honourable things, and not young English gentlemen; we
never felt the strain of "Onward Christian soldiers," nor were
swayed by any premature piety in the cold oak pew of our Sunday
devotions. All that was good. We spent our rare pennies in the
uncensored reading matter of the village dame's shop, on the Boys
of England, and honest penny dreadfuls--ripping stuff, stuff
that anticipated Haggard and Stevenson, badly printed and queerly
illustrated, and very very good for us. On our half-holidays we
were allowed the unusual freedom of rambling in twos and threes
wide and far about the land, talking experimentally, dreaming
wildly. There was much in those walks! To this day the
landscape of the Kentish world, with its low broad distances, its
hop gardens and golden stretches of wheat, its oasts and square
church towers, its background of downland and hangers, has for me
a faint sense of adventure added to the pleasure of its beauty.
We smoked on occasion, but nobody put us up to the proper
"boyish" things to do; we never "robbed an orchard" for example,
though there were orchards all about us, we thought stealing was
sinful, we stole incidental apples and turnips and strawberries
from the fields indeed, but in a criminal inglorious fashion, and
afterwards we were ashamed. We had our days of adventure, but
they were natural accidents, our own adventures. There was one
hot day when several of us, walking out towards Maidstone, were
incited by the devil to despise ginger beer, and we fuddled
ourselves dreadfully with ale; and a time when our young minds
were infected to the pitch of buying pistols, by the legend of
the Wild West. Young Roots from Highbury came back with a
revolver and cartridges, and we went off six strong to live a
free wild life one holiday afternoon. We fired our first shot
deep in the old flint mine at Chiselstead, and nearly burst our
ear drums; then we fired in a primrose studded wood by Pickthorn
Green, and I gave a false alarm of "keeper," and we fled in
disorder for a mile. After which Roots suddenly shot at a
pheasant in the high road by Chiselstead, and then young Barker
told lies about the severity of the game laws and made Roots sore
afraid, and we hid the pistol in a dry ditch outside the school
field. A day or so after we got in again, and ignoring a certain
fouling and rusting of the barrel, tried for a rabbit at three
hundred yards. Young Roots blew a molehill at twenty paces into
a dust cloud, burnt his fingers, and scorched his face; and the
weapon having once displayed this strange disposition to flame
back upon the shooter, was not subsequently fired.

One main source of excitement for us was "cheeking" people in
vans and carts upon the Goudhurst road; and getting myself into a
monstrous white mess in the chalk pits beyond the village, and
catching yellow jaundice as a sequel to bathing stark naked with
three other Adamites, old Ewart leading that function, in the
rivulet across Hickson's meadows, are among my memorabilia.
Those free imaginative afternoons! how much they were for us! how
much they did for us! All streams came from the then
undiscovered "sources of the Nile" in those days, all thickets
were Indian jungles, and our best game, I say it with pride, I
invented. I got it out of the Bladesover saloon. We found a
wood where "Trespassing" was forbidden, and did the "Retreat of
the Ten Thousand" through it from end to end, cutting our way
bravely through a host of nettle beds that barred our path, and
not forgetting to weep and kneel when at last we emerged within
sight of the High Road Sea. So we have burst at times, weeping
and rejoicing, upon startled wayfarers. Usually I took the part
of that distinguished general Xenophen--and please note the
quantity of the o. I have all my classical names like
that,--Socrates rhymes with Bates for me, and except when the
bleak eye of some scholar warns me of his standards of judgment,
I use those dear old mispronunciations  still. The little splash
into Latin made during my days as a chemist washed off nothing of
the habit. Well,--if I met those great gentlemen of the past
with their accents carelessly adjusted I did at least meet them
alive, as an equal, and in a living tongue. Altogether my school
might easily have been worse for me, and among other good things
it gave me a friend who has lasted my life out.

This was Ewart, who is now a monumental artist at Woking, after
many vicissitudes. Dear chap, how he did stick out of his
clothes to be sure! He was a longlimbed lout, ridiculously tall
beside my more youth full compactness, and, except that there was
no black moustache under his nose blob, he had the same round
knobby face as he has to-day, the same bright and active hazel
brown eyes, the stare, the meditative moment,  the insinuating
reply. Surely no boy ever played the fool as Bob Ewart used to
play it, no boy had a readier knack of mantling the world with
wonder. Commonness  vanished before Ewart, at his expository
touch all things became memorable and rare. From him I first
heard tell of love, but only after its barbs were already
sticking in my heart. He was, I know now the bastard of that
great improvident artist, Rickmann Ewart; he brought the light of
a lax world that at least had not turned its back upon beauty,
into the growing fermentation of my mind.

I won his heart by a version of Vathek, and after that we were
inseparable yarning friends. We merged our intellectual stock so
completely that I wonder sometimes  how much I did not become
Ewart, how much Ewart is not vicariously and derivatively me.

VII

And then when I had newly passed my fourteenth birthday, came my
tragic disgrace.

It was in my midsummer holidays that the thing happened, and it
was through the Honourable Beatrice Normandy. She had "come into
my life," as they say, before I was twelve.

She descended unexpectedly into a peaceful interlude that
followed the annual going of those Three Great Women. She came
into the old nursery upstairs, and every day she had tea with us
in the housekeeper's room. She was eight, and she came with a
nurse called Nannie; and to begin with, I did not like her at
all.

Nobody liked this irruption into the downstairs rooms; the two
"gave trouble,"--a dire offence; Nannie's sense of duty to her
charge led to requests and demands that took my mother's breath
away. Eggs at unusual times, the reboiling of milk, the
rejection of an excellent milk pudding--not negotiated
respectfully but dictated as of right. Nannie was a dark,
longfeatured, taciturn woman in a grey dress; she had a furtive
inflexibility of manner that finally dismayed and crushed and
overcame. She conveyed she was "under orders"--like a Greek
tragedy. She was that strange product of the old time, a
devoted, trusted servant; she had, as it were, banked all her
pride and will with the greater, more powerful people who
employed her, in return for a life-long security of
servitude--the bargain was nonetheless binding for being
implicit. Finally they were to pension her, and she would die
the hated treasure of a boarding-house. She had built up in
herself an enormous habit of reference to these upstairs  people,
she had curbed down all discordant murmurings  of her soul, her
very instincts were perverted or surrendered. She was sexless,
her personal pride was all transferred, she mothered another
woman's child with a hard, joyless devotion that was at least
entirely compatible with a stoical separation. She treated us
all as things that counted for nothing save to fetch and carry
for her charge. But the Honourable Beatrice could condescend.

The queer chances of later years come between me and a distinctly
separated memory of that childish face. When I think of Beatrice,
I think of her as I came to know her at a later time, when at
last I came to know her so well that indeed now I could draw her,
and show a hundred little delicate things you would miss in
looking at her.  But even then I remember how I noted the
infinite delicacy of her childish skin and the fine eyebrow,
finer than the finest feather that ever one felt on the breast of
a bird. She was one of those elfin, rather precocious little
girls, quick coloured, with dark hair, naturally curling dusky
hair that was sometimes astray over her eyes, and eyes that were
sometimes impishly dark, and sometimes a clear brown yellow. And
from the very outset, after a most cursory attention to Rabbits,
she decided that the only really interesting thing at the
tea-table was myself.

The elders talked in their formal dull way--telling Nannie the
trite old things about the park and the village that they told
every one, and Beatrice watched me across the table with a
pitiless little curiosity that made me uncomfortable.

"Nannie," she said, pointing, and Nannie left a question of my
mother's disregarded to attend to her; "is he a servant boy? "

"S-s-sh," said Nannie. "He's Master Ponderevo."

"Is he a servant boy?" repeated Beatrice.

"He's a schoolboy," said my mother.

"Then may I talk to him, Nannie?"

Nannie surveyed me with brutal inhumanity. "You mustn't talk too
much," she said to her charge, and cut cake into fingers for her.

"No," she added decisively, as Beatrice made to speak.

Beatrice became malignant. Her eyes explored me with
unjustifiable hostility. "He's got dirty hands," she said,
stabbing at the forbidden fruit. "And there's a fray to his
collar."

Then she gave herself up to cake with an appearance of entire
forgetfulness of me that filled me with hate and a passionate
desire to compel her to admire me.... And the next day before
tea, I did for the first time in my life, freely, without command
or any compulsion, wash my hands.

So our acquaintance began, and presently was deepened by a whim
of hers. She had a cold and was kept indoors, and confronted
Nannie suddenly with the alternative of being hopelessly naughty,
which in her case involved a generous amount of screaming
unsuitable for the ears of an elderly, shaky, rich aunt, or
having me up to the nursery to play with her all the afternoon.
Nannie came downstairs and borrowed me in a careworn manner; and
I was handed over to the little creature as if I was some large
variety of kitten. I had never had anything to do with a little
girl before, I thought she was more beautiful and wonderful and
bright than anything else could possibly be in life, and she
found me the gentlest of slaves--though at the same time, as I
made evident, fairly strong. And Nannie was amazed to find the
afternoon slip cheerfully and rapidly away. She praised my
manners to Lady Drew and to my mother, who said she was glad to
hear well of me, and after that I played with Beatrice several
times. The toys she had remain in my memory still as great
splendid things, gigantic to all my previous experience of toys,
and we even went to the great doll's house on the nursery landing
to play discreetly with that, the great doll's house that the
Prince Regent had given Sir Harry Drew's first-born (who died at
five, that was a not ineffectual model of Bladesover itself, and
contained eighty-five dolls and had cost hundreds of pounds. I
played under imperious direction with that toy of glory.

I went back to school when that holiday was over, dreaming of
beautiful things, and got Ewart to talk to me of love; and I made
a great story out of the doll's house, a story that, taken over
into Ewart's hands, speedily grew to an island doll's city all
our own.

One of the dolls, I privately decided, was like Beatrice.

One other holiday there was when I saw something of her--oddly
enough my memory of that second holiday in which she played a
part is vague--and then came a gap of a year, and then my
disgrace.

VIII

Now I sit down to write my story and tell over again things in
their order, I find for the first time how inconsecutive  and
irrational a thing the memory can be. One recalls acts and cannot
recall motives; one recalls quite vividly moments that stand out
inexplicably-- things adrift, joining on to nothing, leading
nowhere. I think I must have seen Beatrice and her half-brother
quite a number of times in my last holiday at Bladesover,  but I
really cannot recall more than a little of the quality of the
circumstances. That great crisis of my boyhood stands out very
vividly as an effect, as a sort of cardinal thing for me, but
when I look for details, particularly details that led up to the
crisis--I cannot find them in any developing order at all. This
halfbrother, Archie Garvell, was a new factor in the affair. I
remember him clearly as a fair-haired, supercilious looking,
weedily-lank boy, much taller than I, but I should imagine very
little heavier, and that we hated each other by a sort of
instinct from the beginning; and yet I cannot remember my first
meeting with him at all.

Looking back into these past things--it is like rummaging  in a
neglected attic that has experienced the attentions of some
whimsical robber--I cannot even account for the presence of
these children at Bladesover. They were, I know, among the
innumerable cousins of Lady Drew, and according to the theories
of downstairs candidates for the ultimate possession of
Bladesover. If they were, their candidature was unsuccessful.
But that great place, with all its faded splendour, its fine
furniture, its large traditions, was entirely at the old lady's
disposition; and I am inclined to think it is true that she used
this fact to torment and dominate a number of eligible people.
Lord Osprey was among the number of these, and she showed these
hospitalities to his motherless child and step-child, partly, no
doubt, because  he was poor, but quite as much, I nowadays
imagine, in the dim hope of finding some affectionate or
imaginative outcome of contact with them. Nannie had dropped out
of the world this second time, and Beatrice was in the charge of
an extremely amiable and ineffectual poor army-class young woman
whose name I never knew. They were, I think, two remarkably
illmanaged  and enterprising children. I seem to remember too,
that it was understood that I was not a fit companion  for them,
and that our meetings had to be as unostentatious  as possible.
It was Beatrice who insisted upon our meeting.

I am certain I knew quite a lot about love at fourteen and that I
was quite as much in love with Beatrice then as any impassioned
adult could be, and that Beatrice was, in her way, in love with
me. It is part of the decent and useful pretences of our world
that children of the age at which we were, think nothing, feel
nothing, know nothing of love. It is wonderful what people the
English are for keeping up pretences. But indeed I cannot avoid
telling that Beatrice and I talked of love and kissed and
embraced one another.

I recall something of one talk under the overhanging bushes of
the shrubbery--I on the park side of the stone wall, and the lady
of my worship a little inelegantly astride thereon. Inelegantly
do I say? you should have seen the sweet imp as I remember her.
Just her poise on the wall comes suddenly clear before me, and
behind her the light various branches of the bushes of the
shrubbery that my feet might not profane, and far away and high
behind her, dim and stately, the cornice of the great facade of
Bladesover rose against the dappled sky. Our talk must have been
serious and business-like, for we were discussing my social
position.

"I don't love Archie," she had said, apropos of nothing; and then
in a whisper, leaning forward with the hair about her face, "I
love YOU!"

But she had been a little pressing to have it clear that I was
not and could not be a servant.

"You'll never be a servant--ever!"

I swore that very readily, and it is a vow I have kept by nature.

"What will you be?" said she.

I ran my mind hastily over the professions.

"Will you be a soldier?" she asked.

"And be bawled at by duffers? No fear!" said I. "Leave that to
the plough-boys."

"But an officer? "

"I don't know," I said, evading a shameful difficulty.

"I'd rather go into the navy."

"Wouldn't you like to fight?"

"I'd like to fight," I said. "But a common soldier it's no
honour to have to be told to fight and to be looked down upon
while you do it, and how could I be an officer?"

"Couldn't you be?" she said, and looked at me doubtfully; and the
spaces of the social system opened between us.

Then, as became a male of spirit, I took upon myself to brag and
lie my way through this trouble. I said I was a poor man, and
poor men went into the navy; that I "knew" mathematics, which no
army officer did; and I claimed Nelson for an exemplar, and spoke
very highly of my outlook upon blue water. "He loved Lady
Hamilton," I said, "although she was a lady--and I will love
you."

We were somewhere near that when the egregious governess became
audible, calling "Beeee-atrice! Beeee-e-atrice!"

"Snifty beast!" said my lady, and tried to get on with the
conversation; but that governess made things impossible.

"Come here!" said my lady suddenly, holding out a grubby hand;
and I went very close to her, and she put her little head down
upon the wall until her black fog of hair tickled my cheek.

"You are my humble, faithful lover," she demanded in a whisper,
her warm flushed face near touching mine, and her eyes very dark
and lustrous.

"I am your humble, faithful lover," I whispered back.

And she put her arm about my head and put out her lips and we
kissed, and boy though I was, I was all atremble. So we two
kissed for the first time.

"Beeee-e-e-a-trice!" fearfully close.

My lady had vanished, with one wild kick of her black-stocking
leg. A moment after, I heard her sustaining the reproaches of
her governess, and explaining  her failure to answer with an
admirable lucidity and disingenuousness.

I felt it was unnecessary for me to be seen just then, and I
vanished guiltily round the corner into the West Wood, and so to
love-dreams and single-handed play, wandering along one of those
meandering bracken valleys that varied Bladesover park. And
that day and for many days that kiss upon my lips was a seal, and
by night the seed of dreams.

Then I remember an expedition we made--she, I, and her
half-brother--into those West Woods--they two were supposed to be
playing in the shrubbery--and how we were Indians there, and made
a wigwam out of a pile of beech logs, and how we stalked deer,
crept near and watched rabbits feeding in a glade, and almost got
a squirrel. It was play seasoned with plentiful disputing
between me and young Garvell, for each firmly insisted upon the
leading roles, and only my wider reading--I had read ten stories
to his one--gave me the ascendency over him. Also I scored over
him by knowing how to find the eagle in a bracken stem. And
somehow--I don't remember what led to it at all--I and Beatrice,
two hot and ruffled creatures, crept in among the tall bracken
and hid from him. The great fronds rose above us, five feet or
more, and as I had learnt how to wriggle through that undergrowth
with the minimum of betrayal by tossing greenery above, I led the
way. The ground under bracken is beautifully clear and faintly
scented in warm weather; the stems come up black and then green;
if you crawl flat, it is a tropical forest in miniature. I led
the way and Beatrice crawled behind, and then as the green of the
further glade opened before us, stopped. She crawled up to me,
her hot little face came close to mine; once more she looked and
breathed close to me, and suddenly she flung her arm about my
neck and dragged me to earth beside her, and kissed me and kissed
me again. We kissed, we embraced and kissed again, all without a
word; we desisted, we stared and hesitated--then in a suddenly
damped mood and a little perplexed at ourselves, crawled out, to
be presently run down and caught in the tamest way by Archie.

That comes back very clearly to me, and other vague memories--I
know old Hall and his gun, out shooting at jackdaws, came into
our common experiences, but I don't remember how; and then at
last, abruptly, our fight in the Warren stands out. The Warren,
like most places in England that have that name, was not
particularly a warren, it was a long slope of thorns and beeches
through which a path ran, and made an alternative route to the
downhill carriage road between Bladesover and Ropedean. I don't
know how we three got there, but I have an uncertain fancy it was
connected with a visit paid by the governess to the Ropedean
vicarage people. But suddenly Archie and I, in discussing  a
game, fell into a dispute for Beatrice. I had made him the
fairest offer: I was to be a Spanish nobleman, she was to be my
wife, and he was to be a tribe of Indians trying to carry her
off. It seems to me a fairly attractive offer to a boy to be a
whole tribe of Indians with a chance of such a booty. But Archie
suddenly took offence.

"No," he said; "we can't have that!"

"Can't have what?"

"You can't be a gentleman, because you aren't. And you can't
play Beatrice is your wife. It's--it's impertinent."

"But" I said, and looked at her.

Some earlier grudge in the day's affairs must have been in
Archie's mind. "We let you play with us," said Archie; "but we
can't have things like that."

"What rot!" said Beatrice. "He can if he likes."

But he carried his point. I let him carry it, and only began to
grow angry three or four minutes later. Then we were still
discussing play and disputing about another game. Nothing seemed
right for all of us.

"We don't want you to play with us at all," said Archie.

"Yes, we do," said Beatrice.

"He drops his aitches like anything."

"No, 'e doesn't," said I, in the heat of the moment.

"There you go!" he cried. "E, he says. E! E! E!"

He pointed a finger at me. He had struck to the heart of my
shame. I made the only possible reply by a rush at him.
"Hello!" he cried, at my blackavised attack. He dropped back
into an attitude that had some style in it, parried my blow, got
back at my cheek, and laughed with surprise and relief at his own
success. Whereupon I became a thing of murderous rage. He could
box as well or better than I--he had yet to realise I knew
anything of that at all--but I had fought once or twice to a
finish with bare fists. I was used to  inflicting and enduring
savage hurting, and I doubt if he had ever fought. I hadn't
fought ten seconds before I felt this softness in him, realised
all that quality of modern upper-class England that never goes to
the quick, that hedges about rules and those petty points of
honour that are the ultimate comminution of honour, that claims
credit for things demonstrably half done. He seemed to think
that first hit of his and one or two others were going to matter,
that I ought to give in when presently my lip bled and dripped
blood upon my clothes. So before we had been at it a minute he
had ceased to be aggressive except in momentary spurts, and I was
knocking him about almost as I wanted to do; and demanding
breathlessly and fiercely, after our school manner, whether he
had had enough, not knowing that by his high code and his soft
training it was equally impossible for him to either buck-up and
beat me, or give in.

I have a very distinct impression of Beatrice dancing about us
during the affair in a state of unladylike appreciation, but I
was too preoccupied to hear much of what she was saying. But she
certainly backed us both, and I am inclined to think now--it may
be the  disillusionment of my ripened years--whichever she
thought was winning.

Then young Garvell, giving way before my slogging, stumbled and
fell over a big flint, and I, still following the tradition of my
class and school, promptly flung myself on him to finish him. We
were busy with each other on the ground when we became aware of a
dreadful interruption.

"Shut up, you FOOL!" said Archie.

"Oh, Lady Drew!" I heard Beatrice cry. "They're fighting!
They're fighting something awful!"

I looked over my shoulder. Archie's wish to get up became
irresistible, and my resolve to go on with him vanished
altogether.

I became aware of the two old ladies, presences of black and
purple silk and fur and shining dark things; they had walked up
through the Warren, while the horses took the hill easily, and so
had come upon us. Beatrice had gone to them at once with an air
of taking refuge, and stood beside and a little behind them. We
both rose dejectedly. The two old ladies were evidently quite
dreadfully shocked, and peering at us with their poor old eyes;
and never had I seen such a tremblement in Lady Drew's
lorgnettes.

"You've never been fighting? " said Lady Drew.

"You have been fighting."

"It wasn't proper fighting," snapped Archie, with accusing eyes
on me.

"It's Mrs. Ponderevo's George!" said Miss Somerville, so adding
a conviction for ingratitude to my evident sacrilege.

"How could he DARE?" cried Lady Drew, becoming very awful.

"He broke the rules" said Archie, sobbing for breath. "I
slipped, and--he hit me while I was down. He knelt on me."

"How could you DARE?" said Lady Drew.

I produced an experienced handkerchief rolled up into a tight
ball, and wiped the blood from my chin, but I offered no
explanation of my daring. Among other things that prevented
that, I was too short of breath.

"He didn't fight fair," sobbed Archie.

Beatrice, from behind the old ladies, regarded me intently and
without hostility. I am inclined to think the modification of my
face through the damage to my lip interested her. It became
dimly apparent to my confused intelligence that I must not say
these two had been playing with me. That would not be after the
rules of their game. I resolved in this difficult situation upon
a sulky silence, and to take whatever consequences might follow.

IX

The powers of justice in Bladesover made an extraordinary  mess
of my case.

I have regretfully to admit that the Honourable Beatrice Normandy
did, at the age of ten, betray me, abandon me, and lie most
abominably about me. She was, as a matter of fact,
panic-stricken about me, conscience stricken too; she bolted from
the very thought of my being her affianced lover and so forth,
from the faintest memory of kissing; she was indeed altogether
disgraceful and human in her betrayal. She and her half-brother
lied in perfect concord, and I was presented as a wanton
assailant of my social betters. They were waiting about in the
Warren, when I came up and spoke to them, etc.

On the whole, I now perceive Lady Drew's decisions were, in the
light of the evidence, reasonable and merciful.

They were conveyed to me by my mother, who was, I really believe,
even more shocked by the grossness of my social insubordination
than Lady Drew. She dilated on her ladyship's kindnesses to me,
on the effrontery and wickedness of my procedure, and so came at
last to the terms of my penance. "You must go up to young Mr.
Garvell, and beg his pardon."

"I won't beg his pardon," I said, speaking for the first time.

My mother paused, incredulous.

I folded my arms on her table-cloth, and delivered my wicked
little ultimatum. "I won't beg his pardon nohow," I said.
"See?"

"Then you will have to go off to your uncle Frapp at Chatham."

"I don't care where I have to go or what I have to do, I won't
beg his pardon," I said.

And I didn't.

After that I was one against the world. Perhaps in my mother's
heart there lurked some pity for me, but she did not show it.
She took the side of the young gentleman; she tried hard, she
tried very hard, to make me say I was sorry I had struck him.
Sorry!

I couldn't explain.

So I went into exile in the dog-cart to Redwood station, with
Jukes the coachman, coldly silent, driving me, and all my
personal belongings in a small American cloth portmanteau behind.

I felt I had much to embitter me; the game had and the beginnings
of fairness by any standards I knew.... But the thing that
embittered me most was that the Honourable Beatrice Normandy
should have repudiated  and fled from me as though I was some
sort of leper, and not even have taken a chance or so, to give me
a good-bye. She might have done that anyhow! Supposing I had
told on her! But the son of a servant counts as a servant. She
had forgotten and now remembered.

I solaced myself with some extraordinary dream of coming back to
Bladesover, stern, powerful, after the fashion of Coriolanus. I
do not recall the details, but I have no doubt I displayed great
magnanimity...

Well, anyhow I never said I was sorry for pounding young Garvell,
and I am not sorry to this day.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

OF MY LAUNCH INTO THE WORLD AND THE LAST I SAW OF BLADESOVER

I

When I was thus banished from Bladesover House, as it was then
thought for good and all, I was sent by my mother in a vindictive
spirit, first to her cousin Nicodemus Frapp, and then, as a
fully indentured apprentice, to my uncle Ponderevo.

I ran away from the care of my cousin Nicodemus back to
Bladesover House.

My cousin Nicodemus Frapp was a baker in a back street--a slum
rather--just off that miserable narrow mean high road that
threads those exquisite beads, Rochester and Chatham. He was, I
must admit, a shock to me, much dominated by a young, plump,
prolific, malingering wife; a bent, slow-moving, unwilling dark
man with flour in his hair and eyelashes, in the lines of his
face and the seams of his coat. I've never had a chance to
correct my early impression of him, and he still remains an
almost dreadful memory, a sort of caricature of incompetent
simplicity. As I remember him, indeed, he presented the servile
tradition perfected. He had no pride in his person; fine clothes
and dressing up wasn't "for the likes of" him, so that he got his
wife, who was no artist at it, to cut his black hair at irregular
intervals, and let his nails become disagreeable to the
fastidious eye; he had no pride in his business nor any
initiative; his only virtues were not doing certain things and
hard work. "Your uncle," said my mother--all grown-up cousins
were uncles by courtesy among the Victorian middle-class-- "isn't
much to look at or talk to, but he's a Good Hard-Working Man."
There was a sort of base honourableness about toil, however
needless, in that system of inversion. Another point of honour
was to rise at or before dawn, and then laboriously muddle about.

It was very distinctly impressed  on my mind that the Good
Hard-Working Man would have thought it "fal-lallish" to own a
pocket handkerchief. Poor old Frapp--dirty and crushed by,
product of, Bladesover's magnificence! He made no fight against
the world at all, he was floundering in small debts that were not
so small but that finally they overwhelmed him, whenever there
was occasion for any exertion his wife fell back upon pains and
her "condition,"  and God sent them many children, most of whom
died, and so, by their coming and going, gave a double exercise
in the virtues of submission.

Resignation to God's will was the common device of these people
in the face of every duty and every emergency. There were no
books in the house; I doubt if either of them had retained the
capacity for reading consecutively for more than a minute or so,
and it was with amazement that day after day, over and above
stale bread, one beheld food and again more food amidst the
litter that held permanent session on the living-room table.

One might have doubted if either of them felt discomfort in this
dusty darkness of existence, if it was not that they did visibly
seek consolation. They sought this and found it of a Sunday, not
in strong drink and raving, but in imaginary draughts of blood.
They met with twenty or thirty other darkened and unclean people,
all dressed in dingy colours that would not show the dirt, in a
little brick-built chapel equipped with a spavined roarer of a
harmonium, and there solaced their minds on the thought that all
that was fair and free in life, all that struggled, all that
planned and made, all pride and beauty and honour, all fine and
enjoyable things, were irrevocably damned to everlasting
torments. They were the self-appointed confidants of God's
mockery of his own creation. So at any rate they stick in my
mind. Vaguer, and yet hardly less agreeable than this cosmic
jest, this coming "Yah, clever!" and general serving out and
"showing up" of the lucky, the bold, and the cheerful, was their
own predestination to Glory.

      "There is a Fountain, filled with Blood
        Drawn from Emmanuel's Veins,"

so they sang. I hear the drone and wheeze of that hymn now. I
hated them with the bitter uncharitable condemnation of boyhood,
and a twinge of that hate comes back to me. As I write the
words, the sounds and then the scene return, these obscure,
undignified people, a fat woman with asthma, an old Welsh
milk-seller with a tumour on his bald head, who was the
intellectual leader of the sect, a huge-voiced haberdasher with a
big black beard, a white-faced, extraordinarily pregnant woman,
his wife, a spectacled rate collector with a bent back.... I
hear the talk about souls, the strange battered old phrases that
were coined ages ago in the seaports of the sun-dry Levant, of
balm of Gilead and manna in the desert, of gourds that give shade
and water in a thirsty land; I recall again the way in which at
the conclusion of the service the talk remained pious in form but
became medical in substance, and how the women got together for
obstetric whisperings. I, as a boy, did not matter, and might
overhear.

If Bladesover is my key for the explanation of England, I think
my invincible persuasion that I understand Russia was engendered
by the circle of Uncle Frapp.

I slept in a dingy sheeted bed with the two elder survivors of
Frapp fecundity, and spent my week days in helping in the
laborious disorder of the shop and bakehouse, in incidental
deliveries of bread and so forth, and in parrying the probings of
my uncle into my relations with the Blood, and his confidential
explanations that ten shillings a week--which was what my mother
paid him--was not enough to cover my accommodation. He was very
anxious to keep that, but also he wanted more. There were
neither books nor any seat nor corner in that house where reading
was possible, no newspaper ever brought the clash of worldly
things into its heavenward seclusion; horror of it all grew in me
daily, and whenever I could I escaped into the streets and
tramped about Chatham. The news shops appealed to me
particularly. One saw there smudgy illustrated sheets, the
Police News in particular, in which vilely drawn pictures brought
home to the dullest intelligence an interminable succession of
squalid crimes, women murdered and put into boxes, buried under
floors, old men bludgeoned at midnight by robbers, people thrust
suddenly out of trains, happy lovers shot, vitrioled and so forth
by rivals. I got my first glimpse of the life of pleasure in
foully drawn pictures of "police raids" on this and that.
Interspersed with these sheets were others in which Sloper, the
urban John Bull, had his fling with gin bottle and obese
umbrella, or the kindly empty faces of the Royal Family appeared
and reappeared, visiting this, opening that, getting married,
getting offspring, lying in state, doing everything but anything,
a wonderful, good-meaning, impenetrable race apart.

I have never revisited Chatham; the impression it has left on my
mind is one of squalid compression, unlit by any gleam of a
maturer charity. All its effects arranged themselves as
antithetical to the Bladesover effects. They confirmed and
intensified all that Bladesover  suggested. Bladesover declared
itself to be the land, to be essentially England; I have already
told how its airy spaciousness, its wide dignity, seemed to
thrust village, church, and vicarage into corners, into a
secondary  and conditional significance. Here one gathered the
corollary of that. Since the whole wide country of Kent was
made up of contiguous Bladesovers and for the gentlefolk, the
surplus of population, all who were not good tenants nor good
labourers, Church of England, submissive and respectful, were
necessarily thrust together, jostled out of sight, to fester as
they might in this place that had the colours and even the smells
of a well-packed dustbin. They should be grateful even for
that; that, one felt, was the theory of it all.

And I loafed about this wilderness of crowded dinginess, with
young, receptive, wide-open eyes, and through the blessing (or
curse) of some fairy godmother of mine, asking and asking again:
"But after all, WHY--"

I wandered up through Rochester once, and had a glimpse of the
Stour valley above the town, all horrible with cement works and
foully smoking chimneys and rows of workmen's cottages, minute,
ugly, uncomfortable, and grimy. So I had my first intimation of
how industrialism must live in a landlord's land. I spent some
hours, too, in the streets that give upon the river, drawn by the
spell of the sea. But I saw barges and ships stripped of magic
and mostly devoted to cement, ice, timber, and coal. The sailors
looked to me gross and slovenly men, and the shipping struck me
as clumsy, ugly, old, and dirty. I discovered that most sails
don't fit the ships that hoist them, and that there may be as
pitiful and squalid a display of poverty with a vessel as with a
man. When I saw colliers unloading, watched the workers in the
hold filling up silly little sacks and the succession of
blackened, half-naked men that ran to and fro with these along a
plank over a thirty-foot drop into filth and mud, I was first
seized with admiration  of their courage and toughness and then,
"But after all, WHY--?" and the stupid ugliness of all this waste
of muscle and endurance came home to me. Among other things it
obviously wasted and deteriorated the coal.... And I had
imagined great things of the sea!

Well, anyhow, for a time that vocation was stilled.

But such impressions came into my leisure, and of that I had no
excess. Most of my time was spent doing things for Uncle Frapp,
and my evenings and nights perforce in the company of the two
eldest of my cousins. He was errand boy at an oil shop and
fervently pious, and of him I saw nothing until the evening
except at meals; the other was enjoying the midsummer holidays
without any great elation; a singularly  thin and abject, stunted
creature he was, whose chief liveliness was to pretend to be a
monkey, and who I am now convinced had some secret disease that
drained his vitality away. If I met him now I should think him a
pitiful little creature and be extremely sorry for him. Then I
felt only a wondering aversion. He sniffed horribly, he was
tired out by a couple of miles of loafing, he never started any
conversation, and he seemed to prefer his own company to mine.
His mother, poor woman, said he was the "thoughtful one."

Serious trouble came suddenly out of a conversation we held in
bed one night. Some particularly pious phrase of my elder
cousin's irritated me extremely, and I avowed outright my entire
disbelief in the whole scheme of revealed religion. I had never
said a word about my doubts to any one before, except to Ewart
who had first evolved them. I had never settled my doubts until
at this moment when I spoke. But it came to me then that the
whole scheme of salvation of the Frappes was not simply doubtful,
but impossible. I fired this discovery out into the darkness
with the greatest promptitude.

My abrupt denials certainly scared my cousin amazingly.

At first they could not understand what I was saying, and when
they did I fully believe they expected an instant answer in
thunderbolts and flames. They gave me more room in the bed
forthwith, and then the elder sat up and expressed his sense of
my awfulness. I was already a little frightened at my temerity,
but when he asked me categorically to unsay what I had said, what
could I do but confirm my repudiation?

"There's no hell," I said, "and no eternal punishment. No God
would be such a fool as that."

My elder cousin cried aloud in horror, and the younger lay
scared, but listening. "Then you mean," said my elder cousin,
when at last he could bring himself to argue, "you might do just
as you liked?"

"If you were cad enough," said I.

Our little voices went on interminably, and at one stage my
cousin got out of bed and made his brother do likewise, and knelt
in the night dimness and prayed at me. That I found trying, but
I held out valiantly. "Forgive him, "said my cousin, "he knows
not what he sayeth."

"You can pray if you like," I said, "but if you're going to cheek
me in your prayers I draw the line."

The last I remember of that great discussion was my cousin
deploring the fact that he "should ever sleep in the same bed
with an Infidel!"

The next day he astonished me by telling the whole business to
his father. This was quite outside all my codes. Uncle
Nicodemus sprang it upon me at the midday meal.

"You been sayin' queer things, George," he said abruptly. "You
better mind what you're saying."

"What did he say, father?" said Mrs. Frapp.

"Things I couldn't' repeat," said he.

"What things?" I asked hotly.

"Ask 'IM," said my uncle, pointing with his knife to his
informant, and making me realise the nature of my offence. My
aunt looked at the witness. "Not--?" she framed a question.

"Wuss," said my uncle. "Blarsphemy."

My aunt couldn't touch another mouthful. I was already a little
troubled in my conscience by my daring, and now I began to feel
the black enormity of the course upon which I had embarked.

"I was only talking sense," I said.

I had a still more dreadful moment when presently I met my cousin
in the brick alley behind the yard, that led back to his grocer's
shop.

"You sneak!" I said, and smacked his face hard forthwith. "Now
then," said I.

He started back, astonished and alarmed. His eyes met mine, and
I saw a sudden gleam of resolution. He turned his other cheek to
me.

"'It 'it," he said."'It 'it. I'LL forgive you."

I felt I had never encountered a more detestable way of evading a
licking. I shoved him against the wall and left him there,
forgiving me, and went back into the house.

"You better not speak to your cousins, George," said my aunt,
"till you're in a better state of mind."

I became an outcast forthwith. At supper that night a gloomy
silence was broken by my cousin saying

"'E 'it me for telling you, and I turned the other cheek,
muvver."

"'E's got the evil one be'ind 'im now, a ridin' on 'is back,"
said my aunt, to the grave discomfort of the eldest girl, who sat
beside me.

After supper my uncle, in a few ill-chosen words, prayed me to
repent before I slept.

"Suppose you was took in your sleep, George," he said; "where'd
you be then? You jest think of that me boy."  By this time I was
thoroughly miserable and frightened, and this suggestion unnerved
me dreadfully but I kept up an impenitent front. "To wake in
'ell," said Uncle Nicodemus, in gentle tones. "You don't want to
wake in 'ell, George, burnin' and screamin' for ever, do you?
You wouldn't like that?"

He tried very hard to get me to "jest 'ave a look at the
bake'ouse fire" before I retired. "It might move you," he said.

I was awake longest that night. My cousins slept, the sleep of
faith on either side of me. I decided I would whisper my
prayers, and stopped midway because I was ashamed, and perhaps
also because I had an idea one didn't square God like that.

"No," I said, with a sudden confidence, "damn me if you're coward
enough.... But you're not. No! You couldn't be!"

I woke my cousins up with emphatic digs, and told them as much,
triumphantly, and went very peacefully to sleep with my act of
faith accomplished.

I slept not only through that night, but for all my nights since
then. So far as any fear of Divine injustice  goes, I sleep
soundly, and shall, I know, to the end of things. That
declaration was an epoch in my spiritual life.

II

But I didn't expect to have the whole meeting on Sunday turned on
to me.

It was. It all comes back to me, that convergence of attention,
even the faint leathery smell of its atmosphere returns, and the
coarse feel of my aunt's black dress beside me in contact with my
hand. I see again the old Welsh milkman "wrestling" with me,
they all wrestled with me, by prayer or exhortation. And I was
holding out stoutly, though convinced now by the contagion of
their universal conviction that by doing so I was certainly and
hopelessly damned. I felt that they were right, that God was
probably like them, and that on the whole it didn't matter. And
to simplify the business thoroughly I had declared I didn't
believe anything at all. They confuted me by texts from
Scripture which I now perceive was an illegitimate method of
reply. When I got home, still impenitent and eternally lost and
secretly very lonely and miserable and alarmed, Uncle Nicodemus
docked my Sunday pudding.

One person only spoke to me like a human being on that day of
wrath, and that was the younger Frapp. He came up to me in the
afternoon while I was confined upstairs with a Bible and my own
thoughts.

"'Ello," he said, and fretted about.

"D'you mean to say there isn't--no one," he said, funking the
word.

"No one?"

"No one watching yer--always."

"Why should there be?" I asked.

"You can't 'elp thoughts," said my cousin, "anyhow. You mean--"
He stopped hovering. "I s'pose I oughtn't to be talking to you."

He hesitated and flitted away with a guilty back glance over his
shoulder....

The following week made life quite intolerable for me; these
people forced me at last into an Atheism that terrified me. When
I learnt that next Sunday the wrestling was to be resumed, my
courage failed me altogether.

I happened upon a map of Kent in a stationer's window on
Saturday, and that set me thinking of one form of release. I
studied it intently for half an hour perhaps, on Saturday night,
got a route list of villages well fixed in my memory, and got up
and started for Bladesover about five on Sunday morning while my
two bed mates were still fast asleep.

III

I remember something, but not so much of it as I should like to
recall, of my long tramp to Bladesover House. The distance from
Chatham is almost exactly seventeen miles, and it took me until
nearly one. It was very interesting and I do not think I was
very fatigued, though I got rather pinched by one boot.

The morning must have been very clear, because I remember that
near Itchinstow Hall I looked back and saw the estuary of the
Thames, that river that has since played so large a part in my
life. But at the time I did not know it was the Thames, I
thought this great expanse of mud flats and water was the sea,
which I had never yet seen nearly. And out upon it stood ships,
sailing ships and a steamer or so, going up to London or down out
into the great seas of the world. I stood for a long time
watching these and thinking whether after all I should not have
done better to have run away to sea.

The nearer I drew to Bladesover, the more doubtful I grew of the
duality of my reception, and the more I regretted that
alternative. I suppose it was the dirty clumsiness of the
shipping I had seen nearly, that put me out of mind of that. I
took a short cut through the Warren across the corner of the main
park to intercept the people from the church. I wanted to avoid
meeting any one before I met my mother, and so I went to a place
where the path passed between banks, and without exactly hiding,
stood up among the bushes. This place among other advantages
eliminated any chance of seeing Lady Drew, who would drive round
by the carriage road.

Standing up to waylay in this fashion I had a queer feeling of
brigandage, as though I was some intrusive sort of bandit among
these orderly things. It is the first time I remember having
that outlaw feeling distinctly,  a feeling that has played a
large part in my subsequent life. I felt there existed no place
for me that I had to drive myself in.

Presently, down the hill, the servants appeared, straggling by
twos and threes, first some of the garden people and the butler's
wife with them, then the two laundry maids, odd inseparable old
creatures, then the first footman talking to the butler's little
girl, and at last, walking grave and breathless beside old Ann
and Miss Fison, the black figure of my mother.

My boyish mind suggested the adoption of a playful form of
appearance. "Coo-ee, mother" said I, coming out against the
sky,"Coo-ee!"

My mother looked up, went very white, and put her hand to her
bosom.

I suppose there was a fearful fuss about me. And of course I was
quite unable to explain my reappearance. But I held out
stoutly, "I won't go back to Chatham; I'll drown myself first."
The next day my mother carried me off to Wimblehurst, took me
fiercely and aggressively to an uncle I had never heard of
before, near though the place was to us. She gave me no word
as to what was to happen, and I was too subdued by her manifest
wrath and humiliation at my last misdemeanour to demand
information. I don't for one moment think Lady Drew was "nice"
about me. The finality of my banishment was endorsed and
underlined and stamped home. I wished very much now that I had
run away to sea, in spite of the coal dust and squalour Rochester
had revealed to me. Perhaps over seas one came to different
lands.

IV

I do not remember much of my journey to Wimblehurst with my
mother except the image of her as sitting bolt upright, as rather
disdaining the third-class carriage in which we traveled, and
how she looked away from me out of the window when she spoke of
my uncle. "I have not seen your uncle," she said, "since he was
a boy...."  She added grudgingly, "Then he was supposed to be
clever."

She took little interest in such qualities as cleverness.

"He married about three years ago, and set up for himself in
Wimblehurst.... So I suppose she had some money."

She mused on scenes she had long dismissed from her mind.
"Teddy," she said at last in the tone of one who has been feeling
in the dark and finds. "He was called Teddy... about your
age.... Now he must be twenty-six or seven."

I thought of my uncle as Teddy directly I saw him; there was
something in his personal appearance that in the light of that
memory phrased itself at once as Teddiness--a certain Teddidity.
To describe it in and other terms is more difficult. It is
nimbleness without grace, and alertness without intelligence. He
whisked out of his shop upon the pavement, a short figure in grey
and wearing grey carpet slippers; one had a sense of a young
fattish face behind gilt glasses, wiry hair that stuck up and
forward over the forehead, an irregular nose that had its
aquiline moments, and that the body betrayed an equatorial
laxity, an incipient "bow window" as the image goes. He jerked
out of the shop, came to a stand on the pavement outside,
regarded something in the window with infinite appreciation,
stroked his chin, and, as abruptly, shot sideways into the door
again, charging through it as it were behind an extended hand.

"That must be him," said my mother, catching at her breath.

We came past the window whose contents I was presently to know by
heart, a very ordinary chemist's window except that there was a
frictional electrical machine, an air pump and two or three
tripods and retorts replacing the customary blue, yellow, and red
bottles above. There was a plaster of Paris horse to indicate
veterinary medicines among these breakables, and below were scent
packets and diffusers and sponges and soda-water syphons and
such-like things. Only in the middle there was a rubricated
card, very neatly painted by hand, with these words--

                Buy Ponderevo's Cough Linctus NOW.
                           NOW!
                           WHY?
               Twopence Cheaper than in Winter.
            You Store apples! why not the Medicine   
                   You are Bound to Need?

in which appeal I was to recognise presently my uncle's
distinctive note.

My uncle's face appeared above a card of infant's comforters in
the glass pane of the door. I perceived his eyes were brown, and
that his glasses creased his nose. It was manifest he did not
know us from Adam. A stare of scrutiny allowed an expression of
commercial deference to appear in front of it, and my uncle flung
open the door.

"You don't know me?" panted my mother.

My uncle would not own he did not, but his curiosity was
manifest. My mother sat down on one of the little chairs before
the soap and patent medicine-piled counter,  and her lips opened
and closed.

"A glass of water, madam," said my uncle, waved his hand in a
sort of curve and shot away.

My mother drank the water and spoke. "That boy," she said,
"takes after his father. He grows more like him every day....
And so I have brought him to you."

"His father, madam?"

"George."

For a moment the chemist was still at a loss. He stood behind
the counter with the glass my mother had returned to him in his
hand. Then comprehension grew.

"By Gosh!" he said. "Lord!" he cried. His glasses fell off. He
disappeared replacing them, behind a pile of boxed-up bottles of
blood mixture. "Eleven thousand virgins!" I heard him cry. The
glass was banged down. "O-ri-ental Gums!"

He shot away out of the shop through some masked door. One heard
his voice. "Susan! Susan!"

Then he reappeared with an extended hand. "Well, how are you?"
he said. "I was never so surprised in my life. Fancy!... You!"

He shook my mother's impassive hand and then mine very warmly
holding his glasses on with his left forefinger.

"Come right in!" he cried--"come right in! Better late than
never!" and led the way into the parlour behind the shop.

After Bladesover that apartment struck me as stuffy and petty,
but it was very comfortable in comparison with the Frapp
living-room. It had a faint, disintegrating smell of meals
about it, and my most immediate impression was of the remarkable
fact that something was hung about or wrapped round or draped
over everything. There was bright-patterned muslin round the
gas-bracket in the middle of the room, round the mirror over the
mantel, stuff with ball-fringe along the mantel and casing in the
fireplace,--I first saw ball-fringe here--and even the lamp on
the little bureau wore a shade like a large muslin hat. The
table-cloth had ball-fringe and so had the window curtains, and
the carpet was a bed of roses. There were little cupboards on
either side of the fireplace, and in the recesses, ill-made
shelves packed with books, and enriched with pinked American
cloth. There was a dictionary lying face downward on the table,
and the open bureau was littered with foolscap paper and the
evidences of recently abandoned toil. My eye caught "The
Ponderevo Patent Flat, a Machine you can Live in," written in
large firm letters. My uncle opened a little door like a
cupboard door in the corner of this room, and revealed the
narrowest twist of staircase I had ever set eyes upon. "Susan!"
he bawled again. "Wantje. Some one to see you. Surprisin'."

There came an inaudible reply, and a sudden loud bump over our
heads as of some article of domestic utility pettishly flung
aside, then the cautious steps of someone descending the twist,
and then my aunt appeared in the doorway with her hand upon the
jamb.

"It's Aunt Ponderevo," cried my uncle. "George's wife--and she's
brought over her son!"  His eye roamed about the room. He darted
to the bureau with a sudden impulse, and turned the sheet about
the patent flat face down. Then he waved his glasses at us, "You
know, Susan, my elder brother George. I told you about 'im lots
of times."

He fretted across to the hearthrug and took up a position there,
replaced his glasses and coughed.

My aunt Susan seemed to be taking it in. She was then rather a
pretty slender woman of twenty-three or four, I suppose, and I
remember being struck by the blueness of her eyes and the clear
freshness of her complexion. She had little features, a button
nose, a pretty chin and a long graceful neck that stuck out of
her pale blue cotton morning dress. There was a look of
half-assumed perplexity on her face, a little quizzical wrinkle
of the brow that suggested a faintly amused attempt to follow my
uncle's mental operations, a vain attempt and a certain
hopelessness that had in succession  become habitual. She seemed
to be saying, "Oh Lord! What's he giving me THIS time?"  And as
came to know her better I detected, as a complication of her
effort of apprehension, a subsidiary riddle to "What's he giving
me?" and that was--to borrow a phrase from my schoolboy language
"Is it keeps?"  She looked at my mother and me, and back to her
husband again.

"You know," he said. "George."

"Well," she said to my mother, descending the last three steps of
the staircase and holding out her hand! "you're welcome. Though
it's a surprise.... I can't ask you to HAVE anything, I'm
afraid, for there isn't anything in the house."  She smiled, and
looked at her husband banteringly. "Unless he makes up something
with his old chemicals, which he's quite equal to doing."

My mother shook hands stiffly, and told me to kiss my aunt....

"Well, let's all sit down," said my uncle, suddenly whistling
through his clenched teeth, and briskly rubbing  his hands
together. He put up a chair for my mother, raised the blind of
the little window, lowered it again, and returned to his
hearthrug. "I'm sure," he said, as one who decides, "I'm very
glad to see you."

V

As they talked I gave my attention pretty exclusively to my
uncle.

I noted him in great detail. I remember now his partially
unbuttoned waistcoat, as though something had occurred to
distract him as he did it up, and a little cut upon his chin. I
liked a certain humour in his eyes. I watched, too, with the
fascination that things have for an observant boy, the play of
his lips--they were a little oblique, and there was something
"slipshod," if one may strain a word so far, about his mouth, so
that he lisped and sibilated ever and again and the coming and
going of a curious expression, triumphant in quality it was, upon
his face as he talked. He fingered his glasses, which did not
seem to fit his nose, fretted with things in his waistcoat
pockets or put his hands behind him, looked over our heads, and
ever and again rose to his toes and dropped back on his heels.
He had a way of drawing air in at times through his teeth that
gave a whispering zest to his speech It's a sound I can only
represent as a soft Zzzz.

He did most of the talking. My mother repeated what she had
already said in the shop, "I have brought George over to you,"
and then desisted for a time from the real business in hand.
"You find this a comfortable  house?" she asked; and this being
affirmed: "It looks--very convenient.... Not too big to be a
trouble--no. You like Wimblehurst, I suppose?"

My uncle retorted with some inquiries about the great people of
Bladesover, and my mother answered in the character of a personal
friend of Lady Drew's. The talk hung for a time, and then my
uncle embarked upon a dissertation upon Wimblehurst.

"This place," he began, "isn't of course quite the place I ought
to be in."

My mother nodded as though she had expected that.

"It gives me no Scope," he went on. "It's dead-and-alive.
Nothing happens."

"He's always wanting something to happen," said my aunt Susan.
"Some day he'll get a shower of things and they'll be too much
for him."

"Not they," said my uncle, buoyantly.

"Do you find business--slack?" asked my mother.

"Oh! one rubs along. But there's no Development--no growth.
They just come along here and buy pills when they want 'em--and a
horseball or such. They've got to be ill before there's a
prescription. That sort they are. You can't get 'em to launch
out, you can't get 'em to take up anything new. For instance,
I've been trying lately--induce them to buy their medicines in
advance, and in larger quantities. But they won't look for it!
Then I tried to float a little notion of mine, sort of an
insurance scheme for colds; you pay so much a week, and when
you've got a cold you get a bottle of Cough Linctus so long as
you can produce a substantial sniff. See? But Lord! they've no
capacity for ideas, they don't catch on; no Jump about the place,
no Life. Live!--they trickle, and what one has to do here is to
trickle too-- Zzzz."

"Ah!" said my mother.

"It doesn't suit me," said my uncle. "I'm the cascading sort."

"George was that," said my mother after a pondering moment.

My aunt Susan took up the parable with an affectionate glance at
her husband.

"He's always trying to make his old business jump," she said.
"Always putting fresh cards in the window, or getting up to
something. You'd hardly believe. It makes ME jump sometimes."

"But it does no good," said my uncle.

"It does no good," said his wife. "It's not his miloo..."

Presently they came upon a wide pause.

From the beginning of their conversation there had been the
promise of this pause, and I pricked my ears. I knew perfectly
what was bound to come; they were going to talk of my father. I
was enormously strengthened in my persuasion when I found my
mother's eyes resting thoughtfully upon me in the silence, and
than my uncle looked at me and then my aunt. I struggled
unavailingly to produce an expression of meek stupidity.

"I think," said my uncle, "that George will find it more amusing
to have a turn in the market-place than to sit here talking with
us. There's a pair of stocks there, George--very interesting.
Old-fashioned stocks."

"I don't mind sitting here," I said.

My uncle rose and in the most friendly way led me through the
shop. He stood on his doorstep and jerked amiable directions to
me.

"Ain't it sleepy, George, eh? There's the butcher's dog over
there, asleep in the road-half an hour from midday! If the last
Trump sounded I don't believe it would wake. Nobody would wake!
The chaps up there in the churchyard--they'd just turn over and
say: 'Naar--you don't catch us, you don't! See?'.... Well,
you'll find the stocks just round that corner."

He watched me out of sight.

So I never heard what they said about my father after all.

VI

When I returned, my uncle had in some remarkable way become
larger and central. "Tha'chu, George?" he cried, when the
shop-door bell sounded. "Come right through"; and I found him,
as it were, in the chairman's place before the draped grate.

The three of them regarded me.

"We have been talking of making you a chemist, George," said my
uncle.

My mother looked at me. "I had hoped," she said, "that Lady Drew
would have done something for him--" She stopped.

"In what way?" said my uncle.

"She might have spoken to some one, got him into something
perhaps...."  She had the servant's invincible  persuasion that
all good things are done by patronage.

"He is not the sort of boy for whom things are done," she added,
dismissing these dreams. "He doesn't accommodate himself. When
he thinks Lady Drew wishes a thing, he seems not to wish it.
Towards Mr. Redgrave, too, he has been--disrespectful--he is like
his father."

"Who's Mr. Redgrave?"

"The Vicar."

"A bit independent?" said my uncle, briskly.

"Disobedient," said my mother. "He has no idea of his place. He
seems to think he can get on by slighting people and flouting
them. He'll learn perhaps before it is too late."

My uncle stroked his cut chin and me. "Have you learnt any
Latin?" he asked abruptly.

I said I had not.

"He'll have to learn a little Latin," he explained to my mother,
"to qualify. H'm. He could go down to the chap at the grammar
school here--it's just been routed into existence again by the
Charity Commissioners and have lessons."

"What, me learn Latin!" I cried, with emotion.

"A little," he said.

"I've always wanted" I said and; "LATIN!"

I had long been obsessed by the idea that having no Latin was a
disadvantage in the world, and Archie Garvell had driven the
point of this pretty earnestly home. The literature I had read
at Bladesover had all tended that way. Latin had had a quality
of emancipation for me that I find it difficult to convey. And
suddenly, when I had supposed all learning was at an end for me,
I heard this!

"It's no good to you, of course," said my uncle, "except to pass
exams with, but there you are!"

"You'll have to learn Latin because you have to learn Latin,"
said my mother, "not because you want to. And afterwards you
will have to learn all sorts of other things...."

The idea that I was to go on learning, that to read and master
the contents of books was still to be justifiable  as a duty,
overwhelmed all other facts. I had had it rather clear in my
mind for some weeks that all that kind of opportunity might close
to me for ever. I began to take a lively interest in this new
project.

"Then shall I live here?" I asked, "with you, and study... as
well as work in the shop?"

"That's the way of it," said my uncle.

I parted from my mother that day in a dream, so sudden and
important was this new aspect of things to me. I was to learn
Latin! Now that the humiliation of my failure at Bladesover was
past for her, now that she had a little got over her first
intense repugnance at this resort to my uncle and contrived
something that seemed like a possible provision for my future,
the tenderness natural to a parting far more significant than any
of our previous partings crept into her manner.

She sat in the train to return, I remember, and I stood at the
open door of her compartment, and neither of us knew how soon we
should cease for ever to be a trouble to one another.

"You must be a good boy, George," she said. "You must learn....
And you mustn't set yourself up against those who are above you
and better than you.... Or envy them."

"No, mother," I said.

I promised carelessly. Her eyes were fixed upon me. I was
wondering whether I could by any means begin Latin that night.

Something touched her heart then, some thought, some memory;
perhaps some premonition.... The solitary porter began slamming
carriage doors.

"George" she said hastily, almost shamefully, "kiss me!"

I stepped up into her compartment as she bent downward.

She caught me in her arms quite eagerly, she pressed me to her--a
strange thing for her to do. I perceived her eyes were
extraordinarily bright, and then this brightness burst along the
lower lids and rolled down her cheeks.

For the first and last time in my life I saw my mother's tears.
Then she had gone, leaving me discomforted  and perplexed,
forgetting for a time even that I was to learn Latin, thinking of
my mother as of something new and strange.

The thing recurred though I sought to dismiss it, it stuck itself
into my memory against the day of fuller understanding. Poor,
proud, habitual, sternly narrow soul! poor difficult and
misunderstanding son! it was the first time that ever it dawned
upon me that my mother also might perhaps feel.

VII

My mother died suddenly and, it was thought by Lady Drew,
inconsiderately, the following spring. Her ladyship instantly
fled to Folkestone with Miss Somerville  and Fison, until the
funeral should be over and my mother's successor installed.

My uncle took me over to the funeral. I remember there was a
sort of prolonged crisis in the days preceding  this because,
directly he heard of my loss, he had sent a pair of check
trousers to the Judkins people in London to be dyed black, and
they did not come back in time. He became very excited on the
third day, and sent a number of increasingly fiery telegrams
without any result whatever, and succumbed next morning with a
very ill grace to my aunt Susan's insistence upon the resources
of his dress-suit. In my memory those black legs of his, in a
particularly thin and shiny black cloth--for evidently his
dress-suit dated from adolescent and slenderer days--straddle
like the Colossus of Rhodes over my approach to my mother's
funeral. Moreover, I was inconvenienced and distracted by a silk
hat he had bought me, my first silk hat, much ennobled, as his
was also, by a deep mourning band.

I remember, but rather indistinctly, my mother's white paneled
housekeeper's room and the touch of oddness about it that she was
not there, and the various familiar faces made strange by black,
and I seem to recall the exaggerated self-consciousness that
arose out of their focussed attention. No doubt the sense of the
new silk hat came and went and came again in my emotional chaos.
Then something comes out clear and sorrowful, rises out clear and
sheer from among all these rather base and inconsequent things,
and once again I walk before all the other mourners close behind
her coffin as it is carried along the churchyard path to her
grave, with the old vicar's slow voice saying regretfully and
unconvincingly above me, triumphant solemn things.

"I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that
believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and
whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."

Never die! The day was a high and glorious morning in spring,
and all the trees were budding and bursting into green.
Everywhere there were blossoms and flowers; the pear trees and
cherry trees in the sexton's garden were sunlit snow, there were
nodding daffodils and early tulips in the graveyard beds, great
multitudes of daisies, and everywhere the birds seemed singing.
And in the middle was the brown coffin end, tilting on men's
shoulders and half occluded by the vicar's Oxford hood.

And so we came to my mother's waiting grave.

For a time I was very observant, watching the coffin lowered,
hearing the words of the ritual. It seemed a very curious
business altogether.

Suddenly as the service drew to its end, I felt something had
still to be said which had not been said, realised that she had
withdrawn in silence, neither forgiving  me nor hearing from
me--those now lost assurances.  Suddenly I knew I had not
understood. Suddenly  I saw her tenderly; remembered not so much
tender or kindly things of her as her crossed wishes and the ways
in which I had thwarted her. Surprisingly  I realised that
behind all her hardness and severity she had loved me, that I was
the only thing she had ever loved and that until this moment I
had never loved her. And now she was there and deaf and blind to
me, pitifully defeated in her designs for me, covered from me so
that she could not know....

I dug my nails into the palms of my hands, I set my teeth, but
tears blinded me, sobs would have choked me had speech been
required of me. The old vicar read on, there came a mumbled
response--and so on to the end. I wept as it were internally,
and only when we had come out of the churchyard could I think and
speak calmly again.

Stamped across this memory are the little black figures of my
uncle and Rabbits, telling Avebury, the sexton and undertaker,
that "it had all passed off very well--very well indeed."

VIII

That is the last I shall tell of Bladesover. The dropscene
falls on that, and it comes no more as an actual presence into
this novel. I did indeed go back there once again, but under
circumstances quite immaterial to my story. But in a sense
Bladesover has never left me; it is, as I said at the outset, one
of those dominant explanatory impressions that make the framework
of my mind. Bladesover illuminates England; it has become all
that is spacious, dignified pretentious, and truly conservative
in English life. It is my social datum. That is why I have
drawn it here on so large a scale.

When I came back at last to the real Bladesover on an
inconsequent visit, everything was far smaller than I could have
supposed possible. It was as though everything had shivered and
shrivelled a little at the Lichtenstein touch. The harp was
still in the saloon, but there was a different grand piano with a
painted lid and a metrostyle pianola, and an extraordinary
quantity of artistic litter and bric-a-brac scattered about.
There was the trail of the Bond Street showroom over it all. The
furniture was still under chintz, but it wasn't the same sort of
chintz although it pretended to be, and the lustre-dangling
chandeliers had passed away. Lady Lichtenstein's books replaced
the brown volumes I had browsed among--they were mostly
presentation copies of contemporary novels and the National
Review and the Empire Review, and the Nineteenth Century and
after jostled current books on the tables--English new books in
gaudy catchpenny "artistic" covers, French and Italian novels in
yellow, German art handbooks of almost incredible ugliness.
There were abundant evidences that her ladyship was playing with
the Keltic renascence, and a great number of ugly cats made of
china--she "collected" china and stoneware cats--stood about
everywhere--in all colours, in all kinds of deliberately comic,
highly glazed distortion.

It is nonsense to pretend that finance makes any better
aristocrats than rent. Nothing can make an aristocrat but pride,
knowledge, training, and the sword. These people were no
improvement on the Drews, none whatever. There was no effect of
a beneficial replacement of passive unintelligent people by
active intelligent ones. One felt that a smaller but more
enterprising and intensely undignified variety of stupidity had
replaced the large dullness of the old gentry, and that was all.
Bladesover, I thought, had undergone just the same change between
the seventies and the new century that had overtaken the dear old
Times, and heaven knows how much more of the decorous British
fabric. These Lichtensteins and their like seem to have no
promise in them at all of any fresh vitality for the kingdom. I
do not believe in their intelligence or their power--they have
nothing new about them at all, nothing creative nor
rejuvenescent, no more than a disorderly instinct of acquisition;
and the prevalence of them and their kind is but a phase in the
broad slow decay of the great social organism of England. They
could not have made Bladesover they cannot replace it; they just
happen to break out over it--saprophytically.

Well--that was my last impression of Bladesover.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE WIMBLEHURST APPRENTICESHIP

I

So far as I can remember now, except for that one emotional phase
by the graveside, I passed through all these experiences rather
callously. I had already, with the facility of youth, changed my
world, ceased to think at all of the old school routine and put
Bladesover aside for digestion at a latter stage. I took up my
new world in Wimblehurst with the chemist's shop as its hub, set
to work at Latin and materia medica, and concentrated upon the
present with all my heart. Wimblehurst is an exceptionally
quiet and grey Sussex town rare among south of England towns in
being largely built of stone. I found something very agreeable
and picturesque in its clean cobbled streets, its odd turnings
and abrupt corners; and in the pleasant park that crowds up one
side of the town. The whole place is under the Eastry dominion
and it was the Eastry influence and dignity that kept its
railway station a mile and three-quarters away. Eastry House is
so close that it dominates the whole; one goes across the
marketplace (with its old lock-up and stocks), past the great
pre-reformation church, a fine grey shell, like some empty skull
from which the life has fled, and there at once are the huge
wrought-iron gates, and one peeps through them to see the facade
of this place, very white and large and fine, down a long avenue
of yews. Eastry was far greater than Bladesover and an
altogether completer example of the eighteenth century system.
It ruled not two villages, but a borough, that had sent its sons
and cousins to parliament almost as a matter of right so long as
its franchise endured. Every one was in the system, every
one--except my uncle. He stood out and complained.

My uncle was the first real breach I found in the great front of
Bladesover the world had presented me, for Chatham was not so
much a breach as a confirmation.  But my uncle had no respect
for Bladesover and Eastry--none whatever. He did not believe in
them. He was blind even to what they were. He propounded
strange phrases about them, he exfoliated and wagged about novel
and incredible ideas.

"This place," said my uncle, surveying it from his open doorway
in the dignified stillness of a summer afternoon, "wants Waking
Up!"

I was sorting up patent medicines in the corner.

"I'd like to let a dozen young Americans loose into it," said my
uncle. "Then we'd see."

I made a tick against Mother Shipton's Sleeping Syrup. We had
cleared our forward stock.

"Things must be happening SOMEWHERE, George," he broke out in a
querulously rising note as he came back into the little shop. He
fiddled with the piled dummy boxes of fancy soap and scent and so
forth that adorned the end of the counter, then turned about
petulantly, stuck his hands deeply into his pockets and withdrew
one to scratch his head. "I must do SOMETHING," he said. "I
can't stand it.

"I must invent something. And shove it.... I could.

"Or a play. There's a deal of money in a play, George. What
would you think of me writing a play eh?... There's all sorts of
things to be done.

"Or the stog-igschange."

He fell into that meditative whistling of his.

"Sac-ramental wine!" he swore, "this isn't the world--it's Cold
Mutton Fat! That's what Wimblehurst is! Cold Mutton Fat!--dead
and stiff! And I'm buried in it up to the arm pits. Nothing
ever happens, nobody wants things to happen 'scept me! Up in
London, George, things happen. America! I wish to Heaven,
George, I'd been born American--where things hum.

"What can one do here? How can one grow? While we're sleepin'
here with our Capital oozing away into Lord Eastry's pockets for
rent-men are up there...."  He indicated London as remotely over
the top of the dispensing counter, and then as a scene of great
activity by a whirl of the hand and a wink and a meaning smile at
me.

"What sort of things do they do?" I asked.

"Rush about," he said. "Do things! Somethin' glorious. There's
cover gambling. Ever heard of that, George?"  He drew the air in
through his teeth. "You put down a hundred say, and buy ten
thousand pounds worth. See? That's a cover of one per cent.
Things go up one, you sell, realise cent per cent; down, whiff,
it's gone! Try again! Cent per cent, George, every day. Men are
made or done for in an hour. And the shoutin'! Zzzz.... Well,
that's one way, George. Then another way--there's Corners!"

"They're rather big things, aren't they?" I ventured.

"Oh, if you go in for wheat or steel--yes. But suppose you
tackled a little thing, George. Just some little thing that only
needed a few thousands. Drugs for example. Shoved all you had
into it--staked your liver on it, so to speak. Take a drug--take
ipecac, for example. Take a lot of ipecac. Take all there is!
See? There you are! There aren't unlimited supplies of
ipecacuanha--can't be!--and it's a thing people must have. Then
quinine again! You watch your chance, wait for a tropical war
breaking out, let's say, and collar all the quinine. Where ARE
they? Must have quinine, you know. Eh? Zzzz.

"Lord! there's no end of things--no end of little things.
Dill-water--all the suffering babes yowling for it. Eucalyptus
again--cascara--witch hazel--menthol--all the toothache things.
Then there's antiseptics, and curare, cocaine...."

"Rather a nuisance to the doctors," I reflected.

"They got to look out for themselves. By Jove, yes. They'll do
you if they can, and you do them. Like brigands. That makes it
romantic. That's the Romance of Commerce, George. You're in the
mountains  there! Think of having all the quinine in the world,
and some millionaire's pampered wife gone ill with malaria, eh?
That's a squeeze, George, eh? Eh? Millionaire on his motor car
outside, offering you any price you liked. That 'ud wake up
Wimblehurst.... Lord! You haven't an Idea down here. Not an
idea. Zzzz."

He passed into a rapt dream, from which escaped such fragments
as: "Fifty per cent. advance sir; security--to-morrow. Zzzz."

The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a sort
of irresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever be
permitted to do in reality. It was the sort of nonsense one
would talk to make Ewart laugh and set him going on to still
odder possibilities. I thought it was part of my uncle's way of
talking. But I've learnt differently since. The whole trend of
modern money-making is to foresee something that will presently
be needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself
wealthy. You buy up land upon which people will presently want
to build houses, you secure rights that will bar vitally
important developments,  and so on, and so on. Of course the
naive intelligence of a boy does not grasp the subtler
developments of human inadequacy. He begins life with a
disposition to believe in the wisdom of grown-up people, he does
not realise how casual and disingenuous has been the development
of law and custom, and he thinks that somewhere in the state
there is a power as irresistible as a head master's to check
mischievous and foolish enterprises of every sort. I will
confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I had a
clear impression  that any one who contrived to do that would
pretty certainly go to jail. Now I know that any one who could
really bring it off would be much more likely to go to the House
of Lords!

My uncle ranged over the gilt labels of his bottles and drawers
for a while, dreaming of corners in this and that. But at last
he reverted to Wimblehurst again.

"You got to be in London when these things are in hand. Down
here--!

"Jee-rusalem!" he cried. "Why did I plant myself here?
Everything's done. The game's over. Here's Lord Eastry, and
he's got everything, except what his lawyers get, and before you
get any more change this way you'll have to dynamite him--and
them. HE doesn't want anything more to happen. Why should he?
Any chance 'ud be a loss to him. He wants everything to burble
along and burble along and go on as it's going for the next ten
thousand years, Eastry after Eastry, one parson down another
come, one grocer dead, get another! Any one with any ideas
better go away. They HAVE gone away! Look at all these blessed
people in this place! Look at 'em! All fast asleep, doing their
business out of habit--in a sort of dream, Stuffed men would do
just as well--just. They've all shook down into their places.
THEY don't want anything to happen either. They're all broken
in. There you are! Only what are they all alive for?...

"Why can't they get a clockwork chemist?"

He concluded as he often concluded these talks. "I must invent
something,--that's about what I must do. Zzzz. Some convenience.

Something people want.... Strike out.... You can't think, George,
of anything everybody wants and hasn't got? I mean something you
could turn out retail under a shilling, say? Well, YOU think,
whenever you haven't got anything better to do. See?"

II

So I remember my uncle in that first phase, young, but already a
little fat, restless, fretful, garrulous, putting in my
fermenting head all sorts of discrepant ideas. Certainly he was
educational....

For me the years at Wimblehurst were years of pretty active
growth. Most of my leisure and much of my time in the shop I
spent in study. I speedily mastered the modicum of Latin
necessary for my qualifying examinations, and--a little assisted
by the Government Science and Art Department classes that were
held in the Grammar School--went on with my mathematics.  There
were classes in physics, in chemistry, in mathematics and machine
drawing, and I took up these subjects with considerable
avidity. Exercise I got chiefly in the form of walks. There was
some cricket in the summer and football in the winter sustained
by young men's clubs that levied a parasitic blackmail of the big
people and the sitting member, but I was never very keen at these
games. I didn't find any very close companions among the youths
of Wimblehurst. They struck me, after my cockney schoolmates, as
loutish and slow, servile and furtive, spiteful and mean. WE
used to swagger, but these countrymen dragged their feet and
hated an equal who didn't; we talked loud, but you only got the
real thoughts of Wimblehurst in a knowing undertone behind its
hand. And even then they weren't much in the way of thoughts.

No, I didn't like those young countrymen, and I'm no believer in
the English countryside under the Bladesover system as a
breeding ground for honourable men. One hears a frightful lot of
nonsense about the Rural Exodus and the degeneration wrought by
town life upon our population. To my mind, the English townsman,
even in the slums, is infinitely better spiritually, more
courageous, more imaginative and cleaner, than his agricultural
cousin. I've seen them both when they didn't think they were
being observed, and I know. There was something about my
Wimblehurst companions that disgusted me. It's hard to define.
Heaven knows that at that cockney boarding-school at Goudhurst we
were coarse enough; the Wimblehurst youngsters had neither words
nor courage for the sort of thing we used to do--for our bad
language, for example; but, on the other hand, they displayed a
sort of sluggish, real lewdness, lewdness is the word--a baseness
of attitude. Whatever we exiled urbans did at Goudhurst was
touched with something, however coarse, of romantic imagination.
We had read the Boys of England, and told each other stories. In
the English countryside there are no books at all, no songs, no
drama, no valiant sin even; all these things have never come or
they were taken away and hidden generations ago, and the
imagination aborts and bestialises. That, I think, is where the
real difference against the English rural man lies. It is
because I know this that I do not share in the common repinings
because  our countryside is being depopulated, because our
population is passing through the furnace of the towns. They
starve, they suffer, no doubt, but they come out of it hardened,
they come out of it with souls.

Of an evening the Wimblehurst blade, shiny-faced from a wash and
with some loud finery, a coloured waistcoat or a vivid tie, would
betake himself to the Eastry Arms billiard-room, or to the bar
parlour of some minor pub where nap could be played. One soon
sickened of his slow knowingness, the cunning observation  of his
deadened eyes, his idea of a "good story," always, always told in
undertones, poor dirty worm! his shrewd, elaborate maneuvers for
some petty advantage,  a drink to the good or such-like deal.
There rises before my eyes as I write, young Hopley Dodd, the son
of the Wimblehurst auctioneer, the pride of Wimblehurst, its
finest flower, with his fur waistcoat and his bulldog pipe, his
riding breeches--he had no horse--and his gaiters, as he used to
sit, leaning forward and watching the billiard-table from under
the brim of his artfully tilted hat. A half-dozen phrases
constituted  his conversation: "hard lines!" he used to say, and
"Good baazness," in a bass bleat. Moreover, he had a long slow
whistle that was esteemed the very cream of humorous comment.
Night after night he was there.

Also you knew he would not understand that _I_ could play
billiards, and regarded every stroke I made as a fluke. For a
beginner I didn't play so badly, I thought. I'm not so sure now;
that was my opinion at the time. But young Dodd's scepticism and
the "good baazness" finally cured me of my disposition to
frequent the Eastry Arms, and so these noises had their value in
my world.

I made no friends among the young men of the place at all, and
though I was entering upon adolescence I have no love-affair to
tell of here. Not that I was not waking up to that aspect of
life in my middle teens I did, indeed, in various slightly
informal ways scrape acquaintance with casual Wimblehurst girls;
with a little dressmaker's apprentice I got upon shyly speaking
terms, and a pupil teacher in the National School went further
and was "talked about" in connection with me but I was not by any
means touched by any reality of passion for either of these young
people; love--love as yet came to me only in my dreams. I only
kissed these girls once or twice. They rather disconcerted than
developed those dreams. They were so clearly not "it."  I shall
have much to say of love in this story, but I may break it to the
reader now that it is my role to be a rather ineffectual lover.
Desire I knew well enough--indeed, too well; but love I have been
shy of. In all my early enterprises in the war of the sexes, I
was torn between the urgency of the body and a habit of romantic
fantasy that wanted every phase of the adventure to be generous
and beautiful. And I had a curiously haunting memory of
Beatrice, of her kisses in the bracken and her kiss upon the
wall, that somehow pitched the standard too high for
Wimblehurst's opportunities. I will not deny I did in a boyish
way attempt a shy, rude adventure or so in love-making at
Wimblehurst;  but through these various influences, I didn't
bring things off to any extent at all. I left behind me no
devastating memories, no splendid reputation. I came away at
last, still inexperienced and a little thwarted, with only a
natural growth of interest and desire in sexual things.

If I fell in love with any one in Wimblehurst it was with my
aunt. She treated me with a kindliness that was only half
maternal--she petted my books, she knew about my certificates,
she made fun of me in a way that stirred my heart to her. Quite
unconsciously I grew fond of her....

My adolescent years at Wimblehurst were on the whole laborious,
uneventful years that began in short jackets and left me in many
ways nearly a man, years so uneventful that the Calculus of
Variations is associated with one winter, and an examination in
Physics for Science and Art department Honours marks an epoch.
Many divergent impulses stirred within me, but the master impulse
was a grave young disposition to work and learn and thereby in
some not very clearly defined way get out of the Wimblehurst
world into which I had fallen. I wrote with some frequency to
Ewart, self-conscious, but, as I remember them, not intelligent
letters, dated in Latin and with lapses into Latin quotation that
roused Ewart to parody. There was something about me in those
days more than a little priggish. But it was, to do myself
justice, something  more than the petty pride of learning. I had
a very grave sense of discipline and preparation that I am not
ashamed at all to remember. I was serious. More serious than I
am at the present time. More serious, indeed, than any adult
seems to be. I was capable then of efforts--of nobilities....
They are beyond me now. I don't see why, at forty, I shouldn't
confess I respect my own youth. I had dropped being a boy quite
abruptly. I thought I was presently to go out into a larger and
quite important world and do significant things there. I thought
I was destined to do something definite to a world that had a
definite purpose. I did not understand then, as I do now, that
life was to consist largely in the world's doing things to me.
Young people never do seem to understand that aspect of things.
And, as I say, among my educational influences my uncle, all
unsuspected, played a leading part, and perhaps among other
things gave my discontent with Wimblehurst, my desire to get away
from that clean and picturesque emptiness, a form and expression
that helped to emphasise it. In a way that definition made me
patient. "Presently I shall get to London," I said, echoing him.

I remember him now as talking, always talking, in those days. He
talked to me of theology, he talked of politics, of the wonders
of science and the marvels of art, of the passions and the
affections, of the immortality of the soul and the peculiar
actions of drugs; but predominantly and constantly he talked of
getting on, of enterprises, of inventions and great fortunes, of
Rothschilds, silver kings, Vanderbilts, Goulds, flotations,
realisations and the marvelous ways of Chance with men--in all
localities, that is to say, that are not absolutely sunken to the
level of Cold Mutton Fat.

When I think of those early talks, I figure him always in one of
three positions. Either we were in the dispensing lair behind a
high barrier, he pounding up things in a mortar perhaps, and I
rolling pill-stuff into long rolls and cutting it up with a sort
of broad, fluted knife, or he stood looking out of the shop door
against the case of sponges and spray-diffusers, while I surveyed
him from behind the counter, or he leant against the little
drawers behind the counter, and I hovered dusting in front. The
thought of those early days brings back to my nostrils the faint
smell of scent that was always in the air, marbled now with
streaks of this drug and now of that, and to my eyes the rows of
jejune glass bottles with gold labels, mirror-reflected, that
stood behind him. My aunt, I remember, used sometimes to come
into the shop in a state of aggressive sprightliness, a sort of
connubial ragging expedition, and get much fun over the
abbreviated Latinity of those gilt inscriptions. "Ol Amjig,
George," she would read derisively, "and he pretends it's almond
oil! Snap!--and that's mustard. Did you ever, George?

"Look at him, George, looking dignified. I'd like to put an old
label on to him round the middle like his bottles are, with Ol
Pondo on it. That's Latin for Impostor, George MUST be. He'd
look lovely with a stopper."

"YOU want a stopper," said my uncle, projecting his face....

My aunt, dear soul, was in those days quite thin and slender,
with a delicate rosebud completion and a disposition to connubial
badinage, to a sort of gentle skylarking. There was a silvery
ghost of lisping in her speech. She was a great humourist, and
as the constraint of my presence at meals wore off, I became more
and more aware of a filmy but extensive net of nonsense she had
woven about her domestic relations until it had become the
reality of her life. She affected a derisive attitude to the
world at large and applied the epithet "old" to more things than
I have ever heard linked to it before or since. "Here's the old
news-paper," she used to say--to my uncle. "Now don't go and get
it in the butter, you silly old Sardine!"

"What's the day of the week, Susan?" my uncle would ask.

"Old Monday, Sossidge," she would say, and add, "I got all my Old
Washing to do. Don't I KNOW it!"...

She had evidently been the wit and joy of a large circle of
schoolfellows, and this style had become a second nature with
her. It made her very delightful to me in that quiet place. Her
customary walk even had a sort of hello! in it. Her chief
preoccupation in life was, I believe, to make my uncle laugh, and
when by some new nickname, some new quaintness or absurdity, she
achieved that end, she was, behind a mask of sober amazement, the
happiest woman on earth. My uncle's laugh when it did come, I
must admit was, as Baedeker says, "rewarding."  It began with
gusty blowings and snortings, and opened into a clear "Ha ha!"
but in fullest development it included, in those youthful
days, falling about anyhow and doubling up tightly, and whackings
of the stomach, and tears and cries of anguish. I never in my
life heard my uncle laugh to his maximum except at her; he was
commonly too much in earnest for that, and he didn't laugh much
at all, to my knowledge, after those early years. Also she threw
things at him to an enormous extent in her resolve to keep things
lively in spite of Wimblehurst; sponges out of stock she threw,
cushions, balls of paper, clean washing,  bread; and once up the
yard when they thought that I and the errand boy and the
diminutive maid of all work were safely out of the way, she
smashed a boxful of eight-ounce bottles I had left to drain,
assaulting  my uncle with a new soft broom. Sometimes she would
shy things at me--but not often. There seemed always laughter
round and about her--all three of us would share hysterics at
times--and on one occasion the two of them came home from church
shockingly  ashamed of themselves, because of a storm of mirth
during the sermon. The vicar, it seems, had tried to blow his
nose with a black glove as well as the customary
pocket-handkerchief. And afterwards she had picked up her own
glove by the finger, and looking innocently  but intently
sideways, had suddenly by this simple expedient exploded my uncle
altogether. We had it all over again at dinner.

"But it shows you," cried my uncle, suddenly becoming grave,
"what Wimblehurst is, to have us all laughing at a little thing
like that! We weren't the only ones that giggled. Not by any
means! And, Lord! it was funny!"

Socially, my uncle and aunt were almost completely isolated. In
places like Wimblehurst the tradesmen's lives always are isolated
socially, all of them, unless they have a sister or a bosom
friend among the other wives, but the husbands met in various
bar-parlours or in the billiard-room of the Eastry Arms. But my
uncle, for the most part, spent his evenings at home. When first
he arrived in Wimblehurst I think he had spread his effect of
abounding ideas and enterprise rather too aggressively; and
Wimblehurst, after a temporary subjugation, had rebelled and
done its best to make a butt of him. His appearance in a
public-house led to a pause in any conversation that was going
on.

"Come to tell us about everything, Mr. Pond'revo?" some one would
say politely.

"You wait," my uncle used to answer, disconcerted, and sulk for
the rest of his visit.

Or some one with an immense air of innocence would remark to the
world generally, "They're talkin' of rebuildin'  Wimblehurst all
over again, I'm told. Anybody heard anything of it? Going to
make it a reg'lar smartgoin', enterprisin' place--kind of
Crystal Pallas."

"Earthquake and a pestilence before you get that," my uncle would
mutter, to the infinite delight of every one, and add something
inaudible about "Cold Mutton Fat."...

III

We were torn apart by a financial accident to my uncle of which I
did not at first grasp the full bearings. He had developed what
I regarded as an innocent intellectual recreation which he called
stock-market meteorology. I think he got the idea from one use
of curves in the graphic presentation of associated variations
that he saw me plotting. He secured some of my squared paper
and, having cast about for a time, decided  to trace the rise and
fall of certain lines and railways. "There's something in this,
George," he said, and I little dreamt that among other things
that were in it, was the whole of his spare money and most of
what my mother had left to him in trust for me.

"It's as plain as can be," he said. "See, here's one system of
waves and here's another! These are prices for Union
Pacifics--extending over a month. Now next week, mark my words,
they'll be down one whole point. We're getting near the steep
part of the curve again. See? It's absolutely scientific. It's
verifiable. Well, and apply it! You buy in the hollow and sell
on the crest, and there you are!"

I was so convinced of the triviality of this amusement that to
find at last that he had taken it in the most disastrous earnest
overwhelmed me.

He took me for a long walk to break it to me, over the hills
towards Yare and across the great gorse commons by Hazelbrow.

"There are ups and downs in life, George," he said--halfway
across that great open space, and paused against the sky...."I
left out one factor in the Union Pacific analysis."

"DID you?" I said, struck by the sudden chance in his voice.
"But you don't mean?"

I stopped and turned on him in the narrow sandy rut of pathway
and he stopped likewise.

"I do, George. I DO mean. It's bust me! I'm a bankrupt here
and now."

"Then--?"

"The shop's bust too. I shall have to get out of that."

"And me?"

"Oh, you!--YOU'RE all right. You can transfer your
apprenticeship, and--er--well, I'm not the sort of man to be
careless with trust funds, you can be sure. I kept that aspect
in mind. There's some of it left George--trust me!--quite a
decent little sum."

"But you and aunt?"

"It isn't QUITE the way we meant to leave Wimblehurst, George;
but we shall have to go. Sale; all the things shoved about and
ticketed--lot a hundred and one. Ugh!... It's been a larky
little house in some ways. The first we had. Furnishing--a
spree in its way.... Very happy..."  His face winced at some
memory. "Let's go on, George," he said shortly, near choking, I
could see.

I turned my back on him, and did not look round again for a
little while.

"That's how it is, you see, George."  I heard him after a time.

When we were back in the high road again he came alongside, and
for a time we walked in silence.

"Don't say anything home yet," he said presently. "Fortunes of
War. I got to pick the proper time with Susan--else she'll get
depressed. Not that she isn't a first-rate brick whatever comes
along."

"All right," I said, "I'll be careful"; and it seemed to me for
the time altogether too selfish to bother him with any further
inquiries about his responsibility as my trustee. He gave a
little sigh of relief at my note of assent, and was presently
talking quite cheerfully of his plans.... But he had, I
remember, one lapse into moodiness that came and went suddenly.
"Those others!" he said, as though the thought had stung him for
the first time.

"What others?" I asked.

"Damn them!" said he.

"But what others?"

"All those damned stick-in-the-mud-and-die-slowly tradespeople:
Ruck, the butcher, Marbel, the grocer. Snape! Gord! George,
HOW they'll grin!"

I thought him over in the next few weeks, and I remember now in
great detail the last talk we had together before he handed over
the shop and me to his successor. For he had the good luck to
sell his business, "lock, stock, and barrel"--in which expression
I found myself and my indentures included. The horrors of a sale
by auction of the furniture even were avoided.

I remember that either coming or going on that occasion, Ruck,
the butcher, stood in his doorway and regarded us with a grin
that showed his long teeth.

"You half-witted hog!" said my uncle. "You grinning hyaena"; and
then, "Pleasant day, Mr. Ruck."

"Goin' to make your fortun' in London, then?" said Mr. Ruck, with
slow enjoyment.

That last excursion took us along the causeway to Beeching, and
so up the downs and round almost as far as Steadhurst, home. My
moods, as we went, made a mingled web. By this time I had really
grasped the fact that my uncle had, in plain English, robbed me;
the little accumulations of my mother, six hundred pounds and
more, that would have educated me and started me in business, had
been eaten into and was mostly gone into the unexpected hollow
that ought to have been a crest of the Union Pacific curve, and
of the remainder he still gave no account. I was too young and
inexperienced to insist on this or know how to get it, but the
thought of it all made streaks of decidedly black anger in that
scheme of interwoven feelings.  And you know, I was also acutely
sorry for him--almost as sorry as I was for my aunt Susan. Even
then I had quite found him out. I knew him to be weaker than
myself; his incurable, irresponsible childishness was as clear
to me then as it was on his deathbed, his redeeming and excusing
imaginative silliness. Through some odd mental twist perhaps I
was disposed to exonerate him even at the cost of blaming my poor
old mother who had left things in his untrustworthy hands.

I should have forgiven him altogether, I believe, if he had been
in any manner apologetic to me; but he wasn't that. He kept
reassuring me in a way I found irritating. Mostly, however, his
solicitude was for Aunt Susan and himself.

"It's these Crises, George," he said, "try Character. Your aunt's
come out well, my boy."

He made meditative noises for a space.

"Had her cry of course,"--the thing had been only too painfully
evident to me in her eyes and swollen face--"who wouldn't? But
now--buoyant again!... She's a Corker.

"We'll be sorry to leave the little house of course. It's a bit
like Adam and Eve, you know. Lord! what a chap old Milton was!

     "'The world was all before them, where to choose
      Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.'

It sounds, George.... Providence their guide!... Well--thank
goodness there's no imeedgit prospect of either Cain or Abel!

"After all, it won't be so bad up there. Not the scenery,
perhaps, or the air we get here, but--LIFE! We've got very
comfortable little rooms, very comfortable considering, and I
shall rise. We're not done yet, we're not beaten; don't think
that, George. I shall pay twenty shillings in the pound before
I've done--you mark my words, George,--twenty--five to you.... I
got this situation within twenty-four hours--others offered.
It's an important firm--one of the best in London. I looked to
that. I might have got four or five shillings a week
more--elsewhere. Quarters I could name. But I said to them
plainly, wages to go on with, but opportunity's my
game--development. We understood each other."

He threw out his chest, and the little round eyes behind his
glasses rested valiantly on imaginary employers.

We would go on in silence for a space while he revised and
restated that encounter. Then he would break out abruptly with
some banal phrase.

"The Battle of Life, George, my boy," he would cry, or "Ups and
Downs!"

He ignored or waived the poor little attempts I made to ascertain
my own position. "That's all right," he would say; or, "Leave
all that to me. I'LL look after them."  And he would drift away
towards the philosophy and moral of the situation. What was I to
do?

"Never put all your resources into one chance, George; that's the
lesson I draw from this. Have forces in reserve. It was a
hundred to one, George, that I was right--a hundred to one. I
worked it out afterwards. And here we are spiked on the
off-chance. If I'd have only kept back a little, I'd have had it
on U.P. next day, like a shot, and come out on the rise. There
you are!"

His thoughts took a graver turn.

"It's where you'll bump up against Chance like this, George, that
you feel the need of religion. Your hard-and-fast scientific
men--your Spencers and Huxleys--they don't understand that. I
do. I've thought of it a lot lately--in bed and about. I was
thinking of it this morning while I shaved. It's not irreverent
for me to say it, I hope--but God comes in on the off-chance,
George. See? Don't you be too cocksure of anything, good or
bad. That's what I make out of it. I could have sworn. Well,
do you think I--particular as I am--would have touched those
Union Pacifics with trust money  at all, if I hadn't thought it a
thoroughly good thing--good without spot or blemish?... And it
was bad!

"It's a lesson to me. You start in to get a hundred percent.
and you come out with that. It means, in a way, a reproof for
Pride. I've thought of that, George--in the Night Watches. I
was thinking this morning when I was shaving, that that's where
the good of it all comes in. At the bottom I'm a mystic in these
affairs. You calculate you're going to do this or that, but at
bottom who knows at all WHAT he's doing? When you most think
you're doing things, they're being done right over your head.
YOU'RE being done--in a sense. Take a hundred-to one chance, or
one to a hundred--what does it matter? You're being Led."

It's odd that I heard this at the time with unutterable contempt,
and now that I recall it--well, I ask myself, what have I got
better?

"I wish," said I, becoming for a moment outrageous, "YOU were
being Led to give me some account of my money, uncle."

"Not without a bit of paper to figure on, George, I can't. But
you trust me about that never fear. You trust me."

And in the end I had to.

I think the bankruptcy hit my aunt pretty hard. There was, so
far as I can remember now, a complete cessation of all those
cheerful outbreaks of elasticity, no more skylarking in the shop
nor scampering about the house. But there was no fuss that I
saw, and only little signs in her complexion of the fits of
weeping that must have taken her. She didn't cry at the end,
though to me her face with its strain of self-possession was more
pathetic than any weeping. "Well" she said to me as she came
through the shop to the cab, "Here's old orf, George! Orf to
Mome number two! Good-bye!"  And she took me in her arms and
kissed me and pressed me to her. Then she dived straight for the
cab before I could answer her.

My uncle followed, and he seemed to me a trifle too valiant and
confident in his bearing for reality. He was unusually white in
the face. He spoke to his successor at the counter. "Here we
go!" he said. "One down, the other up. You'll find it a quiet
little business so long as you run it on quiet lines--a nice
quiet little business. There's nothing more? No? Well, if you
want to know anything write to me. I'll always explain fully.
Anything--business, place or people. You'll find Pil Antibil. a
little overstocked by-the-by, I found it soothed my mind the day
before yesterday making 'em, and I made 'em all day. Thousands!
And where's George? Ah! there you are! I'll write to you,
George, FULLY, about all that affair. Fully!"

It became clear to me as if for the first time, that I was really
parting from my aunt Susan. I went out on to the pavement and
saw her head craned forward, her wide-open blue eyes and her
little face intent on the shop that had combined for her all the
charms of a big doll's house and a little home of her very own.
"Good-bye!" she said to it and to me. Our eyes met for a
moment--perplexed. My uncle bustled out and gave a few totally
unnecessary directions to the cabman and got in beside her. "All
right?" asked the driver. "Right," said I; and he woke up the
horse with a flick of his whip. My aunt's eyes surveyed me
again. "Stick to your old science and things, George, and write
and tell me when they make you a Professor," she said cheerfully.

She stared at me for a second longer with eyes growing wider and
brighter and a smile that had become fixed, glanced again at the
bright little shop still saying "Ponderevo" with all the emphasis
of its fascia, and then flopped back hastily out of sight of me
into the recesses of the cab. Then it had gone from before me
and I beheld Mr. Snape, the hairdresser, inside his store
regarding its departure with a quiet satisfaction and exchanging
smiles and significant headshakes with Mr. Marbel.

IV

I was left, I say, as part of the lock, stock, and barrel, at
Wimblehurst with my new master, a Mr. Mantell; who plays no part
in the progress of this story except in so far as he effaced my
uncle's traces. So soon as the freshness of this new personality
faded, I began to find Wimblehurst not only a dull but a lonely
place, and to miss my aunt Susan immensely. The advertisements
of the summer terms for Cough Linctus were removed; the bottles
of coloured water--red, green, and yellow--restored to their
places; the horse announcing veterinary medicine, which my uncle,
sizzling  all the while, had coloured in careful portraiture of a
Goodwood favourite, rewhitened; and I turned myself  even more
resolutely than before to Latin (until the passing of my
preliminary examination enabled me to drop that), and then to
mathematics and science.

There were classes in Electricity and Magnetism at the Grammar
School. I took a little "elementary" prize in that in my first
year and a medal in my third; and in Chemistry and Human
Physiology and Sound, Light and Heat, I did well. There was also
a lighter, more discursive subject called Physiography, in which
one ranged among the sciences and encountered Geology as a
process of evolution from Eozoon to Eastry House, and Astronomy
as a record of celestial movements of the most austere and
invariable integrity. I learnt out of badly-written, condensed
little text-books, and with the minimum of experiment, but still
I learnt. Only thirty years ago it was, and I remember I learnt
of the electric light as an expensive, impracticable toy, the
telephone as a curiosity, electric traction as a practical
absurdity. There was no argon, no radium, no phagocytes--at
least to my knowledge, and aluminium was a dear, infrequent
metal. The fastest ships in the world went then at nineteen
knots, and no one but a lunatic here and there ever thought it
possible that men might fly.

Many things have happened since then, but the last glance I had
of Wimblehurst two years ago remarked no change whatever in its
pleasant tranquillity. They had not even built any fresh
houses--at least not actually  in the town, though about the
station there had been some building. But it was a good place to
do work in, for all its quiescence. I was soon beyond the small
requirements of the Pharmaceutical Society's examination,  and as
they do not permit candidates to sit for that until one and
twenty, I was presently filling up my time and preventing my
studies becoming too desultory by making an attack upon the
London University degree of Bachelor of Science, which impressed
me then as a very splendid but almost impossible achievement.
The degree in mathematics and chemistry appealed to me as
particularly congenial--albeit giddily inaccessible. I set to
work. I had presently to arrange a holiday and go to London to
matriculate, and so it was I came upon my aunt and uncle again.
In many ways that visit marked an epoch. It was my first
impression of London at all. I was then nineteen, and by a
conspiracy of chances my nearest approach to that human
wilderness had been my brief visit to Chatham. Chatham too had
been my largest town. So that I got London at last with an
exceptional freshness of effect, as the sudden revelation of a
whole unsuspected other side to life.

I came to it on a dull and smoky day by the South Eastern
Railway, and our train was half an hour late, stopping and going
on and stopping again. I marked beyond Chiselhurst the growing
multitude of villas, and so came stage by stage through
multiplying houses and diminishing interspaces of market garden
and dingy grass to regions of interlacing railway lines, big
factories,  gasometers and wide reeking swamps of dingy little
homes, more of them and more and more. The number of these and
their dinginess and poverty increased,  and here rose a great
public house and here a Board School and there a gaunt factory;
and away to the east there loomed for a time a queer, incongruous
forest of masts and spars. The congestion of houses intensified
and piled up presently into tenements; I marveled more and more
at this boundless world of dingy people; whiffs of industrial
smell, of leather, of brewing, drifted into the carriage; the sky
darkened, I rumbled thunderously over bridges, van-crowded
streets, peered down on and crossed the Thames with an abrupt
eclat of sound. I got an effect of tall warehouses, of grey
water, barge crowded, of broad banks of indescribable mud, and
then I was in Cannon Street Station--a monstrous dirty cavern
with trains packed across its vast floor and more porters
standing along the platform than I had ever been in my life
before. I alighted with my portmanteau and struggled along,
realising for the first time just how small and weak I could
still upon occasion feel. In this world, I felt, an Honours medal
in Electricity and magnetism counted for nothing at all.

Afterwards I drove in a cab down a canon of rushing street
between high warehouses, and peeped up astonished  at the
blackened greys of Saint Paul's. The traffic of Cheapside--it
was mostly in horse omnibuses in those days--seemed stupendous,
its roar was stupendous;  I wondered where the money came from to
employ so many cabs, what industry could support the endless
jostling stream of silk-hatted, frock-coated, hurrying men. Down
a turning I found the Temperance Hotel Mr. Mantell had
recommended to me. The porter in a green uniform who took over
my portmanteau, seemed, I thought, to despise me a good deal.

V

Matriculation kept me for four full days and then came an
afternoon to spare, and I sought out Tottenham Court Road
through a perplexing network of various and crowded streets. But
this London was vast! it was endless! it seemed the whole world
had changed into packed frontages and hoardings and street
spaces. I got there at last and made inquiries, and I found my
uncle behind the counter of the pharmacy he managed, an
establishment that did not impress me as doing a particularly
high-class trade. "Lord!" he said at the sight of me, "I was
wanting something to happen!"

He greeted me warmly. I had grown taller, and he, I thought, had
grown shorter and smaller and rounder but otherwise he was
unchanged. He struck me as being rather shabby, and the silk hat
he produced and put on, when, after mysterious negotiations in
the back premises he achieved his freedom to accompany me, was
past its first youth; but he was as buoyant and confident as
ever.

"Come to ask me about all THAT," he cried. "I've never written
yet."

"Oh, among other things," said I, with a sudden regrettable
politeness, and waived the topic of his trusteeship to ask after
my aunt Susan.

"We'll have her out of it," he said suddenly; "we'll go
somewhere. We don't get you in London every day."

"It's my first visit," I said, "I've never seen London before";
and that made him ask me what I thought of it, and the rest of
the talk was London, London, to the exclusion of all smaller
topics. He took me up the Hampstead Road almost to the Cobden
statue, plunged into some back streets to the left, and came at
last to a blistered front door that responded to his latch-key,
one of a long series of blistered front doors with fanlights and
apartment cards above. We found ourselves in a drab-coloured
passage that was not only narrow and dirty but desolatingly
empty, and then he opened a door and revealed my aunt sitting at
the window with a little sewing-machine on a bamboo occasional
table before her, and "work"--a plum-coloured walking dress I
judged at its most analytical stage--scattered over the rest of
the apartment.

At the first glance I judged my aunt was plumper than she had
been, but her complexion was just as fresh and her China blue eye
as bright as in the old days.

"London," she said, didn't "get blacks" on her.

She still "cheeked" my uncle, I was pleased to find. "What are
you old Poking in for at THIS time--Gubbitt?," she said when he
appeared, and she still looked with a practised eye for the
facetious side of things. When she saw me behind him, she gave a
little cry and stood up radiant. Then she became grave.

I was surprised at my own emotion in seeing her. She held me at
arm's length for a moment, a hand on each shoulder, and looked at
me with a sort of glad scrutiny. She seemed to hesitate, and
then pecked little kiss off my cheek.

"You're a man, George," she said, as she released me, and
continued to look at me for a while.

Their menage was one of a very common type in London. They
occupied what is called the dining-room floor of a small house,
and they had the use of a little inconvenient kitchen in the
basement that had once been scullery. The two rooms, bedroom
behind and living room in front, were separated by folding-doors
that were never now thrown back, and indeed, in the presence of a
visitor, not used at all. There was of course no bathroom or
anything of that sort available, and there was no water supply
except to the kitchen below. My aunt did all the domestic work,
though she could have afforded to pay for help if the build of
the place had not rendered that inconvenient to the pitch of
impossibility. There was no sort of help available except that
of indoor servants, for whom she had no accommodation.  The
furniture was their own; it was partly secondhand,  but on the
whole it seemed cheerful to my eye, and my aunt's bias for cheap,
gay-figured muslin had found ample score. In many ways I should
think it must have been an extremely inconvenient and cramped
sort of home, but at the time I took it, as I was taking
everything, as being there and in the nature of things. I did
not see the oddness of solvent decent people living in a
habitation so clearly neither designed nor adapted for their
needs, so wasteful of labour and so devoid of beauty as this was,
and it is only now as I describe this that I find myself thinking
of the essential absurdity of an intelligent community living in
such makeshift homes. It strikes me now as the next thing to
wearing second-hand clothes.

You see it was a natural growth, part of that system to which
Bladesover, I hold, is the key. There are wide regions of
London, miles of streets of houses, that appear  to have been
originally designed for prosperous-middle-class homes of the
early Victorian type. There must have been a perfect fury of
such building in the thirties, forties, and fifties. Street
after street must have been rushed into being, Campden Town way,
Pentonville way, Brompton way, West Kensington way in the
Victoria region and all over the minor suburbs of the south side.

I am doubtful if many of these houses had any long use as the
residences of single families if from the very first almost their
tenants did not makeshift and take lodgers and sublet. They were
built with basements, in which their servants worked and
lived--servants of a more submissive and troglodytic generation
who did not mind stairs. The dining-room (with folding doors)
was a little above the ground level, and in that the wholesome
boiled and roast with damp boiled potatoes and then pie to
follow, was consumed  and the numerous family read and worked in
the evening, and above was the drawing-room (also with folding
doors), where the infrequent callers were received.  That was
the vision at which those industrious builders aimed. Even while
these houses were being run up, the threads upon the loom of fate
were shaping to abolish altogether the type of household that
would have fitted them. Means of transit were developing to
carry the moderately prosperous middle-class families out of
London, education and factory employment were whittling away at
the supply of rough, hardworking, obedient girls who would stand
the subterranean drudgery  of these places, new classes of
hard-up middle-class people such as my uncle, employees of
various types, were coming into existence, for whom no homes were
provided. None of these classes have ideas of what they ought to
be, or fit in any legitimate way into the Bladesover theory that
dominates our minds. It was nobody's concern to see them housed
under civilised conditions, and the beautiful laws of supply and
demand  had free play. They had to squeeze in. The landlords
came out financially intact from their blundering  enterprise.
More and more these houses fell into the hands of married
artisans, or struggling widows or old servants with savings, who
became responsible for the quarterly rent and tried to sweat a
living by sub-letting furnished or unfurnished apartments.

I remember now that a poor grey-haired old woman who had an air
of having been roused from a nap in the dust bin, came out into
the area and looked up at us as we three went out from the front
door to "see London" under my uncle's direction. She was the
sub-letting occupier; she squeezed out a precarious living by
taking the house whole and sub-letting it in detail and she made
her food and got the shelter of an attic above and a basement
below by the transaction. And if she didn't chance to "let"
steadily, out she went to pauperdom and some other poor, sordid
old adventurer tried in her place....

It is a foolish community that can house whole classes, useful
and helpful, honest and loyal classes, in such squalidly
unsuitable dwellings. It is by no means the social economy it
seems, to use up old women, savings and inexperience in order to
meet the landlord's demands. But any one who doubts this thing
is going on right up to to-day need only spend an afternoon in
hunting for lodgings in any of the regions of London I have
named.

But where has my story got to? My uncle, I say, decided I must
be shown London, and out we three went as soon as my aunt had got
her hat on, to catch all that was left of the day.

VI

It pleased my uncle extremely to find I had never seen London
before. He took possession of the metropolis forthwith.
"London, George," he said, "takes a lot of understanding. It's a
great place. Immense. The richest town in the world, the biggest
port, the greatest manufacturing town, the Imperial city--the
centre of civilisation, the heart of the world! See those
sandwich men down there! That third one's hat! Fair treat! You
don't see poverty like that in Wimblehurst George! And many of
them high Oxford honour men too. Brought down by drink! It's a
wonderful place, George--a whirlpool, a maelstrom! whirls you up
and whirls you down."

I have a very confused memory of that afternoon's inspection of
London. My uncle took us to and fro showing us over his London,
talking erratically, following  a route of his own. Sometimes we
were walking, sometimes we were on the tops of great staggering
horse omnibuses in a heaving jumble of traffic, and at one point
we had tea in an Aerated Bread Shop. But I remember very
distinctly how we passed down Park Lane under an overcast sky,
and how my uncle pointed out the house of this child of good
fortune and that with succulent appreciation.

I remember, too, that as he talked I would find my aunt watching
my face as if to check the soundness of his talk by my
expression.

"Been in love yet, George?" she asked suddenly, over a bun in the
tea-shop.

"Too busy, aunt," I told her.

She bit her bun extensively, and gesticulated with the remnant to
indicate that she had more to say.

"How are YOU going to make your fortune?" she said so soon as
she could speak again. "You haven't told us that."

"'Lectricity," said my uncle, taking breath after a deep draught
of tea.

"If I make it at all," I said. "For my part I think shall be
satisfied with something less than a fortune."

"We're going to make ours--suddenly," she said.

"So HE old says."  She jerked her head at my uncle.

"He won't tell me when--so I can't get anything ready. But it's
coming. Going to ride in our carriage and have a garden.
Garden--like a bishop's."

She finished her bun and twiddled crumbs from her fingers. "I
shall be glad of the garden," she said. "It's going to be a real
big one with rosaries and things. Fountains in it. Pampas
grass. Hothouses."

"You'll get it all right," said my uncle, who had reddened a
little.

"Grey horses in the carriage, George," she said. "It's nice to
think about when one's dull. And dinners in restaurants often
and often. And theatres--in the stalls. And money and money and
money."

"You may joke," said my uncle, and hummed for a moment.

"Just as though an old Porpoise like him would ever make money,"
she said, turning her eyes upon his profile with a sudden lapse
to affection. "He'll just porpoise about."  

"I'll do something," said my uncle, "you bet! Zzzz!" and rapped
with a shilling on the marble table.

"When you do you'll have to buy me a new pair of gloves," she
said, "anyhow. That finger's past mending. Look! you
Cabbage--you."  And she held the split under his nose, and pulled
a face of comical fierceness.

My uncle smiled at these sallies at the time, but afterwards,
when I went back with him to the Pharmacy--the low-class business
grew brisker in the evening and they kept open late--he reverted
to it in a low expository tone. "Your aunt's a bit impatient,
George. She gets at me. It's only natural.... A woman doesn't
understand how long it takes to build up a position. No.... In
certain directions now--I am--quietly--building up a position.
Now here.... I get this room. I have my three assistants. Zzzz.
It's a position that, judged by the criterion of imeedjit
income, isn't perhaps so good as I deserve, but
strategically--yes. It's what I want. I make my plans. I rally
my attack."  

"What plans," I said, "are you making?"

"Well, George, there's one thing you can rely upon, I'm doing
nothing in a hurry. I turn over this one and that, and I don't
talk--indiscreetly. There's-- No! I don't think I can tell you
that. And yet, why NOT?"

He got up and closed the door into the shop. "I've told no one,"
he remarked, as he sat down again. "I owe you something."  

His face flushed slightly, he leant forward over the little table
towards me.

"Listen!" he said.

I listened.

"Tono-Bungay," said my uncle very slowly and distinctly.

I thought he was asking me to hear some remote, strange noise.
"I don't hear anything," I said reluctantly to his expectant
face.  He smiled undefeated. "Try again,"  he said, and
repeated, "Tono-Bungay."  

"Oh, THAT!" I said.

"Eh?" said he.

"But what is it?"

"Ah!" said my uncle, rejoicing and expanding. "What IS it?
That's what you got to ask? What won't it be?"  He dug me
violently in what he supposed to be my ribs. "George," he
cried--"George, watch this place! There's more to follow."  

And that was all I could get from him.

That, I believe, was the very first time that the words
Tono-Bungay ever heard on earth--unless my uncle indulged in
monologues in his chamber--a highly probable thing. Its
utterance certainly did not seem to me at the time to mark any
sort of epoch, and had I been told this word was the Open Sesame
to whatever pride and pleasure the grimy front of London hid from
us that evening, I should have laughed aloud.

"Coming now to business," I said after a pause, and with a chill
sense of effort; and I opened the question of his trust.

My uncle sighed, and leant back in his chair. "I wish I could
make all this business as clear to you as it is to me," he said.
"However--Go on! Say what you have to say."  

VII

After I left my uncle that evening I gave way to a feeling of
profound depression. My uncle and aunt seemed to me to be
leading--I have already used the word too often, but I must use
it again--DINGY lives. They seemed to be adrift in a limitless
crowd of dingy people, wearing shabby clothes, living
uncomfortably in shabby second-hand houses, going to and fro on
pavements that had always a thin veneer of greasy, slippery mud,
under grey skies that showed no gleam of hope of anything for
them but dinginess until they died. It seemed absolutely clear
to me that my mother's little savings had been swallowed up and
that my own prospect was all too certainly to drop into and be
swallowed  up myself sooner or later by this dingy London ocean.
The London that was to be an adventurous escape from the slumber
of Wimblehurst, had vanished from my dreams. I saw my uncle
pointing to the houses in Park Lane and showing a frayed
shirt-cuff as he did so. I heard my aunt: "I'm to ride in my
carriage then. So he old says."  

My feelings towards my uncle were extraordinarily mixed. I was
intensely sorry not only for my aunt Susan but for him--for it
seemed indisputable that as they were living then so they must go
on--and at the same time I was angry with the garrulous vanity
and illness that had elipped all my chance of independent study,
and imprisoned her in those grey apartments. When I got back to
Wimblehurst I allowed myself to write him a boyishly sarcastic
and sincerely bitter letter. He never replied. Then, believing
it to be the only way of escape for me, I set myself far more
grimly and resolutely to my studies than I had ever done before.
After a time I wrote to him in more moderate terms, and he
answered me evasively. And then I tried to dismiss him from my
mind and went on working.

Yes, that first raid upon London under the moist and chilly
depression of January had an immense effect upon me. It was for
me an epoch-making disappointment. I had thought of London as a
large, free, welcoming, adventurous place, and I saw it slovenly
and harsh and irresponsive.

I did not realise at all what human things might be found behind
those grey frontages, what weakness that whole forbidding facade
might presently confess. It is the constant error of youth to
over-estimate the Will in things. I did not see that the dirt,
the discouragement,  the discomfort of London could be due simply
to the fact that London was a witless old giantess of a town, too
slack and stupid to keep herself clean and maintain a brave face
to the word. No! I suffered from the sort of illusion that burnt
witches in the seventeenth century. I endued her grubby disorder
with a sinister and magnificent quality of intention.

And my uncle's gestures and promises filled me with doubt and a
sort of fear for him. He seemed to me a lost little creature,
too silly to be silent, in a vast implacable condemnation. I was
full of pity and a sort of tenderness for my aunt Susan, who was
doomed to follow his erratic fortunes mocked by his grandiloquent
promises.

I was to learn better. But I worked with the terror of the grim
underside of London in my soul during all my last year at
Wimblehurst.

BOOK THE SECOND

THE RISE OF TONO-BUNGAY

CHAPTER THE FIRST

HOW I BECAME A LONDON STUDENT AND WENT ASTRAY

I came to live in London, as I shall tell you, when I was nearly
twenty-two. Wimblehurst dwindles in perspective, is now in this
book a little place far off, Bladesover no more than a small
pinkish speck of frontage among the distant Kentish hills; the
scene broadens out, becomes multitudinous and limitless, full of
the sense of vast irrelevant movement. I do not remember my
second coming to London as I do my first, for my early
impressions, save that an October memory of softened amber
sunshine stands out, amber sunshine falling on grey house fronts
I know not where. That, and a sense of a large tranquillity.

I could fill a book, I think, with a more or less imaginary
account of how I came to apprehend London, how first in one
aspect and then in another it grew in my mind. Each day my
accumulating impressions were added to and qualified and brought
into relationship with new ones; they fused inseparably with
others that were purely personal and accidental. I find myself
with a certain comprehensive perception of London, complete
indeed, incurably indistinct in places and yet in some way a
whole that began with my first visit and is still being mellowed
and enriched.

London!

At first, no doubt, it was a chaos of streets and people and
buildings and reasonless going to and fro. I do not remember
that I ever struggled very steadily to understand it, or explored
it with any but a personal and adventurous intention. Yet in
time there has grown up in me a kind of theory of London; I do
think I see lines of an ordered structure out of which it has
grown, detected a process that is something more than a confusion
of casual accidents though indeed it may be no more than a
process of disease.

I said at the outset of my first book that I find in Bladesover
the clue to all England. Well, I certainly imagine it is the
clue to the structure of London. There have been no revolutions
no deliberate restatements or abandonments of opinion in England
since the days of the fine gentry, since 1688 or thereabouts, the
days when Bladesover was built; there have been changes,
dissolving forest replacing forest, if you will; but then it was
that the broad lines of the English system set firmly. And as I
have gone to and fro in London in certain regions constantly the
thought has recurred this is Bladesover House, this answers to
Bladesover House. The fine gentry may have gone; they have
indeed largely gone, I think; rich merchants may have replaced
them, financial adventurers or what not. That does not matter;
the shape is still Bladesover.

I am most reminded of Bladesover and Eastry by all those regions
round about the West End parks; for example, estate parks, each
more or less in relation to a palace or group of great houses.
The roads and back ways of Mayfair and all about St. James's
again, albeit perhaps of a later growth in point of time, were of
the very spirit and architectural texture of the Bladesover
passages and yards; they had the same smells, the space, the
large cleanest and always going to and fro where one met
unmistakable Olympians and even more unmistakable valets,
butlers, footmen in mufti. There were moments when I seemed to
glimpse down areas the white panelling, the very chintz of my
mother's room again.

I could trace out now on a map what I would call the Great-House
region; passing south-westward into Belgravia, becoming diffused
and sporadic westward, finding its last systematic outbreak round
and about Regent's Park. The Duke of Devonshire's place in
Piccadilly, in all its insolent ugliness, pleases me
particularly; it is the quintessence of the thing; Apsley House
is all in the manner of my theory, Park Lane has its quite
typical mansions, and they run along the border of the Green Park
and St. James's. And I struck out a truth one day in Cromwell
Road quite suddenly,  as I looked over the Natural History Museum
"By Jove," said I "but this is the little assemblage of cases of
stuffed birds and animals upon the Bladesover staircase grown
enormous, and yonder as the corresponding thing to the
Bladesover curios and porcelain is the Art Museume and there in
the little observatories in Exhibition Road is old Sir Cuthbert's
Gregorian telescope that I hunted out in the storeroom and put
together."   And diving into the Art Museum under this
inspiration, I came to a little reading-room and found as I had
inferred, old brown books!

It was really a good piece of social comparative anatomy I did
that day; all these museums and libraries that are dotted over
London between Piccadilly and West Kensington, and indeed the
museum and library movement throughout the world, sprang from the
elegant leisure of the gentlemen of taste. Theirs were the.
first libraries, the first houses of culture; by my rat-like
raids into the Bladesover saloon I became, as it were, the last
dwindled representative of such a man of letters as Swift. But
now these things have escaped out of the Great House altogether,
and taken on a strange independent life of their own.

It is this idea of escaping parts from the seventeenth century
system of Bladesover, of proliferating and overgrowing elements
from the Estates, that to this day seems to me the best
explanation, not simply of London, but of all England. England
is a country of great Renascence landed gentlefolk who have been
unconsciously  outgrown and overgrown. The proper shops for
Bladesover custom were still to be found in Regent Street and
Bond Street in my early London days in those days they had been
but lightly touched by the American's profaning hand--and in
Piccadilly. I found the doctor's house of the country village or
country town up and down Harley Street, multiplied but not
otherwise different, and the family solicitor (by the hundred)
further eastward in the abandoned houses of a previous generation
of gentlepeople, and down in Westminster, behind Palladian
fronts, the public offices sheltered in large Bladesoverish rooms
and looked out on St. James's Park. The Parliament Houses of
lords and gentlemen, the parliament house that was horrified when
merchants and brewers came thrusting into it a hundred years ago,
stood out upon its terrace gathering the whole system together
into a head.

And the more I have paralleled these things with my
Bladesover-Eastry model, the more evident it has become to me
that the balance is not the same, and the more evident is the
presence of great new forces, blind forces of invasion, of
growth. The railway termini on the north side of London have
been kept as remote as Eastry had kept the railway-station from
Wimblehurst, they stop on the very outskirts of the estates, but
from the south, the South Eastern railway had butted its great
stupid rusty iron head of Charing Cross station, that great head
that came smashing down in 1905--clean across the river, between
Somerset House and Whitehall. The south side had no protecting
estate. Factory chimneys smoke right over against Westminster
with an air of carelessly not having permission, and the whole
effect of industrial London and of all London east of Temple Bar
and of the huge dingy immensity of London port is to me of
something disproportionately large, something morbidly expanded,
without plan or intention, dark and sinister toward the clean
clear social assurance of the West End. And south of this
central London, south-east, south-west, far west, north-west, all
round the northern hills, are similar disproportionate growths,
endless streets of undistinguished houses, undistinguished
industries, shabby families, second-rate shops, inexplicable
people who in a once fashionable phrase do not "exist."  All
these aspects have suggested to my mind at times, do suggest to
this day, the unorganised, abundant substance of some tumorous
growth-process, a process which indeed bursts all the outlines of
the affected carcass and protrudes such masses as ignoble
comfortable Croydon, as tragic impoverished West Ham. To this
day I ask myself will those masses ever become structural, will
they indeed shape into anything new whatever, or is that
cancerous image their true and ultimate diagnosis?...

Moreover, together with this hypertrophy there is an immigration
of elements that have never understood and never will understand
the great tradition, wedges of foreign settlement embedded in the
heart of this yeasty English expansion. One day I remember
wandering  eastward out of pure curiosity--it must have been in
my early student days--and discovering a shabbily bright foreign
quarter, shops displaying Hebrew placards and weird, unfamiliar
commodities and a concourse of bright-eyed, eagle-nosed people
talking some incomprehensible gibberish between the shops and
the barrows. And soon I became quite familiar with the devious.
vicious, dirtily-pleasant eroticism of Soho. I found those
crowded streets a vast relief from the dull grey exterior of
Brompton where I lodged and lived my daily life. In Soho,
indeed, I got my first inkling of the factor of replacement that
is so important in both the English and the American process.

Even in the West End, in Mayfair and the square, about Pall Mall,
Ewart was presently to remind me the face of the old aristocratic
dignity was fairer than its substance; here were actors and
actresses, here money lenders and Jews, here bold financial
adventurers, and I thought of my uncle's frayed cuff as he
pointed out this house in Park Lane and that. That was so and
so's who made a corner in borax, and that palace belonged to that
hero among modern adventurers, Barmentrude, who used to be an
I.D.B.,--an illicit diamond buyer that is to say. A city of
Bladesovers, the capital of a kingdom of Bladesovers, all much
shaken and many altogether in decay, parasitically occupied,
insidiously replaced by alien, unsympathetic and irresponsible
elements;  and with a ruling an adventitious and miscellaneous
empire of a quarter of this daedal earth complex laws,
intricate social necessities, disturbing insatiable suggestions,
followed from this. Such was the world into which I had come,
into which I had in some way to thrust myself and fit my problem,
my temptations, my efforts, my patriotic instinct, all my moral
instincts, my physical appetites, my dreams and my sanity.

London! I came up to it, young and without advisers, rather
priggish, rather dangerously open-minded and very open-eyed, and
with something--it is, I think, the common gift of imaginative
youth, and I claim it unblushingly--fine in me, finer than the
world and seeking fine responses. I did not want simply to live
or simply to live happily or well; I wanted to serve and do and
make--with some nobility. It was in me. It is in half the youth
of the world.

II

I had come to London as a scholar. I had taken the Vincent
Bradley scholarship of the Pharmaceutical Society, but I threw
this up when I found that my work of the Science and Art
Department in mathematics, physics and chemistry had given me one
of the minor Technical Board Scholarships at the Consolidated
Technical Schools at South Kensington. This latter was in
mechanics and metallurgy; and I hesitated between the two. The
Vincent Bradley gave me L70 a year and quite the best start-off a
pharmaceutical chemist could have; the South Kensington thing was
worth about twenty-two shillings a week, and the prospects it
opened were vague. But it meant far more scientific work than
the former, and I was still under the impulse of that great
intellectual appetite that is part of the adolescence of men of
my type. Moreover it seemed to lead towards engineering, in
which I imagined--I imagine to this day--my particular use is to
be found. I took its greater uncertainty as a fair risk. I came
up very keen, not doubting that the really hard and steady
industry that had carried me through Wimblehurst would go on
still in the new surroundings.

Only from the very first it didn't....

When I look back now at my Wimblehurst days, I still find myself
surprised at the amount of steady grinding study, of strenuous
self-discipline that I maintained  throughout my apprenticeship.
In many ways I think that time was the most honourable period in
my life. I wish I could say with a certain mind that my motives
in working so well were large and honourable too. To a certain
extent they were so; there was a fine sincere curiosity, a desire
for the strength and power of scientific knowledge and a passion
for intellectual  exercise; but I do not think those forces alone
would have kept me at it so grimly and closely if Wimblehurst
had not been so dull, so limited and so observant. Directly I
came into the London atmosphere, tasting freedom, tasting
irresponsibility and the pull of new forces altogether, my
discipline fell from me like a garment. Wimblehurst to a
youngster in my position offered no temptations worth counting,
no interests to conflict with study, no vices--such vices as it
offered were coarsely stripped of any imaginative glamourfull
drunkenness, clumsy leering shameful lust, no social intercourse
even to waste one's time, and on the other hand it would minister
greatly to the self-esteem of a conspicuously industrious
student. One was marked as "clever," one played up to the part,
and one's little accomplishment stood out finely in one's private
reckoning  against the sunlit small ignorance of that agreeable
place. One went with an intent rush across the market square,
one took one's exercise with as dramatic a sense of an ordered
day as an Oxford don, one burnt the midnight oil quite
consciously at the rare respectful, benighted  passer-by. And
one stood out finely in the local paper with one's unapproachable
yearly harvest of certificates. Thus I was not only a genuinely
keen student, but also a little of a prig and poseur in those
days--and the latter kept the former at it, as London made clear.

Moreover Wimblehurst had given me no outlet in any other
direction.

But I did not realise all this when I came to London, did not
perceive how the change of atmosphere began at once to warp and
distribute my energies. In the first place I became invisible.
If I idled for a day, no one except my fellow-students (who
evidently had no awe for me) remarked it. No one saw my midnight
taper; no one pointed me out as I crossed the street as an
astonishing intellectual phenomenon. In the next place I became
inconsiderable. In Wimblehurst I felt I stood for Science;
nobody there seemed to have so much as I and to have it so fully
and completely. In London I walked ignorant in an immensity, and
it was clear that among my fellow-students from the midlands and
the north I was ill-equipped and under-trained. With the utmost
exertion I should only take a secondary position among them. And
finally, in the third place, I was distracted by voluminous new
interests; London took hold of me, and Science, which had been
the universe, shrank back to the dimensions of tiresome little
formulae compacted in a book. I came to London in late
September, and it was a very different London from that great
greyly-overcast, smoke-stained house-wilderness  of my first
impressions. I reached it by Victoria and not by Cannon Street,
and its centre was now in Exhibition Road. It shone, pale amber,
blue-grey and tenderly spacious and fine under clear autumnal
skies. a London of hugely handsome buildings and vistas and
distances, a London of gardens and labyrinthine tall museums, of
old trees and remote palaces and artificial waters. I lodged
near by in West Brompton at a house in a little square.

So London faced me the second time, making me forget altogether
for a while the grey, drizzling city visage that had first looked
upon me. I settled down and went to and fro to my lectures and
laboratory; in the beginning I worked hard, and only slowly did
the curiosity that presently possessed me to know more of this
huge urban province arise, the desire to find something beyond
mechanism that I could serve, some use other than learning. With
this was a growing sense of loneliness, a desire for adventure
and intercourse. I found myself in the evenings poring over a
map of London I had bought, instead of copying out lecture
notes--and on Sundays I made explorations, taking omnibus rides
east and west and north and south, and to enlarging and
broadening the sense of great swarming hinterlands of humanity
with whom I had no dealings, of whom I knew nothing....

The whole illimitable place teemed with suggestions of indefinite
and sometimes outrageous possibility, of hidden but magnificent
meanings.

It wasn't simply that I received a vast impression of space and
multitude and opportunity; intimate things also were suddenly
dragged from neglected, veiled and darkened corners into an acute
vividness of perception. Close at hand in the big art museum I
came for the first time upon the beauty of nudity, which I had
hitherto held to be a shameful secret, flaunted and gloried in; I
was made aware of beauty as not only permissible, but desirable
and frequent and of a thousand hitherto unsuspected rich aspects
of life. One night in a real rapture, I walked round the upper
gallery of the Albert Hall and listened for the first time to
great music; I believe now that it was a rendering of Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony....

My apprehension of spaces and places was reinforced by a
quickened apprehension of persons. A constant stream of people
passed by me, eyes met and challenged mine and passed--more and
more I wanted then to stay--if I went eastward towards
Piccadilly, women who seemed then to my boyish inexperience
softly splendid and alluring, murmured to me as they passed.
Extraordinarily life unveiled. The very hoardings clamoured
strangely at one's senses and curiosities. One bought pamphlets
and papers full of strange and daring ideas transcending one's
boldest; in the parks one heard men discussing the very existence
of God, denying the rights of property, debating a hundred things
that one dared not think about in Wimblehurst. And after the
ordinary overcast day, after dull mornings, came twilight, and
London lit up and became a thing of white and yellow and red
jewels of light and wonderful floods of golden illumination and
stupendous and unfathomable  shadows--and there were no longer
any mean or shabby people--but a great mysterious movement of
unaccountable beings....

Always I was coming on the queerest new aspects. Late one
Saturday night I found myself one of a great slow-moving crowd
between the blazing shops and the flaring barrows in the Harrow
Road; I got into conversation with two bold-eyed girls, bought
them boxes of chocolate, made the acquaintance of father and
mother and various younger brothers and sisters, sat in a
public-house hilariously with them all, standing and being stood
drinks, and left them in the small hours at the door of "home,"
never to see them again. And once I was accosted on the
outskirts of a Salvation Army meeting in one of the parks by a
silk-hatted young man of eager and serious discourse, who argued
against scepticism with me, invited me home to tea into a clean
and cheerful family of brothers and sisters and friends, and
there I spent the evening singing hymns to the harmonium (which
reminded me of half-forgotten Chatham), and wishing all the
sisters were not so obviously engaged....

Then on the remote hill of this boundless city-world I found
Ewart.

III

How well I remember the first morning, a bright Sunday morning in
early October, when I raided in upon Ewart! I found my old
schoolfellow in bed in a room over an oil-shop in a back street
at the foot of Highgate Hill. His landlady, a pleasant, dirty
young woman with soft-brown eyes, brought down his message for me
to come up; and up I went. The room presented itself as ample
and interesting in detail and shabby with a quite commendable
shabbiness. I had an impression of brown walls--they were
papered with brown paper-- of a long shelf along one side of the
room, with dusty plaster casts and a small cheap lay figure of a
horse, of a table and something of grey wax partially covered
with a cloth, and of scattered drawings. There was a gas stove
in one corner, and some enameled ware that had been used for
overnight cooking. The oilcloth on the floor was streaked with a
peculiar white dust. Ewart himself was not in the first instance
visible, but only a fourfold canvas screen at the end of the room
from which shouts proceeded of "Come on!" then his wiry black
hair, very much rumpled, and a staring red-brown eye and his
stump of a nose came round the edge of this at a height of about
three feet from the ground "It's old Ponderevo!" he said, "the
Early bird! And he's caught the worm! By Jove, but it's cold this
morning! Come round here and sit on the bed!"

I walked round, wrung his hand, and we surveyed one another.

He was lying on a small wooden fold-up bed, the scanty covering
of which was supplemented by an overcoat and an elderly but still
cheerful pair of check trousers, and he was wearing pajamas of a
virulent pink and green. His neck seemed longer and more stringy
than it had been even in our schooldays, and his upper lip had a
wiry black moustache. The rest of his ruddy, knobby countenance,
his erratic hair and his general hairy leanness had not even--to
my perceptions grown.

"By Jove!" he said, "you've got quite decent-looking, Ponderevo!
What do you think of me?"

"You're all right. What are you doing here?"

"Art, my son--sculpture! And incidentally--" He hesitated. "I
ply a trade. Will you hand me that pipe and those smoking
things? So! You can't make coffee, eh? Well, try your hand.
Cast down this screen--no--fold it up and so we'll go into the
other room. I'll keep in bed all the same. The fire's a gas
stove. Yes. Don't make it bang too loud as you light it--I
can't stand it this morning. You won't smoke ?... Well, it does
me good to see you again, Ponderevo. Tell me what you're doing,
and how you're getting on."  

He directed me in the service of his simple hospitality, and
presently I came back to his bed and sat down and smiled at him
there, smoking comfortably, with his hands under his head,
surveying me.

"How's Life's Morning, Ponderevo? By Jove, it must be nearly six
years since we met! They've got moustaches. We've fleshed
ourselves a bit, eh? And you?"

I felt a pipe was becoming after all, and that lit, I gave him a
favourable sketch of my career.

"Science! And you've worked like that! While I've been potting
round doing odd jobs for stone-masons and people, and trying to
get to sculpture. I've a sort of feeling that the chisel--I
began with painting, Ponderevo, and found I was colour-blind,
colour-blind enough to stop it. I've drawn about and thought
about--thought more particularly. I give myself three days a
week as an art student, and the rest of the time I've a sort of
trade that keeps me. And we're still in the beginning of things,
young men starting. Do you remember the old times at Goudhurst,
our doll's-house island, the Retreat of the Ten Thousand Young
Holmes and the rabbits, eh? It's surprising, if you think of it,
to find we are still young. And we used to talk of what we would
be, and we used to talk of love! I suppose you know all about
that now, Ponderevo?"

I finished and hesitated on some vague foolish lie, "No," I said,
a little ashamed of the truth. "Do you? I've been too busy."  

"I'm just beginning--just as we were then. Things happen."

He sucked at his pipe for a space and stared at the plaster cast
of a flayed hand that hung on the wall.

"The fact is, Ponderevo, I'm beginning to find life a most
extraordinary queer set-out; the things that pull one, the things
that don't. The wants--This business of sex. It's a net. No
end to it, no way out of it, no sense in it. There are times
when women take possession of me, when my mind is like a painted
ceiling at Hampton Court with the pride of the flesh sprawling
all over it. WHY?... And then again sometimes when I have to
encounter a woman, I am overwhelmed by a terror of tantalising
boredom--I fly, I hide, I do anything. You've got your
scientific explanations perhaps;  what's Nature and the universe
up to in that matter?"

"It's her way, I gather, of securing the continuity of the
species."  

"But it doesn't," said Ewart. "That's just it! No. I have
succumbed to--dissipation--down the hill there. Euston Road way.

And it was damned ugly and mean, and I hate having done it. And
the continuity of the species--Lord!... And why does Nature make
a man so infernally ready for drinks? There's no sense in that
anyhow."  He sat up in bed, to put this question with the greater
earnestness. "And why has she given me a most violent desire
towards sculpture and an equally violent desire to leave off work
directly I begin it, eh?... Let's have some more coffee. I put
it to you, these things puzzle me, Ponderevo. They dishearten
me. They keep me in bed."  

He had an air of having saved up these difficulties for me for
some time. He sat with his chin almost touching his knees,
sucking at his pipe.

"That's what I mean," he went on, "when I say life is getting on
to me as extraordinarily queer, I don't see my game, nor why I
was invited. And I don't make anything of the world outside
either. What do you make of it?"

"London," I began. "It's--so enormous!"

"Isn't it! And it's all up to nothing. You find chaps keeping
grocers' shops--why the DEVIL, Ponderevo, do they keep grocers'
shops? They all do it very carefully,  very steadily, very
meanly. You find people running about and doing the most
remarkable things being policemen, for example, and burglars.
They go about these businesses quite gravely and earnestly. I
somehow--can't go about mine. Is there any sense in it at
all--anywhere?"

"There must be sense in it," I said. "We're young."  

"We're young--yes. But one must inquire. The grocer's a grocer
because, I suppose, he sees he comes in there. Feels that on the
whole it amounts to a call.... But the bother is I don't see
where I come in at all. Do you?"

"Where you come in?"

"No, where you come in."  

"Not exactly, yet," I said. "I want to do some good in the
world--something--something effectual, before I die. I have a
sort of idea my scientific work-- I don't know."  

"Yes," he mused."  And I've got a sort of idea my sculpture,--but
now it is to come in and WHY,--I've no idea at all."  He hugged
his knees for a space. "That's what puzzles me, Ponderevo, no
end."  

He became animated. "If you will look in that cupboard," he
said, "you will find an old respectable looking roll on a plate
and a knife somewhere and a gallipot containing butter. You give
them me and I'll make my breakfast, and then if you don't mind
watching me paddle about at my simple toilet I'll get up. Then
we'll go for a walk and talk about this affair of life further.
And about Art and Literature and anything  else that crops up on
the way.... Yes, that's the gallipot. Cockroach got in it?
Chuck him out--damned interloper...."  

So in the first five minutes of our talk, as I seem to remember
it now, old Ewart struck the note that ran through all that
morning's intercourse....

To me it was a most memorable talk because it opened out quite
new horizons of thought. I'd been working rather close and out
of touch with Ewart's free gesticulating  way. He was
pessimistic that day and sceptical to the very root of things.
He made me feel clearly, what I had not felt at all before, the
general adventurousness of life, particularly of life at the
stage we had reached, and also the absence of definite objects,
of any concerted purpose in the lives that were going on all
round us. He made me feel, too, how ready I was to take up
commonplace assumptions. Just as I had always imagined that
somewhere in social arrangements there was certainly a
Head-Master who would intervene if one went too far, so I had
always had a sort of implicit belief that in our England there
were somewhere people who understood what we were all, as a
nation, about. That crumpled into his pit of doubt and vanished.

He brought out, sharply cut and certain, the immense effect of
purposelessness in London that I was already indistinctly
feeling. We found ourselves at last returning through Highgate
Cemetery and Waterlow Park--and Ewart was talking.

"Look at it there," he said, stopping and pointing to the great
vale of London spreading wide and far. "It's like a sea--and we
swim in it. And at last down we go, and then up we come--washed
up here."  He swung his arms to the long slopes about us, tombs
and headstones in long perspectives, in limitless rows.

"We're young, Ponderevo, but sooner or later our whitened
memories will wash up on one of these beaches, on some such beach
as this. George Ponderevo, F.R.S., Sidney Ewart, R.I.P. Look at
the rows of 'em!"

He paused. "Do you see that hand? The hand, I mean, pointing
upward, on the top of a blunted obelisk. Yes. Well, that's what
I do for a living--when I'm not thinking, or drinking, or
prowling, or making love, or pretending I'm trying to be a
sculptor without either the money or the morals for a model.
See? And I do those hearts afire and those pensive angel
guardians with the palm of peace. Damned well I do 'em and
damned cheap! I'm a sweated victim, Ponderevo..."  

That was the way of it, anyhow. I drank deep of talk that day;
we went into theology, into philosophy; I had my first glimpse of
socialism. I felt as though I had been silent in a silence since
I and he had parted. At the thought of socialism Ewart's moods
changed for a time to a sort of energy. "After all, all this
confounded  vagueness might be altered. If you could get men to
work together..."  

It was a good talk that rambled through all the universe.  I
thought I was giving my mind refreshment, but indeed it was
dissipation. All sorts of ideas, even now, carry me back as it
were to a fountain-head, to Waterlow Park and my resuscitated
Ewart. There stretches away south of us long garden slopes and
white gravestones and the wide expanse of London, and somewhere
in the picture is a red old wall, sun-warmed, and a great blaze
of Michaelmas daisies set off with late golden sunflowers and a
drift of mottled, blood-red, fallen leaves. It was with me that
day as though I had lifted my head suddenly out of dull and
immediate things and looked at life altogether.... But it played
the very devil with the copying up of my arrears of notes to
which I had vowed the latter half of that day.

After that reunion Ewart and I met much and talked much, and in
our subsequent encounters his monologue was interrupted and I
took my share. He had exercised me so greatly that I lay awake
at nights thinking him over, and discoursed and answered him in
my head as I went in the morning to the College. I am by nature
a doer and only by the way a critic; his philosophical assertion
of the incalculable vagueness of life which fitted his natural
indolence roused my more irritable and energetic  nature to
active protests. "It's all so pointless,"  I said, "because
people are slack and because it's in the ebb of an age. But
you're a socialist. Well, let's bring that about! And there's a
purpose. There you are!"

Ewart gave me all my first conceptions of socialism; in a little
while I was an enthusiastic socialist and he was a passive
resister to the practical exposition of the theories he had
taught me. "We must join some organisation,"  I said. "We ought
to do things.... We ought to go and speak at street corners.
People don't know."  

You must figure me a rather ill-dressed young man in a state of
great earnestness, standing up in that shabby studio of his and
saying these things, perhaps with some gesticulations, and Ewart
with a clay-smudged face, dressed perhaps in a flannel shirt and
trousers, with a pipe in his mouth, squatting philosophically at
a table, working at some chunk of clay that never got beyond
suggestion.

"I wonder why one doesn't want to," he said.

It was only very slowly I came to gauge Ewart's real position in
the scheme of things, to understand how deliberate and complete
was this detachment of his from the moral condemnation and
responsibilities that played so fine a part in his talk. His was
essentially the nature of an artistic appreciator; he could find
interest and beauty in endless aspects of things that I marked as
evil, or at least as not negotiable; and the impulse I had
towards self-deception, to sustained and consistent
self-devotion, disturbed and detached and pointless as it was at
that time, he had indeed a sort of admiration for but no
sympathy. Like many fantastic and ample talkers he was at bottom
secretive, and he gave me a series of little shocks of discovery
throughout our intercourse.

The first of these came in the realisation that he quite
seriously meant to do nothing in the world at all towards
reforming the evils he laid bare in so easy and dexterous a
manner. The next came in the sudden appearance of a person
called "Milly"--I've forgotten her surname--whom I found in his
room one evening, simply attired in a blue wrap--the rest of her
costume behind the screen--smoking cigarettes and sharing a
flagon of an amazingly cheap and self-assertive grocer's wine
Ewart affected, called "Canary Sack."  "Hullo!"  said Ewart, as I
came in. "This is Milly, you know. She's been being a
model--she IS a model really.... (keep calm, Ponderevo!) Have
some sack?"

Milly was a woman of thirty, perhaps, with a broad, rather pretty
face, a placid disposition, a bad accent and delightful blond
hair that waved off her head with an irrepressible variety of
charm; and whenever Ewart spoke she beamed at him. Ewart was
always sketching this hair of hers and embarking upon clay
statuettes of her that were never finished. She was, I know now,
a woman of the streets, whom Ewart had picked up in the most
casual manner, and who had fallen in love with him, but my
inexperience in those days was too great for me to place her
then, and Ewart offered no elucidations. She came to him, he
went to her, they took holidays together in the country when
certainly she sustained her fair share of their expenditure. I
suspect him now even of taking money from her. Odd old Ewart!
It was a relationship so alien to my orderly conceptions of
honour, to what I could imagine any friend of mine doing, that I
really hardly saw it with it there under my nose. But I see it
and I think I understand it now....

Before I fully grasped the discursive manner in which Ewart was
committed to his particular way in life, I did, I say, as the
broad constructive ideas of socialism took hold of me, try to get
him to work with me in some definite fashion as a socialist.

"We ought to join on to other socialists," I said.

"They've got something."  

"Let's go and look at some first."  

After some pains we discovered the office of the Fabian Society,
lurking in a cellar in Clement's Inn; and we went and interviewed
a rather discouraging secretary who stood astraddle in front of a
fire and questioned us severely and seemed to doubt the integrity
of our intentions profoundly. He advised us to attend the next
open meeting in Clifford's Inn and gave us the necessary data.
We both contrived to get to the affair, and heard a discursive
gritty paper on Trusts and one of the most inconclusive
discussions you can imagine. Three-quarters of the speakers
seemed under some jocular obsession which took the form of
pretending to be conceited. It was a sort of family joke, and as
strangers to the family we did not like it.... As we came out
through the narrow passage from Clifford's Inn to the Strand,
Ewart suddenly pitched upon a wizened, spectacled little man in a
vast felt hat and a large orange tie.

"How many members are there in this Fabian Society of yours?" he
asked.

The little man became at once defensive in his manner.

"About seven hundred," he said; "perhaps eight."  

"Like--like the ones here?"

The little man gave a nervous self-satisfied laugh. "I suppose
they're up to sample," he said.

The little man dropped out of existence and we emerged upon the
Strand. Ewart twisted his arm into a queerly eloquent gesture
that gathered up all the tall facades of the banks, the business
places, the projecting clock and towers of the Law Courts, the
advertisements, the luminous signs, into one social immensity,
into a capitalistic system gigantic and invincible.

"These socialists have no sense of proportion," he said. "What
can you expect of them?"

IV

Ewart, as the embodiment of talk, was certainly a leading factor
in my conspicuous failure to go on studying. Social theory in
its first crude form of Democratic Socialism gripped my
intelligence more and more powerfully. I argued in the
laboratory with the man who shared my bench until we quarreled
and did not speak and also I fell in love.

The ferment of sex had been creeping into my being like a slowly
advancing tide through all my Wimblehurst days, the stimulus of
London was like the rising of a wind out of the sea that brings
the waves in fast and high. Ewart had his share in that. More
and more acutely and unmistakably did my perception of beauty,
form and sound, my desire for adventure, my desire for
intercourse, converge on this central and commanding business of
the individual life. I had to get me a mate.

I began to fall in love faintly with girls I passed in the
street, with women who sat before me in trains, with girl
fellow-students, with ladies in passing carriages, with
loiterers at the corners, with neat-handed waitresses in shops
and tea-rooms, with pictures even of girls and women. On my rare
visits to the theatre I always became exalted, and found the
actresses and even the spectators about me mysterious,
attractive, creatures of deep interest and desire. I had a
stronger and stronger sense that among these glancing, passing
multitudes there was somewhere one who was for me. And in spite
of every antagonistic force in the world, there was something in
my very marrow that insisted: "Stop! Look at this one! Think of
her! Won't she do ? This signifies--this before all things
signifies! Stop! Why are you hurrying by? This may be the
predestined person--before all others."  

It is odd that I can't remember when first I saw Marion, who
became my wife--whom I was to make wretched, who was to make me
wretched, who was to pluck that fine generalised possibility of
love out of my early manhood and make it a personal conflict. I
became  aware of her as one of a number of interesting attractive
figures that moved about in my world, that glanced back at my
eyes, that flitted by with a kind of averted watchfulness. I
would meet her coming through the Art Museum, which was my short
cut to the Brompton  Road, or see her sitting, reading as I
thought, in one of the bays of the Education Library. But
really, as I found out afterwards, she never read. She used to
come there to eat a bun in quiet. She was a very
gracefully-moving figure of a girl then, very plainly dressed,
with dark brown hair I remember, in a knot low on her neck behind
that confessed the pretty roundness of her head and harmonised
with the admirable lines of ears and cheek, the grave serenity of
mouth and brow.

She stood out among the other girls very distinctly because they
dressed more than she did, struck emphatic notes of colour,
startled one by novelties in hats and bows and things. I've
always hated the rustle, the disconcerting colour boundaries, the
smart unnatural angles of women's clothes. Her plain black dress
gave her a starkness....

I do remember, though, how one afternoon I discovered  the
peculiar appeal of her form for me. I had been restless with my
work and had finally slipped out of the Laboratory and come over
to the Art Museum to lounge among the pictures. I came upon her
in an odd corner of the Sheepshanks gallery, intently copying
something from a picture that hung high. I had just been in the
gallery of casts from the antique, my mind was all alive with my
newly awakened sense of line, and there she stood with face
upturned, her body drooping forward from the hips just a
little--memorably graceful--feminine.

After that I know I sought to see her, felt a distinctive
emotion at her presence, began to imagine things about her. I no
longer thought of generalised womanhood or of this casual person
or that. I thought of her.

An accident brought us together. I found myself one Monday
morning in an omnibus staggering westward from Victoria--I was
returning from a Sunday I'd spent at Wimblehurst in response to a
unique freak of hospitality on the part of Mr. Mantell. She was
the sole other inside passenger. And when the time came to pay
her fare, she became an extremely scared, disconcerted and
fumbling young woman; she had left her purse at home.

Luckily I had some money.

She looked at me with startled, troubled brown eyes; she
permitted my proffered payment to the conductor with a certain
ungraciousness that seemed a part of her shyness, and then as she
rose to go, she thanked me with an obvious affectation of ease.

"Thank you so much," she said in a pleasant soft voice; and then
less gracefully, "Awfully kind of you, you know."  

I fancy I made polite noises. But just then I wasn't disposed to
be critical. I was full of the sense of her presence; her arm
was stretched out over me as she moved past me, the gracious
slenderness of her body was near me. The words we used didn't
seem very greatly to matter. I had vague ideas of getting out
with her--and I didn't.

That encounter, I have no doubt, exercised me enormously.  I lay
awake at night rehearsing it, and wondering  about the next phase
of our relationship. That took the form of the return of my
twopence. I was in the Science Library, digging something out of
the Encyclopedia  Britannica, when she appeared beside me and
placed on the open page an evidently premeditated thin envelope,
bulgingly confessing the coins within.

"It was so very kind of you," she said, "the other day. I don't
know what I should have done, Mr.--"

I supplied my name. "I knew," I said, "you were a student here."

"Not exactly a student. I--"

"Well, anyhow, I knew you were here frequently. And I'm a
student myself at the Consolidated Technical Schools."  

I plunged into autobiography and questionings, and so entangled
her in a conversation that got a quality of intimacy through the
fact that, out of deference to our fellow-readers, we were
obliged to speak in undertones. And I have no doubt that in
substance it was singularly banal. Indeed I have an impression
that all our early conversations were incredibly banal. We met
several times in a manner half-accidental, half furtive and
wholly awkward. Mentally I didn't take hold of her. I never did
take hold of her mentally. Her talk, I now know all too clearly,
was shallow, pretentious, evasive. Only--even to this day--I
don't remember it as in any way vulgar. She was, I could see
quite clearly, anxious to overstate or conceal her real social
status, a little desirous to be taken for a student in the art
school and a little ashamed that she wasn't. She came to the
museum to "copy things," and this, I gathered, had something to
do with some way of partially earning her living that I wasn't to
inquire into. I told her things about myself, vain things that I
felt might appeal to her, but that I learnt long afterwards made
her think me "conceited."  We talked of books, but there she was
very much on her guard and secretive, and rather more freely of
pictures. She "liked" pictures. I think from the outset I
appreciated and did not for a moment resent that hers was a
commonplace mind, that she was the unconscious custodian of
something that had gripped my most intimate instinct, that she
embodied the hope of a possibility, was the careless proprietor
of a physical quality that had turned my head like strong wine.
I felt I had to stick to our acquaintance, flat as it was.
Presently we should get through these irrelevant exterior things,
and come to the reality of love beneath.

I saw her in dreams released, as it were, from herself,
beautiful, worshipful, glowing. And sometimes when we were
together, we would come on silences through sheer lack of matter,
and then my eyes would feast on her, and the silence seemed like
the drawing back of a curtain--her superficial self. Odd, I
confess. Odd, particularly, the enormous hold of certain things
about her upon me, a certain slight rounded duskiness of skin, a
certain perfection of modelling in her lips, her brow, a certain
fine flow about the shoulders. She wasn't indeed beautiful to
many people--these things are beyond explaining. She had
manifest defects of form and feature, and they didn't matter at
all. Her complexion was bad, but I don't think it would have
mattered if it had been positively unwholesome. I had
extraordinarily limited, extraordinarily painful, desires. I
longed intolerably to kiss her lips.

V

The affair was immensely serious and commanding to me. I don't
remember that in these earlier phases I had any thought of
turning back at all. It was clear to me that she regarded me
with an eye entirely more critical than I had for her, that she
didn't like my scholarly untidiness, my want of even the most
commonplace  style. "Why do you wear collars like that?" she
said, and sent me in pursuit of gentlemanly neckwear. I remember
when she invited me a little abruptly one day to come to tea at
her home on the following Sunday and meet her father and mother
and aunt, that I immediately doubted whether my hitherto
unsuspected best clothes would create the impression she desired
me to make on her belongings. I put off the encounter until the
Sunday after, to get myself in order. I had a morning coat made
and I bought a silk hat, and had my reward in the first glance of
admiration she ever gave me. I wonder how many of my sex are as
preposterous. I was, you see, abandoning all my beliefs, my
conventions unasked. I was forgetting myself immensely. And
there was a conscious shame in it all. Never a word--did I
breathe to Ewart--to any living soul of what was going on.

Her father and mother and aunt struck me as the dismalest of
people, and her home in Walham Green was chiefly notable for its
black and amber tapestry carpets and curtains and table-cloths,
and the age and irrelevance of its books, mostly books with faded
gilt on the covers. The windows were fortified against the
intrusive eye by cheap lace curtains and an "art pot" upon an
unstable octagonal table. Several framed Art School drawings of
Marion's, bearing official South Kensington marks of approval,
adorned the room, and there was a black and gilt piano with a
hymn-book on the top of it. There were draped mirrors over all
the mantels, and above the sideboard in the dining-room in which
we sat at tea was a portrait of her father, villainously truthful
after the manner of such works. I couldn't see a trace of the
beauty I found in her in either parent, yet she somehow contrived
to be like them both.

These people pretended in a way that reminded me of the Three
Great Women in my mother's room, but they had not nearly so much
social knowledge and did not do it nearly so well. Also, I
remarked, they did it with an eye on Marion. They had wanted to
thank me, they said, for the kindness to their daughter in the
matter of the 'bus fare, and so accounted for anything unusual in
their invitation. They posed as simple gentlefolk,  a little
hostile to the rush and gadding-about of London, preferring a
secluded and unpretentious quiet.

When Marion got out the white table-cloth from the
sideboard-drawer for tea, a card bearing the word "APARTMENTS"
fell to the floor. I picked it up and gave it to her before I
realised from her quickened colour that I should not have seen
it; that probably had been removed from the window in honour of
my coming.

Her father spoke once in a large remote way of he claims of
business engagements, and it was only long afterwards I realised
that he was a supernumerary clerk in the Walham Green Gas Works
and otherwise a useful man at home. He was a large, loose,
fattish man with unintelligent brown eyes magnified by
spectacles; he wore an ill-fitting frock-coat and a paper collar,
and he showed me, as his great treasure and interest, a large
Bible which he had grangerised with photographs of pictures.
Also he cultivated the little garden-yard behind the house, and
he had a small greenhouse with tomatoes. "I wish I 'ad 'eat," he
said. "One can do such a lot with 'eat. But I suppose you can't
'ave everything you want in this world."  

Both he and Marion's mother treated her with a deference that
struck me as the most natural thing in the world. Her own manner
changed, became more authoritative and watchful, her shyness
disappeared. She had taken a line of her own I gathered, draped
the mirror, got the second-hand piano, and broken her parents in.

Her mother must once have been a pretty woman; she had regular
features and Marion's hair without its lustre, but she was thin
and careworn. The aunt, Miss Ramboat, was a large, abnormally
shy person very like her brother, and I don't recall anything she
said on this occasion.

To begin with there was a good deal of tension, Marion was
frightfully nervous and every one was under the necessity of
behaving in a mysteriously unreal fashion until I plunged, became
talkative and made a certain ease and interest. I told them of
the schools, of my lodgings, of Wimblehurst and my apprenticeship
days. "There's a lot of this Science about nowadays,"  Mr.
Ramboat reflected; "but I sometimes wonder a bit what good it
is?"

I was young enough to be led into what he called "a bit of a
discussion," which Marion truncated before our voices became
unduly raised. "I dare say, "she said, "there's much to be said
on both sides."  

I remember Marion's mother asked me what church I attended, and
that I replied evasively. After tea there was music and we sang
hymns. I doubted if I had a voice when this was proposed, but
that was held to be a trivial objection, and I found sitting
close beside the sweep of hair from Marion's brow had many
compensations. I discovered her mother sitting in the horsehair
armchair and regarding us sentimentally. I went for a walk with
Marion towards Putney Bridge, and then there was more singing and
a supper of cold bacon and pie, after which Mr. Ramboat and I
smoked. During that walk, I remember, she told me the import of
her sketchings and copyings in the museum. A cousin of a friend
of hers whom she spoke of as Smithie, had developed an original
business in a sort of tea-gown garment which she called a Persian
Robe, a plain sort of wrap with a gaily embroidered yoke, and
Marion went there and worked in the busy times. In the times
that weren't busy she designed novelties in yokes by an assiduous
use of eyes and note-book in the museum, and went home and traced
out the captured forms on the foundation material. "I don't get
much," said Marion, "but it's interesting, and in the busy times
we work all day. Of course the workgirls are dreadfully common,
but we don't say much to them. And Smithie talks enough for
ten."  

I quite understood the workgirls were dreadfully common.

I don't remember that the Walham Green menage and the quality
of these people, nor the light they threw on Marion, detracted in
the slightest degree at that time from the intent resolve that
held me to make her mine. I didn't like them. But I took them
as part of the affair. Indeed, on the whole, I think they threw
her up by an effect of contrast; she was so obviously controlling
them, so consciously superior to them.

More and more of my time did I give to this passion that
possessed me. I began to think chiefly of ways of pleasing
Marion, of acts of devotion, of treats, of sumptuous presents for
her, of appeals she would understand.  If at times she was
manifestly unintelligent, in her ignorance became indisputable, I
told myself her simple instincts were worth all the education and
intelligence in the world. And to this day I think I wasn't
really wrong about her. There was something extraordinarily
fine about her, something simple and high, that flickered in and
out of her ignorance and commonness  and limitations like the
tongue from the mouth of a snake....

One night I was privileged to meet her and bring her home from an
entertainment at the Birkbeck Institute. We came back on the
underground railway and we travelled first-class--that being the
highest class available. We were alone in the carriage, and for
the first time I ventured to put my arm about her.

"You mustn't," she said feebly.

"I love you," I whispered suddenly with my heart beating wildly,
drew her to me, drew all her beauty to me and kissed her cool and
unresisting lips.

"Love me?" she said, struggling away from me, "Don't!" and then,
as the train ran into a station, "You must tell no one.... I
don't know.... You shouldn't have done that...."  

Then two other people got in with us and terminated my wooing for
a time.

When we found ourselves alone together, walking towards
Battersea, she had decided to be offended. I parted from her
unforgiven and terribly distressed.

When we met again, she told me I must never say "that" again.

I had dreamt that to kiss her lips was ultimate satisfaction.
But it was indeed only the beginning of desires. I told her my
one ambition was to marry her.

"But," she said, "you're not in a position-- What's the good of
talking like that?"

I stared at her. "I mean to," I said.

"You can't," she answered. "It will be years"

"But I love you," I insisted.

I stood not a yard from the sweet lips I had kissed; I stood
within arm's length of the inanimate beauty I desired to quicken,
and I saw opening between us a gulf of years, toil, waiting,
disappointments and an immense uncertainty.

"I love you," I said. "Don't you love me?"

She looked me in the face with grave irresponsive eyes.

"I don't know," she said. "I LIKE you, of course.... One has to
be sensibl..."  

I can remember now my sense of frustration by her unresilient
reply. I should have perceived then that for her my ardour had
no quickening fire. But how was I to know? I had let myself
come to want her, my imagination endowed her with infinite
possibilities. I wanted her and wanted her, stupidly and
instinctively....

"But," I said "Love--!"

"One has to be sensible," she replied. "I like going about with
you. Can't we keep as we are?'"

VI

Well, you begin to understand my breakdown now, I have been
copious enough with these apologia. My work got more and more
spiritless, my behaviour degenerated,  my punctuality declined; I
was more and more outclassed in the steady grind by my
fellow-students. Such supplies of moral energy as I still had at
command shaped now in the direction of serving Marion rather than
science.

I fell away dreadfully, more and more I shirked and skulked; the
humped men from the north, the pale men with thin, clenched
minds, the intent, hard-breathing  students I found against me,
fell at last from keen rivalry to moral contempt. Even a girl
got above me upon one of the lists. Then indeed I made it a
point of honour to show by my public disregard of every rule that
I really did not even pretend to try.

So one day I found myself sitting in a mood of considerable
astonishment in Kensington Gardens, reacting  on a recent heated
interview with the school Registrar in which I had displayed more
spirit than sense. I was astonished chiefly at my stupendous
falling  away from all the militant ideals of unflinching study I
had brought up from Wimblehurst. I had displayed myself, as the
Registrar put it, "an unmitigated rotter."  My failure to get
marks in the written examination had only been equalled by the
insufficiency of my practical work.

"I ask you," the Registrar had said, "what will become of you
when your scholarship runs out?"

It certainly was an interesting question. What was going to
become of me?

It was clear there would be nothing for me in the schools as I
had once dared to hope; there seemed, indeed, scarcely anything
in the world except an illpaid  assistantship in some provincial
organized Science School or grammar school. I knew that for that
sort of work, without a degree or any qualification, one earned
hardly a bare living and had little leisure to struggle up to
anything better. If only I had even as little as fifty pounds I
might hold out in London and take my B.Sc. degree, and quadruple
my chances! My bitterness against my uncle returned at the
thought. After all, he had some of my money still, or ought to
have. Why shouldn't I act within my rights, threaten to 'take
proceedings'? I meditated for a space on the idea, and then
returned to the Science Library and wrote him a very considerable
and occasionally pungent letter.

That letter to my uncle was the nadir of my failure. Its
remarkable consequences, which ended my student days altogether,
I will tell in the next chapter.

I say "my failure."  Yet there are times when I can even doubt
whether that period was a failure at all, when I become
defensively critical of those exacting courses I did not follow,
the encyclopaedic process of scientific exhaustion from which I
was distracted. My mind was not inactive, even if it fed on
forbidden food. I did not learn what my professors and
demonstrators had resolved I should learn, but I learnt many
things. My mind learnt to swing wide and to swing by itself.

After all, those other fellows who took high places in the
College examinations and were the professor's model boys haven't
done so amazingly. Some are professors themselves, some
technical experts; not one can show things done such as I,
following my own interest, have achieved. For I have built boats
that smack across the water like whiplashes; no one ever dreamt
of such boats until I built them; and I have surprised three
secrets that are more than technical discoveries, in the
unexpected hiding-places of Nature. I have come nearer flying
than any man has done. Could I have done as much if I had had a
turn for obeying those rather mediocre professors at the college
who proposed to train my mind? If I had been trained in
research--that ridiculous contradiction in terms--should I have
done more than produce additions to the existing store of little
papers with blunted conclusions, of which there are already too
many? I see no sense in mock modesty upon this matter. Even by
the standards  of worldly success I am, by the side of my
fellow-students, no failure. I had my F.R.S. by the time I was
thirty-seven, and if I am not very wealthy poverty is as far from
me as the Spanish Inquisition. Suppose I had stamped down on the
head of my wandering curiosity, locked my imagination in a box
just when it wanted to grow out to things, worked by so-and-so's
excellent method and so-and-so's indications, where should I be
now?

I may be all wrong in this. It may be I should be a far more
efficient man than I am if I had cut off all those divergent
expenditures of energy, plugged up my curiosity about society
with more currently acceptable rubbish or other, abandoned
Ewart, evaded Marion instead of pursuing her, concentrated. But
I don't believe it!

However, I certainly believed it completely and was filled with
remorse on that afternoon when I sat dejectedly in Kensington
Gardens and reviewed, in the light of the Registrar's pertinent
questions my first two years in London.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

THE DAWN COMES, AND MY UNCLE APPEARS IN A NEW SILK HAT

I

Throughout my student days I had not seen my uncle. I refrained
from going to him in spite of an occasional regret that in this
way I estranged myself from my aunt Susan, and I maintained a
sulky attitude of mind towards him. And I don't think that once
in all that time I gave a thought to that mystic word of his that
was to alter all the world for us. Yet I had not altogether
forgotten it. It was with a touch of memory, dim transient
perplexity if no more--why did this thing seem in some way
personal?--that I read a new inscription upon the hoardings:

            THE SECRET OF VIGOUR,
                TONO-BUNGAY.

That was all. It was simple and yet in some way arresting. I
found myself repeating the word after I had passed; it roused
one's attention like the sound of distant guns. "Tono"--what's
that? and deep, rich, unhurrying;--"BUN--gay!"

Then came my uncle's amazing telegram, his answer to my hostile
note: "Come to me at once you are wanted three hundred a year
certain tono-bungay."

"By Jove!" I cried, "of course!

"It's something--. A patent-medicine! I wonder what he wants
with me."  

In his Napoleonic way my uncle had omitted to give an address.
His telegram had been handed in at Farringdon Road, and after
complex meditations I replied to Ponderevo, Farringdon Road,
trusting to the rarity of our surname to reach him.

"Where are you?" I asked.

His reply came promptly:

"192A, Raggett Street, E.C."  

The next day I took an unsanctioned holiday after the morning's
lecture. I discovered my uncle in a wonderfully new silk
hat--oh, a splendid hat! with a rolling  brim that went beyond
the common fashion. It was decidedly too big for him--that was
its only fault. It was stuck on the back of his head, and he was
in a white waistcoat and shirt sleeves. He welcomed me with a
forgetfulness of my bitter satire and my hostile abstinence that
was almost divine. His glasses fell off at the sight of me. His
round inexpressive eyes shone brightly. He held out his plump
short hand.

"Here we are, George! What did I tell you? Needn't whisper it
now, my boy. Shout it--LOUD! spread it about! Tell every one!
Tono--TONO--, TONO-BUNGAY!"

Raggett Street, you must understand, was a thoroughfare over
which some one had distributed large quantities of cabbage
stumps and leaves. It opened out of the upper end of Farringdon
Street, and 192A was a shop with the plate-glass front coloured
chocolate, on which several of the same bills I had read upon the
hoardings had been stuck. The floor was covered by street mud
that had been brought in on dirty boots, and three energetic
young men of the hooligan type, in neck-wraps and caps, were
packing wooden cases with papered-up bottles, amidst much straw
and confusion. The counter was littered with these same swathed
bottles,  of a pattern then novel but now amazingly familiar  in
the world, the blue paper with the coruscating figure of a
genially nude giant, and the printed directions of how under
practically all circumstances to take Tono-Bungay. Beyond the
counter on one side opened a staircase down which I seem to
remember a girl descending  with a further consignment of
bottles, and the rest of the background was a high partition,
also chocolate, with "Temporary Laboratory" inscribed upon it in
white letters, and over a door that pierced it, "Office."  Here
I rapped, inaudible amid much hammering, and then entered
unanswered to find my uncle, dressed as I have described, one
hand gripping a sheath of letters, and the other scratching his
head as he dictated to one of three toiling typewriter girls.
Behind him was a further partition and a door inscribed
"ABSOLUTELY PRIVATE--NO ADMISSION," thereon. This partition  was
of wood painted the universal chocolate, up to about eight feet
from the ground, and then of glass. Through the glass I saw dimly
a crowded suggestion of crucibles and glass retorts, and--by
Jove!--yes!--the dear old Wimblehurst air-pump still! It gave me
quite a little thrill--that air-pump! And beside it was the
electrical machine--but something--some serious trouble--had
happened to that. All these were evidently placed on a shelf
just at the level to show.

"Come right into the sanctum," said my uncle, after he had
finished something about "esteemed consideration,"  and whisked
me through the door into a room that quite amazingly failed to
verify the promise of that apparatus. It was papered with dingy
wall-paper that had peeled in places; it contained a fireplace,
an easy-chair with a cushion, a table on which stood two or three
big bottles, a number of cigar-boxes on the mantel, whisky
Tantalus and a row of soda syphons. He shut the door after me
carefully.

"Well, here we are!" he said. "Going strong! Have a whisky,
George? No!--Wise man! Neither will I! You see me at it! At
it--hard!"

"Hard at what?"

"Read it," and he thrust into my hand a label--that label that
has now become one of the most familiar objects of the chemist's
shop, the greenish-blue rather old-fashioned bordering, the
legend, the name in good black type, very clear, and the strong
man all set about with lightning flashes above the double column
of skilful lies in red--the label of Tono-Bungay. "It's
afloat,"  he said, as I stood puzzling at this. "It's afloat.
I'm afloat!"  And suddenly he burst out singing in that throaty
tenor of his--

  "I'm afloat, I'm afloat on the fierce flowing tide,
  The ocean's my home and my bark is my bride!

"Ripping song that is, George. Not so much a bark as a solution,
but still--it does! Here we are at it! By-the-by! Half a mo'!
I've thought of a thing."  He whisked out, leaving me to examine
this nuclear spot at leisure while his voice became dictatorial
without. The den struck me as in its large grey dirty way quite
unprecedented and extraordinary. The bottles were all labelled
simply A, B, C, and so forth, and that dear old apparatus above,
seen from this side, was even more patiently "on the shelf" than
when it had been used to impress Wimblehurst. I saw nothing for
it but to sit down in the chair and await my uncle's
explanations. I remarked a frock-coat with satin lapels behind
the door; there was a dignified umbrella in the corner and a
clothes-brush and a hat-brush stood on a side-table. My uncle
returned in five minutes looking at his watch--a gold watch--
"Gettin' lunch-time, George,"  he said. "You'd better come and
have lunch with me!"

"How's Aunt Susan?" I asked.

"Exuberant. Never saw her so larky. This has bucked her up
something wonderful--all this."  

"All what?"

"Tono-Bungay."  

"What is Tono-Bungay?" I asked.

My uncle hesitated. "Tell you after lunch, George," he said.
"Come along!" and having locked up the sanctum after himself, led
the way along a narrow dirty pavement, lined with barrows and
swept at times by avalanche-like porters bearing burthens to
vans, to Farringdon Street. He hailed a passing cab superbly,
and the cabman was infinitely respectful. "Schafer's," he said,
and off we went side by side--and with me more and more amazed at
all these things--to Schafer's Hotel, the second of the two big
places with huge lace curtain-covered windows, near the corner of
Blackfriars Bridge.

I will confess I felt a magic charm in our relative proportions
as the two colossal, pale-blue-and-red liveried porters of
Schafers' held open the inner doors for us with a respectful
salutation that in some manner they seemed to confine wholly to
my uncle. Instead of being about four inches taller, I felt at
least the same size as he, and very much slenderer. Still more
respectful--waiters relieved him of the new hat and the dignified
umbrella, and took his orders for our lunch. He gave them with a
fine assurance.

He nodded to several of the waiters.

"They know me, George, already," he said. "Point me out. Live
place! Eye for coming men!"

The detailed business of the lunch engaged our attention for a
while, and then I leant across my plate. "And NOW?" said I.

"It's the secret of vigour. Didn't you read that label?"

"Yes, but--"

"It's selling like hot cakes."  

"And what is it?" I pressed.

"Well," said my uncle, and then leant forward and spoke softly
under cover of his hand, "It's nothing more or less than..."

(But here an unfortunate scruple intervenes. After all,
Tono-Bungay is still a marketable commodity and in the hands of
purchasers, who bought it from--among other vendors--me. No! I
am afraid I cannot give it away--)

"You see," said my uncle in a slow confidential whisper, with
eyes very wide and a creased forehead, "it's nice because of the"
(here he mentioned a flavouring matter and an aromatic spirit),
"it's stimulating because of" (here he mentioned two very vivid
tonics, one with a marked action on the kidney.) "And the" (here
he mentioned two other ingredients) "makes it pretty
intoxicating. Cocks their tails. Then there's" (but I touch on
the essential secret.) "And there you are. I got it out of an
old book of recipes--all except the" (here he mentioned the more
virulent substance, the one that assails the kidneys), "which is
my idea! Modern touch! There you are!"

He reverted to the direction of our lunch.

Presently he was leading the way to the lounge--sumptuous piece
in red morocco and yellow glazed crockery, with incredible vistas
of settees and sofas and things, and there I found myself grouped
with him in two excessively upholstered chairs with an
earthenware Moorish table between us bearing coffee and
Benedictine,  and I was tasting the delights of a tenpenny cigar.
My uncle smoked a similar cigar in an habituated manner, and he
looked energetic and knowing and luxurious and most unexpectedly
a little bounder, round the end of it. It was just a trivial
flaw upon our swagger, perhaps that we both were clear our cigars
had to be "mild."  He got obliquely across the spaces of his
great armchair so as to incline confidentially to my ear, he
curled up his little legs, and I, in my longer way, adopted a
corresponding receptive obliquity. I felt that we should strike
an unbiased observer as a couple of very deep and wily and
developing and repulsive persons.

"I want to let you into this"--puff--"George," said my uncle
round the end of his cigar. "For many reasons."  

His voice grew lower and more cunning. He made explanations that
to my inexperience did not completely explain. I retain an
impression of a long credit and a share with a firm of wholesale
chemists, of a credit and a prospective share with some pirate
printers, of a third share for a leading magazine and newspaper
proprietor.

"I played 'em off one against the other," said my uncle. I took
his point in an instant. He had gone to each of them in turn and
said the others had come in.

"I put up four hundred pounds," said my uncle, "myself and my
all. And you know--"

He assumed a brisk confidence. "I hadn't five hundred pence. At
least--"

For a moment he really was just a little embarrassed. "I DID" he
said, "produce capital. You see, there was that trust affair of
yours--I ought, I suppose--in strict legality--to have put that
straight first. Zzzz....

"It was a bold thing to do," said my uncle, shifting the venue
from the region of honour to the region of courage. And then
with a characteristic outburst of piety, "Thank God it's all come
right!

"And now, I suppose, you ask where do YOU come in? Well, fact
is I've always believed in you, George. You've got--it's a sort
of dismal grit. Bark your shins, rouse you, and you'll go!
You'd rush any position you had a mind to rush. I know a bit
about character, George--trust me. You've got--"  He clenched
his hands and thrust them out suddenly, and at the same time
said, with explosive violence, "Wooosh! Yes. You have! The way
you put away that Latin at Wimblehurst;  I've never forgotten it.

Wo-oo-oo-osh! Your science and all that! Wo-oo-oo-osh! I know
my limitations. There's things I can do, and" (he spoke in a
whisper, as though this was the first hint of his life's secret)
"there's things I can't. Well, I can create this business, but I
can't make it go. I'm too voluminous--I'm a boiler-over, not a
simmering stick-at-it. You keep on HOTTING UP AND HOTTING UP.
Papin's digester. That's you, steady and long and piling
up,--then, wo-oo-oo-oo-osh. Come in and stiffen these niggers.
Teach them that wo-oo-oo-oo-osh. There you are! That's what I'm
after. You! Nobody else believes you're more than a boy. Come
right in with me and be a man. Eh, George? Think of the fun of
it--a thing on the go--a Real Live Thing! Wooshing it up!
Making it buzz and spin! Whoo-oo-oo." --He made alluring
expanding circles in the air with his hand. "Eh?"

His proposal, sinking to confidential undertones again, took more
definite shape. I was to give all my time and energy to
developing and organising. "You shan't write a single
advertisement, or give a single assurance" he declared. "I can
do all that."  And the telegram vas no flourish; I was to have
three hundred a year. Three hundred a year. ("That's nothing,"
said my uncle, "the thing to freeze on to, when the time comes,
is your tenth of the vendor's share.")

Three hundred a year certain, anyhow! It was an enormous income
to me. For a moment I was altogether staggered. Could there be
that much money in the whole concern?  I looked about me at the
sumptuous furniture of Schafer's Hotel. No doubt there were many
such incomes.

My head was spinning with unwonted Benedictine and Burgundy.

"Let me go back and look at the game again," I said. "Let me see
upstairs and round about."  

I did.

"What do you think of it all?" my uncle asked at last.

"Well, for one thing," I said, "why don't you have those girls
working in a decently ventilated room? Apart from any other
consideration, they'd work twice as briskly. And they ought to
cover the corks before labelling round the bottle"

"Why?" said my uncle.

"Because--they sometimes make a mucker of the cork job, and then
the label's wasted."  

"Come and change it, George," said my uncle, with sudden fervour
"Come here and make a machine of it. You can. Make it all
slick, and then make it woosh. I know you can. Oh! I know you
can."  

II

I seem to remember very quick changes of mind after that lunch.
The muzzy exaltation of the unaccustomed stimulants gave way very
rapidly to a model of pellucid and impartial clairvoyance which
is one of my habitual mental states. It is intermittent; it
leaves me for weeks together, I know, but back it comes at last
like justice on circuit, and calls up all my impression, all my
illusions, all my willful and passionate proceedings. We came
downstairs again into that inner room which pretended to be a
scientific laboratory through its high glass lights, and indeed
was a lurking place. My uncle pressed a cigarette on me, and I
took it and stood before the empty fireplace while he propped his
umbrella in the corner, deposited the new silk hat that was a
little too big for him on the table, blew copiously and produced
a second cigar.

It came into my head that he had shrunken very much in size since
the Wimblehurst days, that the cannon ball he had swallowed was
rather more evident and shameless than it had been, his skin less
fresh and the nose between his glasses, which still didn't quite
fit, much redder. And just then he seemed much laxer in his
muscles and not quite as alertly quick in his movements.  But he
evidently wasn't aware of the degenerative nature of his changes
as he sat there, looking suddenly quite little under my eyes.

"Well, George!" he said, quite happily unconscious of my silent
criticism, "what do you think of it all?"

"Well," I said, "in the first place--it's a damned swindle!"

"Tut! tut!" said my uncle. "It's as straight as-- It's fair
trading!"

"So much the worse for trading," I said.

"It's the sort of thing everybody does. After all, there's no
harm in the stuff--and it may do good. It might do a lot of
good--giving people confidence, f'rinstance, against an epidemic.

See? Why not? don't see where your swindle comes in."  

"H'm," I said. "It's a thing you either see or don't see."  

"I'd like to know what sort of trading isn't a swindle in its
way. Everybody who does a large advertised trade is selling
something common on the strength of saying it's uncommon. Look
at Chickson--they made him a baronet. Look at Lord Radmore, who
did it on lying about the alkali in soap! Rippin' ads those were
of his too!"

"You don't mean to say you think doing this stuff up in bottles
and swearing it's the quintessence of strength and making poor
devils buy it at that, is straight?"

"Why not, George? How do we know it mayn't be the quintessence
to them so far as they're concerned?"

"Oh!" I said, and shrugged my shoulders.

"There's Faith. You put Faith in 'em.... I grant our labels are
a bit emphatic. Christian Science, really. No good setting
people against the medicine. Tell me a solitary trade nowadays
that hasn't to be--emphatic. It's the modern way! Everybody
understands it--everybody allows for it."  

"But the world would be no worse and rather better, if all this
stuff of yours was run down a conduit into the Thames."  

"Don't see that, George, at all. 'Mong other things, all our
people would be out of work. Unemployed! I grant you
Tono-Bungay MAY be--not QUITE so good a find for the world as
Peruvian bark, but the point is, George--it MAKES TRADE! And the
world lives on trade. Commerce! A romantic exchange of
commodities and property. Romance. 'Magination. See? You must
look at these things in a broad light. Look at the wood--and
forget the trees! And hang it, George! we got to do these
things! There's no way unless you do. What do YOU mean to
do--anyhow?"

"There's ways of living," I said, "Without either fraud or
lying."  

"You're a bit stiff, George. There's no fraud in this affair,
I'll bet my hat. But what do you propose to do? Go as chemist
to some one who IS running a business, and draw a salary without
a share like I offer you. Much sense in that! It comes out of
the swindle as you call it--just the same."  

"Some businesses are straight and quiet, anyhow; supply a sound
article that is really needed, don't shout advertisements."  

"No, George. There you're behind the times. The last of that
sort was sold up 'bout five years ago."  

"Well, there's scientific research."  

"And who pays for that? Who put up that big City and Guilds
place at South Kensington? Enterprising  business men! They
fancy they'll have a bit of science going on, they want a handy
Expert ever and again, and there you are! And what do you get
for research when you've done it? Just a bare living and no
outlook. They just keep you to make discoveries, and if they
fancy they'll use 'em they do."  

"One can teach."  

"How much a year, George? How much a year? I suppose you must
respect Carlyle! Well, you take Carlyle's test--solvency.
(Lord! what a book that French Revolution of his is!) See what
the world pays teachers and discoverers and what it pays business
men! That shows the ones it really wants. There's a justice in
these big things, George, over and above the apparent injustice.
I tell you it wants trade. It's Trade that makes the world go
round! Argosies! Venice! Empire!"

My uncle suddenly rose to his feet.

"You think it over, George. You think it over! And come up on
Sunday to the new place--we got rooms in Gower Street now--and
see your aunt. She's often asked for you, George often and
often, and thrown it up at me about that bit of property--though
I've always said and always will, that twenty-five shillings in
the pound is what I'll pay you and interest up to the nail. And
think it over. It isn't me I ask you to help. It's yourself.
It's your aunt Susan. It's the whole concern. It's the commerce
of your country. And we want you badly. I tell you straight, I
know my limitations. You could take this place, you could make
it go! I can see you at it--looking rather sour. Woosh is the
word, George."  

And he smiled endearingly.

"I got to dictate a letter," he said, ending the smile, and
vanished into the outer room.

III

I didn't succumb without a struggle to my uncle's allurements.
Indeed, I held out for a week while I contemplated life and my
prospects. It was a crowded and muddled contemplation. It
invaded even my sleep.

My interview with the Registrar, my talk with my uncle, my abrupt
discovery of the hopeless futility of my passion for Marion, had
combined to bring me to sense of crisis. What was I going to do
with life?

I remember certain phases of my indecisions very well.

I remember going home from our talk. I went down Farringdon
Street to the Embankment because I thought to go home by Holborn
and Oxford Street would be too crowded for thinking.... That
piece of Embankment from Blackfriars to Westminster still
reminds me of that momentous hesitation.

You know, from first to last, I saw the business with my eyes
open, I saw its ethical and moral values quite clearly. Never
for a moment do I remember myself faltering from my persuasion
that the sale of Tono-Bungay was a thoroughly dishonest
proceeding. The stuff was, I perceived, a mischievous trash,
slightly stimulating, aromatic and attractive, likely to become a
bad habit and train people in the habitual use of stronger tonics
and insidiously dangerous to people with defective kidneys. It
would cost about sevenpence the large bottle to make, including
bottling, and we were to sell it at half a crown plus the cost of
the patent medicine stamp. A thing that I will confess deterred
me from the outset far more than the sense of dishonesty in this
affair, was the supreme silliness of the whole concern. I still
clung to the idea that the world of men was or should be a sane
and just organisation, and the idea that I should set myself
gravely, just at the fine springtime of my life, to developing a
monstrous bottling and packing warehouse, bottling rubbish for
the consumption  of foolish, credulous and depressed people, had
in it a touch of insanity. My early beliefs still clung to me.
I felt assured that somewhere there must be a hitch in the fine
prospect of ease and wealth under such conditions; that
somewhere, a little overgrown, perhaps, but still traceable, lay
a neglected, wasted path of use and honour for me.

My inclination to refuse the whole thing increased rather than
diminished at first as I went along the Embankment. In my
uncle's presence there had been a sort of glamour that had
prevented an outright refusal.  It was a revival of affection
for him I felt in his presence, I think, in part, and in part an
instinctive feeling that I must consider him as my host. But
much more was it a curious persuasion he had the knack of
inspiring--a persuasion not so much of his integrity and capacity
as of the reciprocal and yielding foolishness  of the world. One
felt that he was silly and wild, but in some way silly and wild
after the fashion of the universe. After all, one must live
somehow. I astonished  him and myself by temporising.

"No," said I, "I'll think it over!"

And as I went along the embankment the first effect was all
against my uncle. He shrank--for a little while he continued to
shrink--in perspective until he was only a very small shabby
little man in a dirty back street, sending off a few hundred
bottles of rubbish to foolish buyers. The great buildings on
the right of us, the Inns and the School Board place--as it was
then--Somerset House, the big hotels, the great bridges,
Westminster's outlines ahead, had an effect of grey largeness
that reduced him to the proportions of a busy black beetle in a
crack in the floor.

And then my eye caught the advertisements on the south side of
"Sorber's Food," of "Cracknell's Ferric Wine," very bright and
prosperous signs, illuminated at night, and I realised how
astonishingly they looked at home there, how evidently part they
were in the whole thing.

I saw a man come charging out of Palace Yard--the policeman
touched his helmet to him--with a hat and a bearing astonishingly
like my uncle's. After all,--didn't Cracknell himself sit in the
House?

Tono-Bungay shouted at me from a hoarding near Adelphi Terrace; I
saw it afar off near Carfax Street; it cried out again upon me in
Kensington High Street, and burst into a perfect clamour; six or
seven times I saw it as I drew near my diggings. It certainly
had an air of being something more than a dream.

Yes, I thought it over--thoroughly enough.... Trade rules the
world. Wealth rather than trade! The thing was true, and true
too was my uncle's proposition that the quickest way to get
wealth is to sell the cheapest thing possible in the dearest
bottle. He was frightfully right after all. Pecunnia non
olet,--a Roman emperor said that. Perhaps my great heroes in
Plutarch were no more than such men, fine now only because they
are distant; perhaps after all this Socialism to which I had been
drawn was only a foolish dream, only the more foolish because all
its promises were conditionally true. Morris and these others
played with it wittingly; it gave a zest, a touch of substance,
to their aesthetic pleasures. Never would there be good faith
enough to bring such things about. They knew it; every one,
except  a few young fools, knew it. As I crossed the corner of
St. James's Park wrapped in thought, I dodged back just in time
to escape a prancing pair of greys. A stout, common-looking
woman, very magnificently dressed, regarded me from the carriage
with a scornful eye. "No doubt," thought I, "a pill-vendor's
wife...."  

Running through all my thoughts, surging out like a refrain, was
my uncle's master-stroke, his admirable touch of praise: "Make it
all slick--and then make it go Woosh. I know you can! Oh! I
KNOW you can!"

IV

Ewart as a moral influence was unsatisfactory. I had made up my
mind to put the whole thing before him, partly to see how he took
it, and partly to hear how it sounded when it was said. I asked
him to come and eat with me in an Italian place near Panton
Street where one could get a curious, interesting, glutting sort
of dinner for eighteen-pence. He came with a disconcerting
black-eye that he wouldn't explain. "Not so much a black-eye,"
he said, "as the aftermath of a purple patch.... What's your
difficulty?"

"I'll tell you with the salad," I said.

But as a matter of fact I didn't tell him. I threw out that I
was doubtful whether I ought to go into trade, or stick to
teaching in view of my deepening socialist proclivities; and he,
warming with the unaccustomed  generosity of a sixteen-penny
Chianti, ran on from that without any further inquiry as to my
trouble.

His utterances roved wide and loose.

"The reality of life, my dear Ponderevo," I remember  him saying
very impressively and punctuating with the nut-crackers as he
spoke, "is Chromatic Conflict ... and Form. Get hold of that and
let all these other questions go. The Socialist will tell you
one sort of colour and shape is right, the Individualist another.
What does it all amount to? What DOES it all amount to?
NOTHING! I have no advice to give anyone,--except to avoid
regrets. Be yourself, seek after such beautiful things as your
own sense determines to be beautiful. And don't mind the
headache in the morning.... For what, after all, is a morning,
Ponderevo? It isn't like the upper part of a day!"

He paused impressively.

"What Rot!" I cried, after a confused attempt to apprehend him.

"Isn't it! And it's my bedrock wisdom in the matter! Take it or
leave it, my dear George; take it or leave it."... He put down
the nut-crackers out of my reach and lugged a greasy-looking
note-book from his pocket. "I'm going to steal this mustard
pot,"  he said.

I made noises of remonstrance.

"Only as a matter of design. I've got to do an old beast's tomb.

Wholesale grocer. I'll put it on his corners,--four mustard
pots. I dare say he'd be glad of a mustard plaster now to cool
him, poor devil, where he is. But anyhow,--here goes!"

V

It came to me in the small hours that the real moral touchstone
for this great doubting of mind was Marion. I lay composing
statements of my problem and imagined myself delivering them to
her--and she, goddess-like and beautiful; giving her fine,
simply-worded judgment.

"You see, it's just to give one's self over to the Capitalistic
System," I imagined myself saying in good Socialist jargon; "it's
surrendering all one's beliefs. We MAY succeed, we MAY grow
rich, but where would the satisfaction be?"

Then she would say, "No! That wouldn't be right."  

"But the alternative is to wait!"

Then suddenly she would become a goddess. She would turn upon me
frankly and nobly, with shining eyes, with arms held out. "No,"
she would say, "we love one another. Nothing ignoble shall ever
touch us. We love one another. Why wait to tell each other
that, dear? What does it matter that we are poor and may keep
poor?"

But indeed the conversation didn't go at all in that direction.
At the sight of her my nocturnal eloquence became preposterous
and all the moral values altered altogether. I had waited for
her outside the door of the Parsian-robe establishment in
Kensington High Street and walked home with her thence. I
remember how she emerged into the warm evening light and that she
wore a brown straw hat that made her, for once not only beautiful
but pretty.

"I like that hat," I said by way of opening; and she smiled her
rare delightful smile at me.

"I love you," I said in an undertone, as we jostled closer on the
pavement.

She shook her head forbiddingly, but she still smiled. Then--
"Be sensible!"

The High Street pavement is too narrow and crowded for
conversation and we were some way westward before we spoke
again.

"Look here," I said; "I want you, Marion. Don't you understand?
I want you."  

"Now!" she cried warningly.

I do not know if the reader will understand how a passionate
lover, an immense admiration and desire, can be shot with a gleam
of positive hatred. Such a gleam there was in me at the serene
self-complacency of that "NOW!"  It vanished almost before I
felt it. I found no warning in it of the antagonisms latent
between us.

"Marion," I said, "this isn't a trifling matter to me. I love
you; I would die to get you.... Don't you care?"

"But what is the good?"

"You don't care," I cried. "You don't care a rap!"

"You know I care," she answered. "If I didn't-- If I didn't like
you very much, should I let you come and meet me-- go about with
you?"

"Well then," I said, "promise to marry me!"

"If I do, what difference will it make?"

We were separated by two men carrying a ladder who drove between
us unawares.

"Marion," I asked when we got together again, "I tell you I want
you to marry me."  

"We can't."  

"Why not?"

"We can't marry--in the street."  

"We could take our chance!"

"I wish you wouldn't go on talking like this. What is the good?"

She suddenly gave way to gloom. "It's no good marrying" she
said. "One's only miserable. I've seen other girls. When one's
alone one has a little pocket-money anyhow, one can go about a
little. But think of being married and no money, and perhaps
children--you can't be sure...."  

She poured out this concentrated philosophy of her class and type
in jerky uncompleted sentences, with knitted brows, with
discontented eyes towards the westward  glow--forgetful, it
seemed, for a moment even of me.

"Look here, Marion," I said abruptly, "what would you marry on?"

"What IS the good?" she began.

"Would you marry on three hundred a year?"

She looked at me for a moment. "That's six pounds a week," she
said. "One could manage on that, easily. Smithie's brother--No,
he only gets two hundred and fifty. He married a typewriting
girl."  

"Will you marry me if I get three hundred a year?"

She looked at me again, with a curious gleam of hope.

"IF!" she said.

I held out my hand and looked her in the eyes. "It's a bargain,"
I said.

She hesitated and touched my hand for an instant. "It's silly,"
she remarked as she did so. "It means really we're--"  She
paused.

"Yes?" said I.

"Engaged. You'll have to wait years. What good can it do you?"

"Not so many years."  I answered.

For a moment she brooded.

Then she glanced at me with a smile, half-sweet, half-wistful,
that has stuck in my memory for ever.

"I like you!" she said. "I shall like to be engaged to you."  

And, faint on the threshold of hearing, I caught her ventured
"dear!"  It's odd that in writing this down my memory passed over
all that intervened and I feel it all again, and once again I'm
Marion's boyish lover taking great joy in such rare and little
things.

VI

At last I went to the address my uncle had given me in Gower
Street, and found my aunt Susan waiting tea for him.

Directly I came into the room I appreciated the change in outlook
that the achievement of Tono-Bungay had made almost as vividly as
when I saw my uncle's new hat. The furniture of the room struck
upon my eye as almost stately. The chairs and sofa were covered
with chintz which gave it a dim, remote flavour of Bladesover;
the mantel, the cornice, the gas pendant were larger and finer
than the sort of thing I had grown accustomed to in London. And
I was shown in by a real housemaid with real tails to her cap,
and great quantities of reddish hair. There was my aunt too
looking bright and pretty, in a blue-patterned tea-wrap with bows
that seemed to me the quintessence of fashion. She was sitting
in a chair by the open window with quite a pile of
yellow-labelled books on the occasional table beside her. Before
the large, paper-decorated fireplace stood a three-tiered
cake-stand displaying assorted  cakes, and a tray with all the
tea equipage except the teapot, was on the large centre-table.
The carpet was thick, and a spice of adventure was given it by a
number of dyed sheep-skin mats.

"Hello!" said my aunt as I appeared. "It's George!"

"Shall I serve the tea now, Mem?"  said the real housemaid,
surveying our greeting coldly.

"Not till Mr. Ponderevo comes, Meggie," said my aunt, and
grimaced with extraordinary swiftness and virulence as the
housemaid turned her back.

"Meggie she calls herself," said my aunt as the door closed, and
left me to infer a certain want of sympathy.

"You're looking very jolly, aunt," said I.

"What do you think of all this old Business he's got?" asked my
aunt.

"Seems a promising thing," I said.

"I suppose there is a business somewhere?"

"Haven't you seen it ?"

"'Fraid I'd say something AT it George, if I did. So he won't
let me. It came on quite suddenly. Brooding he was and writing
letters and sizzling something awful--like a chestnut going to
pop. Then he came home one day saying Tono-Bungay till I thought
he was clean off his onion, and singing--what was it?"

"'I'm afloat, I'm afloat,'" I guessed.

"The very thing. You've heard him. And saying our fortunes were
made. Took me out to the Ho'burm Restaurant, George,--dinner,
and we had champagne, stuff that blows up the back of your nose
and makes you go SO, and he said at last he'd got things worthy
of me--and we moved here next day. It's a swell house, George.
Three pounds a week for the rooms. And he says the Business'll
stand it."  

She looked at me doubtfully.

"Either do that or smash," I said profoundly.

We discussed the question for a moment mutely with our eyes. My
aunt slapped the pile of books from Mudie's.

"I've been having such a Go of reading, George. You never did!"

"What do you think of the business?" I asked.

"Well, they've let him have money," she said, and thought and
raised her eyebrows.

"It's been a time," she went on. "The flapping about! Me
sitting doing nothing and him on the go like a rocket. He's done
wonders. But he wants you, George--he wants you. Sometimes he's
full of hope--talks of when we're going to have a carriage and be
in society--makes it seem so natural and topsy-turvy, I hardly
know whether my old heels aren't up here listening  to him, and
my old head on the floor.... Then he gets depressed. Says he
wants restraint. Says he can make a splash but can't keep on.
Says if you don't come in everything will smash--But you are
coming in?"

She paused and looked at me.

"Well--"

"You don't say you won't come in!"

"But look here, aunt," I said, "do you understand quite?... It's
a quack medicine. It's trash."  

"There's no law against selling quack medicine that I know of,"
said my aunt. She thought for a minute and became unusually
grave. "It's our only chance, George," she said. "If it doesn't
go..."  

There came the slamming of a door, and a loud bellowing from the
next apartment through the folding doors. "Here-er Shee Rulk
lies Poo Tom Bo--oling."  

"Silly old Concertina! Hark at him, George!"  She raised her
voice. "Don't sing that, you old Walrus, you! Sing 'I'm
afloat!'"

One leaf of the folding doors opened and my uncle appeared.

"Hullo, George! Come along at last? Gossome tea-cake, Susan?"

"Thought it over George?" he said abruptly.

"Yes," said I.

"Coming in?"

I paused for a last moment and nodded yes.

"Ah!" he cried. "Why couldn't you say that a week ago?"

"I've had false ideas about the world," I said. "Oh! they don't
matter now! Yes, I'll come, I'll take my chance with you, I
won't hesitate again."  

And I didn't. I stuck to that resolution for seven long years.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

HOW WE MADE TONO-BUNGAY HUM

I

So I made my peace with my uncle, and we set out upon this bright
enterprise of selling slightly injurious rubbish at
one-and-three-halfpence and two-and-nine a bottle, including the
Government stamp. We made Tono-Bungay hum! It brought us
wealth, influence, respect, the confidence of endless people.
All that my uncle promised me proved truth and understatement;
Tono-Bungay carried me to freedoms and powers that no life of
scientific research, no passionate service of humanity could ever
have given me....

It was my uncle's genius that did it. No doubt he needed me,--I
was, I will admit, his indispensable right hand; but his was the
brain to conceive. He wrote every advertisement; some of them
even he sketched. You must remember that his were the days before
the Time took to enterprise and the vociferous hawking of that
antiquated Encyclopedia. That alluring, button-holing, let-me
-just-tell-you-quite-soberly-something-you-ought-to-know style of
newspaper advertisement, with every now and then a convulsive
jump of some attractive phrase into capitals, was then almost a
novelty. "Many people who are MODERATELY well think they are
QUITE well," was one of his early efforts. The jerks in capitals
were, "DO NOT NEED DRUGS OR MEDICINE," and "SIMPLY A PROPER
REGIMEN TO GET YOU IN TONE."  One was warned against the chemist
or druggist who pushed "much-advertised nostrums" on one's
attention. That trash did more harm than good. The thing needed
was regimen--and Tono-Bungay!

Very early, too, was that bright little quarter column, at least
it was usually a quarter column in the evening papers:
"HILARITY--Tono-Bungay. Like Mountain Air in the Veins."  The
penetrating trio of questions: "Are you bored with your Business?
Are you bored with your Dinner. Are you bored with your Wife?"
--that, too, was in our Gower Street days. Both these we had in
our first campaign when we worked London south central, and west;
and then, too, we had our first poster--the HEALTH, BEAUTY, AND
STRENGTH one. That was his design; I happen still to have got by
me the first sketch he made for it. I have reproduced it here
with one or two others to enable the reader to understand the
mental quality that initiated these familiar ornaments of London.

(The second one is about eighteen months later, the germ of the
well-known "Fog" poster; the third was designed for an influenza
epidemic, but never issued.)

These things were only incidental in my department.

I had to polish them up for the artist and arrange the business
of printing and distribution, and after my uncle had had a
violent and needless quarrel with the advertising manager of the
Daily Regulator about the amount of display given to one of
his happy thoughts, I also took up the negotiations of
advertisements for the press.

We discussed and worked out distribution together first in the
drawing-room floor in Gower Street with my aunt sometimes helping
very shrewdly, and then, with a steadily improving type of cigar
and older and older whisky, in his smuggery at their first house,
the one in Beckenham. Often we worked far into the night
sometimes until dawn.

We really worked infernally hard, and, I recall, we worked with a
very decided enthusiasm, not simply on my uncle's part but mine,
It was a game, an absurd but absurdly interesting game, and the
points were scored in cases of bottles. People think a happy
notion is enough to make a man rich, that fortunes can be made
without toil. It's a dream, as every millionaire (except one or
two lucky gamblers) can testify; I doubt if J.D. Rockefeller in
the early days of Standard Oil, worked harder than we did. We
worked far into the night--and we also worked all day. We made a
rule to be always dropping in at the factory unannounced to keep
things right--for at first we could afford no properly
responsible underlings--and we traveled London, pretending to be
our own representatives and making all sorts of special
arrangements.

But none of this was my special work, and as soon as we could get
other men in, I dropped the traveling, though my uncle found it
particularly interesting and kept it up for years. "Does me
good, George, to see the chaps behind their counters like I was
once,"  he explained. My special and distinctive duty was to
give Tono-Bungay substance and an outward and visible bottle, to
translate my uncle's great imaginings into the creation of case
after case of labelled bottles of nonsense, and the punctual
discharge of them by railway, road and steamer towards their
ultimate goal in the Great Stomach of the People. By all modern
standards the business was, as my uncle would say, "absolutely
bona fide."  We sold our stuff and got the money, and spent the
money honestly in lies and clamour to sell more stuff. Section
by section we spread it over the whole of the British Isles;
first working the middle-class London suburbs, then the outer
suburbs, then the home counties, then going (with new bills and a
more pious style of "ad") into Wales, a great field always for a
new patent-medicine, and then into Lancashire.

My uncle had in his inner office a big map of England, and as we
took up fresh sections of the local press and our consignments
invaded new areas, flags for advertisements  and pink underlines
for orders showed our progress.

"The romance of modern commerce, George!" my uncle would say,
rubbing his hands together and drawing  in air through his
teeth. "The romance of modern commerce, eh? Conquest. Province
by province. Like sogers."  

We subjugated England and Wales; we rolled over the Cheviots with
a special adaptation containing eleven per cent. of absolute
alcohol; "Tono-Bungay: Thistle Brand."  We also had the Fog
poster adapted to a kilted Briton in a misty Highland scene.

Under the shadow of our great leading line we were presently
taking subsidiary specialties into action; "Tono-Bungay Hair
Stimulant" was our first supplement.  Then came "Concentrated
Tono-Bungay" for the eyes. That didn't go, but we had a
considerable success with the Hair Stimulant. We broached the
subject, I remember, in a little catechism beginning: "Why does
the hair fall out? Because the follicles are fagged. What are
the follicles?..."  So it went on to the climax that the Hair
Stimulant contained all "The essential  principles of that most
reviving tonic, Tono-Bungay, together with an emollient and
nutritious oil derived from crude Neat's Foot Oil by a process of
refinement, separation and deodorization.... It will be manifest
to any one of scientific attainments that in Neat's Foot Oil
derived from the hoofs and horns of beasts, we must necessarily
have a natural skin and hair lubricant."  

And we also did admirable things with our next subsidiaries,
"Tono-Bungay Lozenges," and "Tono-Bungay Chocolate."  These we
urged upon the public for their extraordinary nutritive and
recuperative value in cases of fatigue and strain. We gave them
posters and illustrated advertisements showing climbers hanging
from marvelously vertical cliffs, cyclist champions upon the
track, mounted messengers engaged in Aix-to-Ghent rides, soldiers
lying out in action under a hot sun. "You can GO for twenty-four
hours," we declared, "on Tono-Bungay Chocolate."  We didn't say
whether you could return on the same commodity. We also showed a
dreadfully barristerish barrister, wig, side-whiskers, teeth, a
horribly life-like portrait of all existing barristers, talking
at a table, and beneath, this legend: "A Four Hours' Speech on
Tono-Bungay Lozenges, and as fresh as when he began."  Then
brought in regiments of school-teachers, revivalist ministers,
politicians and the like. I really do believe there was an
element of "kick" in the strychnine in these lozenges, especially
in those made according to our earlier formula. For we altered
all our formulae--invariably weakening them enormously as sales
got ahead.

In a little while--so it seems to me now--we were employing
travelers and opening up Great Britain at the rate of a hundred
square miles a day. All the organisation throughout was sketched
in a crude, entangled, half-inspired fashion by my uncle, and
all of it had to be worked out into a practicable scheme of
quantities and expenditure by me. We had a lot of trouble
finding our travelers; in the end at least half of them were
Irish-Americans, a wonderful breed for selling  medicine. We had
still more trouble over our factory  manager, because of the
secrets of the inner room, and in the end we got a very capable
woman, Mrs. Hampton Diggs, who had formerly managed a large
millinery workroom, whom we could trust to keep everything in
good working order without finding out anything that wasn't put
exactly under her loyal and energetic nose. She conceived a high
opinion of Tono-Bungay and took it in all forms and large
quantities so long as I knew her. It didn't seem to do her any
harm. And she kept the girls going quite wonderfully.

My uncle's last addition to the Tono-Bungay group was the
Tono-Bungay Mouthwash. The reader has probably read a hundred
times that inspiring inquiry of his, "You are Young Yet, but are
you Sure Nothing has Aged your Gums?"

And after that we took over the agency for three or four good
American lines that worked in with our own, and could be handled
with it; Texan Embrocation, and "23--to clear the system" were
the chief....

I set down these bare facts. To me they are all linked with the
figure of my uncle. In some of the old seventeenth and early
eighteenth century prayerbooks at Bladesover there used to be
illustrations with long scrolls coming out of the mouths of the
wood-cut figures. I wish I could write all this last chapter on
a scroll coming out of the head of my uncle, show it all the time
as unfolding and pouring out from a short, fattening,
small-legged man with stiff cropped hair, disobedient glasses on
a perky little nose, and a round stare behind them. I wish I
could show you him breathing hard and a little through his nose
as his pen scrabbled out some absurd inspiration for a poster or
a picture page, and make you hear his voice, charged with solemn
import like the voice of a squeaky prophet, saying, "George!
list'n! I got an ideer. I got a notion! George!"

I should put myself into the same picture. Best setting for us,
I think, would be the Beckenham snuggery,  because there we
worked hardest. It would be the lamplit room of the early
nineties, and the clock upon the mantel would indicate midnight
or later. We would be sitting on either side of the fire, I with
a pipe, my uncle with a cigar or cigarette. There would be
glasses standing inside the brass fender. Our expressions would
be very grave.  My uncle used to sit right back in his armchair;
his toes always turned in when he was sitting down and his legs
had a way of looking curved, as though they hadn't bones or
joints but were stuffed with sawdust.

"George, whad'yer think of T.B. for sea-sickness?" he would
say.

"No good that I can imagine."  

"Oom! No harm TRYING, George. We can but try."  

I would suck my pipe. "Hard to get at. Unless we sold our stuff
specially at the docks. Might do a special at Cook's office, or
in the Continental Bradshaw."  

"It 'ud give 'em confidence, George."  

He would Zzzz, with his glasses reflecting the red of the glowing
coals.

"No good hiding our light under a Bushel," he would remark.

I never really determined whether my uncle regarded Tono-Bungay
as a fraud, or whether he didn't come to believe in it in a kind
of way by the mere reiteration of his own assertions. I think
that his average attitude was one of kindly, almost parental,
toleration. I remember saying on one occasion, "But you don't
suppose this stuff ever did a human being the slightest good
all?"  and how his face assumed a look of protest, as of one
reproving harshness and dogmatism.

"You've a hard nature, George," he said. "You're too ready to
run things down. How can one TELL? How can one venture to
TELL!..."

I suppose any creative and developing game would have interested
me in those years. At any rate, I know I put as much zeal into
this Tono-Bungay as any young lieutenant could have done who
suddenly found himself in command of a ship. It was
extraordinarily interesting to me to figure out the advantage
accruing from this shortening of the process or that, and to
weigh it against the capital cost of the alteration. I made a
sort of machine for sticking on the labels, that I patented; to
this day there is a little trickle of royalties to me from that.
I also contrived to have our mixture made concentrated, got the
bottles, which all came sliding down a guarded slant-way, nearly
filled with distilled water at one tap, and dripped our magic
ingredients in at the next. This was an immense economy of space
for the inner sanctum. For the bottling we needed special taps,
and these, too, I invented and patented.

We had a sort of endless band of bottles sliding along an
inclined glass trough made slippery with running water. At one
end a girl held them up to the light, put aside any that were
imperfect and placed the others in the trough; the filling was
automatic; at the other end a girl slipped in the cork and drove
it home with a little mallet. Each tank, the little one for the
vivifying ingredients and the big one for distilled  water, had a
level indicator, and inside I had a float arrangement that
stopped the slide whenever either had sunk too low. Another girl
stood ready with my machine to label the corked bottles and hand
them to the three packers, who slipped them into their outer
papers and put them, with a pad of corrugated paper between each
pair, into a little groove from which they could be made to slide
neatly into position in our standard packing-case. It sounds
wild, I know, but I believe I was the first man in the city of
London to pack patent medicines through the side of the
packing-case, to discover there was a better way in than by the
lid. Our cases packed themselves, practically; had only to be
put into position on a little wheeled tray and when full pulled
to the lift that dropped them to the men downstairs, who padded
up the free space and nailed on top and side. Our girls,
moreover, packed with corrugated paper and matchbook-wood box
partitions when everybody else was using expensive young men to
pack through the top of the box with straw, many breakages and
much waste and confusion.

II

As I look back at them now, those energetic years seem all
compacted to a year or so; from the days of our first hazardous
beginning in Farringdon Street with barely a thousand pounds'
worth of stuff or credit all told--and that got by something
perilously like snatching--to the days when my uncle went to the
public on behalf of himself and me (one-tenth share) and our
silent partners, the drug wholesalers and the printing people and
the owner of that group of magazines and newspapers, to ask with
honest confidence for L150,000. Those silent partners were
remarkably sorry, I know, that they had not taken larger shares
and given us longer credit when the subscriptions came pouring
in. My uncle had a clear half to play with (including the
one-tenth understood to be mine).

L150,000--think of it!--for the goodwill in a string of lies and
a trade in bottles of mitigated water! Do you realise the
madness of the world that sanctions such a thing? Perhaps you
don't. At times use and wont certainly blinded me. If it had
not been for Ewart, I don't think I should have had an inkling of
the wonderfulness  of this development of my fortunes; I should
have grown accustomed to it, fallen in with all its delusions as
completely as my uncle presently did. He was immensely proud of
the flotation. "They've never been given such value," he said,
"for a dozen years."   But Ewart, with his gesticulating hairy
hands and bony wrists, his single-handed chorus to all this as it
played itself over again in my memory, and he kept my fundamental
absurdity illuminated for me during all this astonishing time.

"It's just on all fours with the rest of things," he remarked;
"only more so. You needn't think you're anything out of the
way."  

I remember one disquisition very distinctly. It was just after
Ewart had been to Paris on a mysterious expedition to "rough in"
some work for a rising American sculptor. This young man had
a commission for an allegorical figure of Truth (draped, of
course) for his State Capitol, and he needed help. Ewart had
returned with his hair cut en brosse and with his costume
completely translated into French. He wore, I remember, a
bicycling suit of purplish-brown, baggy beyond ageing--the only
creditable thing about it was that it had evidently not been made
for him--a voluminous black tie, a decadent soft felt hat and
several French expletives of a sinister description. "Silly
clothes, aren't they?" he said at the sight of my startled eye.
"I don't know why I got'm. They seemed all right over there."  

He had come down to our Raggett Street place to discuss a
benevolent project of mine for a poster by him, and he scattered
remarkable discourse over the heads (I hope it was over the
heads) of our bottlers.

"What I like about it all, Ponderevo, is its poetry.... That's
where we get the pull of the animals. No animal would ever run a
factory like this. Think!... One remembers the Beaver, of
course. He might very possibly bottle things, but would he stick
a label round 'em and sell 'em? The Beaver is a dreamy fool,
I'll admit, him and his dams, but after all there's a sort of
protection about 'em, a kind of muddy practicality! They prevent
things getting at him. And it's not your poetry only. It's the
poetry of the customer too. Poet answering to poet--soul to
soul. Health, Strength and Beauty--in a bottle--the magic
philtre! Like a fairy tale....

"Think of the people to whom your bottles of footle go! (I'm
calling it footle, Ponderevo, out of praise,"  he said in
parenthesis.)

"Think of the little clerks and jaded women and overworked
people. People overstrained with wanting to do, people
overstrained with wanting to be.... People, in fact,
overstrained.... The real trouble of life, Ponderevo, isn't that
we exist--that's a vulgar error; the real trouble is that we
DON'T really exist and we want to. That's what this--in the
highest sense--just stands for! The hunger to be--for
once--really alive--to the finger tips!...

"Nobody wants to do and be the things people are--nobody. YOU
don't want to preside over this--this bottling; I don't want to
wear these beastly clothes and be led about by you; nobody wants
to keep on sticking labels on silly bottles at so many farthings
a gross. That isn't existing! That's--sus--substratum. None of
us want to be what we are, or to do what we do. Except as a sort
of basis. What do we want? You know. I know. Nobody
confesses. What we all want to be is something perpetually young
and beautiful--young  Joves--young Joves, Ponderevo" --his voice
became loud, harsh and declamatory--"pursuing coy half-willing
nymphs through everlasting forests."...

There was a just-perceptible listening hang in the work about us.

"Come downstairs," I interrupted, "we can talk better there."  

"I can talk better here," he answered.

He was just going on, but fortunately the implacable face of Mrs.
Hampton Diggs appeared down the aisle of bottling machines.

"All right," he said, "I'll come."  

In the little sanctum below, my uncle was taking a digestive
pause after his lunch and by no means alert. His presence sent
Ewart back to the theme of modern commerce, over the excellent
cigar my uncle gave him. He behaved with the elaborate deference
due to a business magnate from an unknown man.

"What I was pointing out to your nephew, sir," said Ewart,
putting both elbows on the table, "was the poetry of commerce.
He doesn't, you know, seem to see it at all."  

My uncle nodded brightly. "Whad I tell 'im," he said round his
cigar.

"We are artists. You and I, sir, can talk, if you will permit
me, as one artist to another. It's advertisement has--done it.
Advertisement has revolutionised trade and industry; it is going
to revolutionise the world. The old merchant used to tote about
commodities; the new one creates values. Doesn't need to tote.
He takes something that isn't worth anything--or something that
isn't particularly worth anything--and he makes it worth
something. He takes mustard that is just like anybody else's
mustard, and he goes about saying, shouting, singing, chalking on
walls, writing inside people's books, putting it everywhere,
'Smith's Mustard is the Best.' And behold it is the best!"

"True," said my uncle, chubbily and with a dreamy sense of
mysticism; "true!"

"It's just like an artist; he takes a lump of white marble on the
verge of a lime-kiln, he chips it about, he makes--he makes a
monument to himself--and others--a monument the world will not
willingly let die. Talking of mustard, sir, I was at Clapham
Junction the other day, and all the banks are overgrown with
horse radish that's got loose from a garden somewhere. You know
what horseradish is--grows like wildfire--spreads --spreads. I
stood at the end of the platform looking at the stuff and
thinking about it. 'Like fame,' I thought, 'rank and wild where
it isn't wanted. Why don't the really good things in life grow
like horseradish?' I thought. My mind went off in a peculiar way
it does from that to the idea that mustard costs a penny a tin--I
bought some the other day for a ham I had. It came into my head
that it would be ripping good business to use horseradish to
adulterate mustard. I had a sort of idea that I could plunge
into business on that, get rich and come back to my own proper
monumental art again. And then I said, 'But why adulterate? I
don't like the idea of adulteration.'"

"Shabby," said my uncle, nodding his head. "Bound to get found
out!"

"And totally unnecessary, too! Why not do up a
mixture--three-quarters pounded horseradish and a quarter
mustard--give it a fancy name--and sell it at twice the mustard
price. See? I very nearly started the business straight away,
only something happened. My train came along."  

"Jolly good ideer," said my uncle. He looked at me. "That really
is an ideer, George," he said.

"Take shavin's, again! You know that poem of Longfellow's, sir,
that sounds exactly like the first declension. What is
it?--'Marr's a maker, men say!'"

My uncle nodded and gurgled some quotation that died away.

'Jolly good poem, George," he said in an aside to me.

"Well, it's about a carpenter and a poetic Victorian child, you
know, and some shavin's. The child made no end out of the
shavin's. So might you. Powder 'em. They might be anything.
Soak 'em in jipper,--Xylo-tobacco! Powder'em and get a little
tar and turpentinous smell in,--wood-packing for hot baths--a
Certain Cure for the scourge of Influenza! There's all these
patent grain foods,--what Americans call cereals. I believe I'm
right, sir, in saying they're sawdust."  

"No!" said my uncle, removing his cigar; "as far as I can find
out it's really grain,--spoilt grain.... I've been going into
that."  

"Well, there you are!" said Ewart. "Say it's spoilt grain. It
carried out my case just as well. Your modern  commerce is no
more buying and selling than sculpture. It's mercy--it's
salvation. It's rescue work! It takes all sorts of fallen
commodities by the hand and raises them. Cana isn't in it. You
turn water--into Tono-Bungay."  

"Tono-Bungay's all right," said my uncle, suddenly grave. "We
aren't talking of Tono-Bungay."  

"Your nephew, sir, is hard; he wants everything to go to a sort
of predestinated end; he's a Calvinist of Commerce. Offer him a
dustbin full of stuff; he calls it refuse--passes by on the other
side. Now YOU, sir  you'd make cinders respect themselves."  

My uncle regarded him dubiously for a moment. But there was a
touch of appreciation in his eye.

"Might make 'em into a sort of sanitary brick," he reflected over
his cigar end.

"Or a friable biscuit. Why NOT? You might advertise: 'Why are
Birds so Bright? Because they digest their food perfectly! Why
do they digest their food so perfectly? Because they have a
gizzard! Why hasn't man a gizzard? Because he can buy
Ponderevo's Asphalt Triturating, Friable Biscuit--Which is
Better.'"

He delivered the last words in a shout, with his hairy hand
flourished in the air....

"Damn clever fellow," said my uncle, after he had one. "I know a
man when I see one. He'd do. But drunk, I should say. But that
only makes some chap brighter . If he WANTS to do that poster,
he can. Zzzz. That ideer of his about the horseradish. There's
something  in that, George. I'm going to think over that...."  

I may say at once that my poster project came to nothing in the
end, though Ewart devoted an interesting week to the matter. He
let his unfortunate disposition to irony run away with him. He
produced a picture of two beavers with a subtle likeness, he
said, to myself and my uncle--the likeness to my uncle certainly
wasn't half bad--and they were bottling rows and rows of
Tono-Bungay, with the legend "Modern commerce."  It certainly
wouldn't have sold a case, though he urged it on me one cheerful
evening on the ground that it would "arouse curiosity."  In
addition he produced a quite shocking study of my uncle,
excessively and needlessly nude, but, so far as I was able to
judge, an admirable likeness, engaged in feats of strength of a
Gargantuan type before an audience of deboshed and shattered
ladies. The legend, "Health, Beauty, Strength," below, gave a
needed point to his parody. This he hung up in the studio over
the oil shop, with a flap of brown paper; by way of a curtain
over it to accentuate its libellous offence.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

MARION I

As I look back on those days in which we built up the great
Tono-Bungay property out of human hope and credit for bottles and
rent and printing, I see my life as it were arranged in two
parallel columns of unequal width, a wider, more diffused,
eventful and various one which continually broadens out, the
business side of my life, and a narrow, darker and darkling one
shot ever and again with a gleam of happiness, my home-life with
Marion. For, of course, I married Marion.

I didn't, as a matter of fact, marry her until a year after
Tono-Bungay was thoroughly afloat, and then only after conflicts
and discussions of a quite strenuous sort. By that time I was
twenty-four. It seems the next thing to childhood now. We were
both in certain directions unusually ignorant and simple; we
were temperamentally antagonistic, and we hadn't--I don't think
we were capable of--an idea in common. She was young and
extraordinarily conventional--she seemed never to have an idea of
her own but always the idea of her class--and I was young and
sceptical, enterprising and passionate; the two links that held
us together were the intense appeal her physical beauty had for
me, and her appreciation of her importance in my thoughts.
There can be no doubt of my passion for her. In her I had
discovered woman desired. The nights I have lain awake on
account of her, writhing, biting my wrists in a fever of longing!
...

I have told how I got myself a silk hat and black coat to please
her on Sunday--to the derision of some of my fellow-students who
charged to meet me, and how we became engaged. But that was only
the beginning of our difference. To her that meant the beginning
of a not unpleasant little secrecy, an occasional use of verbal
endearments, perhaps even kisses. It was something to go on
indefinitely, interfering in no way with her gossiping spells of
work at Smithie's. To me it was a pledge to come together into
the utmost intimacy of soul and body so soon as we could contrive
it....

I don't know if it will strike the reader that I am setting out
to discuss the queer, unwise love relationship and my bungle of a
marriage with excessive solemnity. But to me it seems to reach
out to vastly wider issues than our little personal affair. I've
thought over my life. In these last few years I've tried to get
at least a little wisdom out of it. And in particular I've
thought over this part of my life. I'm enormously impressed  by
the ignorant, unguided way in which we two entangled ourselves
with each other. It seems to me the queerest thing in all this
network of misunderstandings and misstatements and faulty and
ramshackle conventions which makes up our social order as the
individual  meets it, that we should have come together so
accidentally and so blindly. Because we were no more than
samples of the common fate. Love is not only the cardinal fact
in the individual life, but the most important concern of the
community; after all, the way in which the young people of this
generation pair off determines the fate of the nation; all the
other affairs of the State are subsidiary to that. And we leave
it to flushed and blundering youth to stumble on its own
significance, with nothing to guide in but shocked looks and
sentimental twaddle and base whisperings and cant-smeared
examples.

I have tried to indicate something of my own sexual development
in the preceding chapter. Nobody was ever frank and decent with
me in this relation; nobody, no book, ever came and said to me
thus and thus is the world made, and so and so is necessary.
Everything came obscurely, indefinitely, perplexingly; and all I
knew of law or convention in the matter had the form of
threatenings and prohibitions. Except through the furtive,
shameful talk of my coevals at Goudhurst and Wimblehurst, I was
not even warned against quite horrible dangers. My ideas were
made partly of instinct, partly of a romantic imagination, partly
woven out of a medley of scraps of suggestion that came to me
haphazard. I had read widely and confusedly "Vathek," Shelley,
Tom Paine, Plutarch, Carlyle, Haeckel, William Morris, the Bible,
the Freethinker, the Clarion, "The Woman Who Did,"--I
mention the ingredients that come first to mind. All sorts of
ideas were jumbled up in me and never a lucid explanation. But
it was evident to me that the world regarded Shelley, for
example, as a very heroic as well as beautiful person; and that
to defy convention and succumb magnificently to passion was the
proper thing to do to gain the respect and affection of all
decent people.

And the make-up of Marion's mind in the matter was an equally
irrational affair. Her training had been one, not simply of
silences, but suppressions. An enormous force of suggestion had
so shaped her that the intense natural fastidiousness of girlhood
had developed into an absolute perversion of instinct. For all
that is cardinal in this essential business of life she had one
inseparable epithet--"horrid."  Without any such training she
would have been a shy lover, but now she was an impossible one.
For the rest she had derived, I suppose, partly from the sort of
fiction she got from the Public Library, and partly from the
workroom talk at Smithie's. So far as the former origin went,
she had an idea of love as a state of worship and service on the
part of the man and of condescension on the part of the woman.
There was nothing "horrid" about it in any fiction she had read.
The man gave presents, did services, sought to be in every way
delightful. The woman "went out" with him, smiled at him, was
kissed by him in decorous secrecy, and if he chanced to offend,
denied her countenance and presence. Usually she did something
"for his good" to him, made him go to church, made him give up
smoking or gambling, smartened him up. Quite at the end of the
story came a marriage, and after that the interest ceased.

That was the tenor of Marion's fiction; but I think the
work-table conversation at Smithie's did something to modify
that. At Smithie's it was recognised, I think, that a "fellow"
was a possession to be desired; that it was better to be engaged
to a fellow than not; that fellows had to be kept--they might be
mislaid, they might even be stolen. There was a case of stealing
at Smithie's, and many tears.

Smithie I met before we were married, and afterwards she became a
frequent visitor to our house at Ealing. She was a thin,
bright-eyed, hawk-nosed girl of thirtyodd, with prominent
teeth, a high-pitched, eager voice and a disposition to be
urgently smart in her dress. Her hats were startling and
various, but invariably disconcerting,  and she talked in a
rapid, nervous flow that was hilarious rather than witty, and
broken by little screams of "Oh, my dear!" and "you never did!"
She was the first woman I ever met who used scent. Poor old
Smithie! What a harmless, kindly soul she really was, and how
heartily I detested her! Out of the profits on the Persian robes
she supported a sister's family of three children, she "helped" a
worthless brother, and overflowed in help even to her workgirls,
but that didn't weigh with me in those youthfully-narrow times.
It was one of the intense minor irritations of my married life
that Smithie's whirlwind chatter seemed to me to have far more
influence with Marion than anything I had to say. Before all
things I coveted her grip upon Marion's inaccessible mind.

In the workroom at Smithie's, I gathered, they always spoke of me
demurely as "A Certain Person."  I was rumoured to be dreadfully
"clever," and there were doubts--not altogether without
justification--of the sweetness of my temper.

II

Well, these general explanations will enable the reader to
understand the distressful times we two had together when
presently I began to feel on a footing with Marion and to fumble
conversationally for the mind and the wonderful passion I felt,
obstinately and stupidity, must be in her. I think she thought
me the maddest of sane men; "clever," in fact, which at Smithie's
was, I suppose, the next thing to insanity, a word intimating
incomprehensible and incalculable motives.... She could be
shocked at anything, she misunderstood everything, and her weapon
was a sulky silence that knitted her brows, spoilt her mouth and
robbed her face of beauty. "Well, if we can't agree, I don't see
why you should go on talking," she used to say. That would
always enrage me beyond measure. Or, "I'm afraid I'm not clever
enough to understand that."

Silly little people! I see it all now, but then I was no older
than she and I couldn't see anything but that Marion, for some
inexplicable reason, wouldn't come alive.

We would contrive semi-surreptitious walks on Sunday, and part
speechless with the anger of indefinable offences. Poor Marion!
The things I tried to put before her, my fermenting ideas about
theology, about Socialism, about aesthetics--the very words
appalled her, gave her the faint chill of approaching
impropriety, the terror of a very present intellectual
impossibility. Then by an enormous effort I would suppress
myself for a time and continue a talk that made her happy, about
Smithie's brother, about the new girl who had come to the
workroom, about the house we would presently live in. But
there we differed a little. I wanted to be accessible to St.
Paul's or Cannon Street Station, and she had set her mind quite
resolutely upon Eating.... It wasn't by any means quarreling all
the time, you understand. She liked me to play the lover
"nicely"; she liked the effect of going about--we had lunches, we
went to Earl's Court, to Kew, to theatres and concerts, but not
often to concerts, because, though Marion "liked" music, she
didn't like "too much of it," to picture shows--and there was a
nonsensical sort of babytalk I picked up--I forget where
now--that became a mighty peacemaker.

Her worst offence for me was an occasional excursion into the
Smithie style of dressing, debased West Kensington. For she had
no sense at all of her own beauty. She had no comprehension
whatever of beauty of the body, and she could slash her beautiful
lines to rags with hat-brims and trimmings. Thank Heaven! a
natural refinement,  a natural timidity, and her extremely
slender purse kept her from the real Smithie efflorescence!
Poor, simple, beautiful, kindly limited Marion! Now that I am
forty-five, I can look back at her with all my old admiration
and none of my old bitterness with a new affection and not a
scrap of passion, and take her part against the equally stupid,
drivingly-energetic, sensuous, intellectual sprawl I used to be.
I was a young beast for her to have married--a hound beast. With
her it was my business to understand and control--and I exacted
fellowship, passion....

We became engaged, as I have told; we broke it off and joined
again. We went through a succession of such phases. We had no
sort of idea what was wrong with us. Presently we were formally
engaged. I had a wonderful interview with her father, in which
he was stupendously grave and H--less, wanted to know about my
origins and was tolerant (exasperatingly tolerant) because  my
mother was a servant, and afterwards her mother took to kissing
me, and I bought a ring. But the speechless aunt, I gathered,
didn't approve--having doubts of my religiosity. Whenever we
were estranged we could keep apart for days; and to begin with,
every such separation was a relief. And then I would want her; a
restless longing would come upon me. I would think of the flow
of her arms, of the soft, gracious bend of her body. I would lie
awake or dream of a transfigured Marion of light and fire. It
was indeed Dame Nature driving me on to womankind in her stupid,
inexorable way; but I thought it was the need of Marion that
troubled me. So I always went back to Marion at last and made it
up and more or less conceded or ignored whatever thing had parted
us, and more and more I urged her to marry me....

In the long run that became a fixed idea. It entangled my will
and my pride; I told myself I was not going to be beaten. I
hardened to the business. I think, as a matter of fact, my real
passion for Marion had waned enormously long before we were
married, that she had lived it down by sheer irresponsiveness.
When I felt sure of my three hundred a year she stipulated for
delay, twelve months' delay, "to see how things would turn out."
There were times when she seemed simply an antagonist holding out
irritatingly against something I had to settle. Moreover, I
began to be greatly distracted by the interest and excitement of
Tono-Bungay's success, by the change and movement in things, the
going to and fro. I would forget her for days together, and then
desire her with an irritating intensity at last, one Saturday
afternoon, after a brooding morning, I determined almost savagely
that these delays must end.

I went off to the little home at Walham Green, and made Marion
come with me to Putney Common. Marion wasn't at home when I got
there and I had to fret for a time and talk to her father, who
was just back from his office, he explained, and enjoying himself
in his own way in the greenhouse.

"I'm going to ask your daughter to marry me!" I said. "I think
we've been waiting long enough."  

"I don't approve of long engagements either," said her father.
"But Marion will have her own way about it, anyhow. Seen this
new powdered fertiliser?"

I went in to talk to Mrs. Ramboat. "She'll want time to get her
things," said Mrs. Ramboat....

I and Marion sat down together on a little seat under some trees
at the top of Putney Hill, and I came to my point abruptly.

"Look here, Marion," I said, "are you going to marry me or are
you not?"

She smiled at me. "Well," she said, "we're engaged--aren't we?"

"That can't go on for ever. Will you marry me next week?"

She looked me in the face. "We can't," she said.

"You promised to marry me when I had three hundred a year."

She was silent for a space. "Can't we go on for a time as we
are? We COULD marry on three hundred a year. But it means a
very little house. There's Smithie's brother. They manage on
two hundred and fifty, but that's very little. She says they
have a semi-detached house almost on the road, and hardly a bit
of garden. And the wall to next-door is so thin they hear
everything. When her baby cries--they rap. And people stand
against the railings and talk.... Can't we wait? You're doing so
well."  

An extraordinary bitterness possessed me at this invasion of the
stupendous beautiful business of love by sordid necessity. I
answered her with immense restraint.

"If," I said, "we could have a double-fronted, detached
house--at Ealing, say--with a square patch of lawn in front and a
garden behind--and--and a tiled bathroom"

"That would be sixty pounds a year at least."  

"Which means five hundred a year.... Yes, well, you see, I told
my uncle I wanted that, and I've got it."  

"Got what?"

"Five hundred pounds a year."  

"Five hundred pounds!"

I burst into laughter that had more than a taste of bitterness.

"Yes," I said, "really! and NOW what do you think?"

"Yes," she said, a little flushed; "but be sensible! Do you
really mean you've got a Rise, all at once, of two hundred a
year?"

"To marry on--yes."  

She scrutinised me a moment. "You've done this as a surprise!"
she said, and laughed at my laughter. She had become radiant,
and that made me radiant, too.

"Yes," I said, "yes," and laughed no longer bitterly.

She clasped her hands and looked me in the eyes.

She was so pleased that I forgot absolutely my disgust of a
moment before. I forgot that she had raised her price two
hundred pounds a year and that I had bought her at that.

"Come!" I said, standing up; "let's go towards the sunset, dear,
and talk about it all. Do you know--this is a most beautiful
world, an amazingly beautiful world, and when the sunset falls
upon you it makes you into shining gold. No, not gold--into
golden glass.... Into something better that either glass or
gold."...

And for all that evening I wooed her and kept her glad. She made
me repeat my assurances over again and still doubted a little.

We furnished that double-fronted house from attic--it ran to an
attic--to cellar, and created a garden.

"Do you know Pampas Grass?" said Marion. "I love Pampas Grass...
if there is room."  

"You shall have Pampas Grass," I declared. And there were
moments as we went in imagination about that house together, when
my whole being cried out to take her in my arms--now. But I
refrained. On that aspect of life I touched very lightly in that
talk, very lightly because I had had my lessons. She promised to
marry me within two months' time. Shyly, reluctantly, she named
a day, and next afternoon, in heat and wrath, we "broke it off"
again for the last time. We split upon procedure. I refused
flatly to have a normal wedding with wedding cake, in  white
favours, carriages and the rest of it. It dawned upon me
suddenly in conversation with her and her mother, that this was
implied. I blurted out my objection forthwith, and this time it
wasn't any ordinary difference of opinion; it was a "row."  I
don't remember a quarter of the things we flung out in that
dispute. I remember her mother reiterating in tones of gentle
remonstrance: "But, George dear, you must have a cake--to send
home."  I think we all reiterated things. I seem to remember a
refrain of my own: "A marriage is too sacred a thing, too private
a thing, for this display. Her father came in and stood behind
me against the wall, and her aunt appeared beside the sideboard
and stood with arms, looking from speaker to speaker, a sternly
gratified prophetess. It didn't occur to me  then! How painful
it was to Marion for these people to witness my rebellion.

"But, George," said her father, "what sort of marriage do you
want? You don't want to go to one of those there registry
offices?"

"That's exactly what I'd like to do. Marriage is too private a
thing--"

"I shouldn't feel married," said Mrs. Ramboat.

"Look here, Marion," I said; "we are going to be married at a
registry office. I don't believe in all these fripperies and
superstitions, and I won't submit to them. I've agreed to all
sorts of things to please you."  

"What's he agreed to?" said her father--unheeded.

"I can't marry at a registry office," said Marion, sallow-white.

"Very well," I said. "I'll marry nowhere else."  

"I can't marry at a registry office."  

"Very well," I said, standing up, white and tense and it amazed
me, but I was also exultant; "then we won't marry at all."  

She leant forward over the table, staring blankly. But presently
her half-averted face began to haunt me as she had sat at the
table, and her arm and the long droop of her shoulder.

III

The next day I did an unexampled thing. I sent a telegram to my
uncle, "Bad temper not coming to business," and set off for
Highgate and Ewart. He was actually at work--on a bust of
Millie, and seemed very glad for any interruption.

"Ewart, you old Fool," I said, "knock off and come for a day's
gossip. I'm rotten. There's a sympathetic sort of lunacy about
you. Let's go to Staines and paddle up to Windsor."  

"Girl?" said Ewart, putting down a chisel.

"Yes."  

That was all I told him of my affair.

"I've got no money," he remarked, to clear up ambiguity in my
invitation.

We got a jar of shandy-gaff, some food, and, on Ewart's
suggestion, two Japanese sunshades in Staines; we demanded extra
cushions at the boathouse and we spent an enormously soothing day
in discourse and meditation, our boat moored in a shady place
this side of Windsor. I seem to remember Ewart with a cushion
forward, only his heels and sunshade and some black ends of hair
showing, a voice and no more, against the shining,
smoothly-streaming mirror of the trees and bushes.

"It's not worth it," was the burthen of the voice. "You'd better
get yourself a Millie, Ponderevo, and then you wouldn't feel so
upset."

"No," I said decidedly, "that's not my way."

A thread of smoke ascended from Ewart for a while, like smoke
from an altar.

"Everything's a muddle, and you think it isn't. Nobody  knows
where we are--because, as a matter of fact we aren't anywhere.
Are women property--or are they fellow-creatures? Or a sort of
proprietary goddesses? They're so obviously fellow-creatures.
You believe in the goddess?"

"No," I said, "that's not my idea."  

"What is your idea?"

"Well"

"H'm," said Ewart, in my pause.

"My idea," I said, "is to meet one person who will belong to
me--to whom I shall belong--body and soul. No half-gods! Wait
till she comes. If she comes at all.... We must come to each
other young and pure."  

"There's no such thing as a pure person or an impure person....
Mixed to begin with."  

This was so manifestly true that it silenced me altogether.

"And if you belong to her and she to you, Ponderevo--which end's
the head?"

I made no answer except an impatient "oh!"

For a time we smoked in silence....

"Did I tell you, Ponderevo, of a wonderful discovery I've made?"
Ewart began presently.

"No," I said, "what is it?"

"There's no Mrs. Grundy."  

"No?"

"No! Practically not. I've just thought all that business out.
She's merely an instrument, Ponderevo. She's borne the blame.
Grundy's a man. Grundy unmasked. Rather lean and out of sorts.
Early middle age. With bunchy black whiskers and a worried eye.
Been good so far, and it's fretting him! Moods! There's Grundy
in a state of sexual panic, for example,--'For God's sake cover
it up! They get together--they get together! It's too exciting!
The most dreadful things are happening!'  Rushing about--long
arms going like a windmill. 'They must be kept apart!'  Starts
out for an absolute obliteration of everything absolute
separations. One side of the road for men, and the other for
women, and a hoarding--without posters between them. Every boy
and girl to be sewed up in a sack and sealed, just the head and
hands and feet out until twenty-one. Music abolished, calico
garments for the lower animals! Sparrows to be
suppressed--ab-so-lutely."  

I laughed abruptly.

"Well, that's Mr. Grundy in one mood--and it puts Mrs.
Grundy--She's a much-maligned person, Ponderevo--a rake at
heart--and it puts her in a most painful state of fluster--most
painful! She's an amenable creature. When Grundy tells her
things are shocking, she's shocked--pink and breathless. She
goes about trying to conceal her profound sense of guilt behind a
haughty expression....

"Grundy, meanwhile, is in a state of complete whirlabout. Long
lean knuckly hands pointing and gesticulating! 'They're still
thinking of things--thinking of things! It's dreadful. They get
it out of books. I can't imagine where they get it! I must
watch! There're people over there whispering! Nobody ought to
whisper!--There's something suggestive in the mere act! Then,
pictures! In the museum--things too dreadful for words.  Why
can't we have pure art--with the anatomy all wrong and pure and
nice--and pure fiction pure poetry, instead of all this stuff
with allusions--allusions?... Excuse me! There's something up
behind that locked door! The keyhole! In the interests of
public morality--yes, Sir, as a pure good man--I insist--I'LL
look--it won't hurt me--I insist on looking my  duty--M'm'm--the
keyhole!'"

He kicked his legs about extravagantly, and I laughed again.

"That's Grundy in one mood, Ponderevo. It isn't Mrs. Grundy.
That's one of the lies we tell about women. They're too simple.
Simple! Woman ARE simple! They take on just what men tell 'em."

Ewart meditated for a space. "Just exactly as it's put to them,"
he said, and resumed the moods of Mr. Grundy.                 

"Then you get old Grundy in another mood. Ever caught him
nosing, Ponderevo? Mad with the idea of mysterious, unknown,
wicked, delicious things. Things that aren't respectable. Wow!
Things he mustn't do!... Any one who knows about these things,
knows there's just as much mystery and deliciousness about
Grundy's forbidden things as there is about eating ham. Jolly
nice if it's a bright morning and you're well and hungry and
having breakfast in the open air. Jolly unattractive if you're
off colour. But Grundy's covered it all up and hidden it and put
mucky shades and covers over it until he's forgotten it. Begins
to fester round it in his mind. Has dreadful struggles--with
himself about impure thoughts.... Then you set Grundy with hot
ears,--curious in undertones. Grundy on the loose, Grundy in a
hoarse whisper and with furtive eyes and convulsive
movements--making things indecent. Evolving--in dense
vapours--indecency!

"Grundy sins. Oh, yes, he's a hypocrite. Sneaks round a corner
and sins ugly. It's Grundy and his dark corners that make vice,
vice! We artists--we have no vices.

"And then he's frantic with repentance. And wants to be cruel to
fallen women and decent harmless sculptors  of the simple
nude--like me--and so back to his panic again."  

"Mrs. Grundy, I suppose, doesn't know he sins," I remarked.

"No? I'm not so sure.... But, bless her heart she's a woman....
She's a woman. Then again you get Grundy with a large greasy
smile--like an accident to a butter tub--all over his face, being
Liberal Minded--Grundy in his Anti-Puritan moments, 'trying not
to see Harm in it'--Grundy the friend of innocent pleasure. He
makes you sick with the Harm he's trying not to see in it...

"And that's why everything's wrong, Ponderevo. Grundy, damn him!
stands in the light, and we young people can't see. His moods
affect us. We catch his gusts of panic, his disease of nosing,
his greasiness. We don't know what we may think, what we may
say, he does his silly utmost to prevent our reading and seeing
the one thing, the one sort of discussion we find--quite
naturally and properly--supremely interesting. So we don't
adolescence; we blunder up to sex. Dare--dare to look--and he
may dirt you for ever! The girls are terror-stricken to silence
by his significant whiskers, by the bleary something in his
eyes."  

Suddenly Ewart, with an almost Jack-in-the-box effect, sat up.

"He's about us everywhere, Ponderevo," he said, very solemnly.
"Sometimes--sometimes I think he is--in our blood. In MINE."  

He regarded me for my opinion very earnestly, with his pipe in
the corner of his mouth.

"You're the remotest cousin he ever had," I said.

I reflected. "Look here, Ewart," I asked, "how would you have
things different?"

He wrinkled up his queer face, regarded the wait and made his
pipe gurgle for a space, thinking deeply.

"There are complications, I admit. We've grown up under the
terror of Grundy and that innocent but docile
and--yes--formidable lady, his wife. I don't know how far the
complications aren't a disease, a sort of bleaching under the
Grundy shadow.... It is possible there are things I have still
to learn about women.... Man has eaten of the Tree of Knowledge.
His innocence is gone. You can't have your cake and eat it.
We're in for knowledge; let's have it plain and straight. I
should begin, I think, by abolishing the ideas of decency and
indecency...."  

"Grundy would have fits!" I injected.

"Grundy, Ponderevo, would have cold douches--publicly--if the
sight was not too painful--three times a day.... But I don't
think, mind you, that I should let the sexes run about together.
No. The fact behind the sexes--is sex. It's no good humbugging.
It trails about--even in the best mixed company. Tugs at your
ankle. The men get showing off and quarrelling--and the women.
Or they're bored. I suppose the ancestral  males have competed
for the ancestral females ever since they were both some sort of
grubby little reptile. You aren't going to alter that in a
thousand years or so.... Never should you have a mixed company,
never--except with only one man or only one woman. How would
that be?...

"Or duets only?...

"How to manage it? Some rule of etiquette, perhaps."... He
became portentously grave.

Then his long hand went out in weird gestures.

"I seem to see--I seem to see--a sort of City of Women,
Ponderevo. Yes.... A walled enclosure--good stone-mason's
work--a city wall, high as the walls of Rome, going about a
garden. Dozens of square miles of garden--trees--fountains--
arbours--lakes. Lawns on which the women play, avenues in which
they gossip, boats.... Women like that sort of thing. Any woman
who's been to a good eventful girls' school lives on the memory
of it for the rest of her life. It's one of the pathetic things
about women--the superiority of school and college--to anything
they get afterwards. And this city-garden of women will have
beautiful places for music, places for beautiful dresses, places
for beautiful work. Everything a woman can want. Nurseries.
Kindergartens. Schools. And no man--except to do rough work,
perhaps--ever comes in. The men live in a world where they can
hunt and engineer, invent and mine and manufacture, sail ships,
drink deep and practice the arts, and fight--"

"Yes," I said, "but--"

He stilled me with a gesture.

"I'm coming to that. The homes of the women, Ponderevo, will be
set in the wall of their city; each woman will have her own
particular house and home, furnished after her own heart in her
own manner--with a little balcony on the outside wall. Built
into the wall--and a little balcony. And there she will go and
look out, when the mood takes her, and all round the city there
will be a broad road and seats and great shady trees. And men
will stroll up and down there when they feel the need of feminine
company; when, for instance, they want to talk about their souls
or their characters or any of the things that only women will
stand.... The women will lean over and look at the men and smile
and talk to them as they fancy. And each woman will have this;
she will have a little silken ladder she can let down if she
chooses--if she "wants to talk closer..."  

"The men would still be competing."  

"There perhaps--yes. But they'd have to abide by the women's
decisions."  

I raised one or two difficulties, and for a while we played  with
this idea.

"Ewart," I said, "this is like Doll's Island.

"Suppose," I reflected, "an unsuccessful man laid siege to a
balcony and wouldn't let his rival come near it?"

"Move him on," said Ewart, "by a special regulation. As one does
organ-grinders. No difficulty about that. And you could forbid
it--make it against the etiquette. No life is decent without
etiquette.... And people obey etiquette sooner than laws..."  

"H'm," I said, and was struck by an idea that is remote in the
world of a young man. "How about children?" I asked; "in the
City? Girls are all very well. But boys, for example--grow up."

"Ah!" said Ewart. "Yes. I forgot. They mustn't grow up
inside.... They'd turn out the boys when they were seven. The
father must come with a little pony and a little gun and manly
wear, and take the boy away. Then one could come afterwards to
one's mother's balcony.... It must be fine to have a mother.
The father and the son..."  

"This is all very pretty in its way," I said at last, "but it's a
dream. Let's come back to reality. What I want to know is, what
are you going to do in Brompton, let us say, or Walham Green
NOW?"

"Oh! damn it!" he remarked, "Walham Green! What a chap you are,
Ponderevo!" and he made an abrupt end to his discourse. He
wouldn't even reply to my tentatives for a time.

"While I was talking just now," he remarked presently,

"I had a quite different idea."  

"What?"

"For a masterpiece. A series. Like the busts of the Caesars.
Only not heads, you know. We don't see the people who do things
to us nowadays..."  

"How will you do it, then?"

"Hands--a series of hands! The hands of the Twentieth  Century.
I'll do it. Some day some one will discover it--go there--see
what I have done, and what is meant by it."  

"See it where?"

"On the tombs. Why not? The Unknown Master of the Highgate
Slope! All the little, soft feminine hands, the nervous ugly
males, the hands of the flops, and the hands of the snatchers!
And Grundy's loose, lean, knuckly affair--Grundy the terror!--the
little wrinkles and the thumb! Only it ought to hold all the
others together--in a slightly disturbing squeeze....Like
Rodin's great Hand--you know the thing!"

IV

I forget how many days intervened between that last breaking off
of our engagement and Marion's surrender. But I recall now the
sharpness of my emotion, the concentrated  spirit of tears and
laughter in my throat as I read the words of her unexpected
letter--"I have thought over everything, and I was selfish...."  
I rushed off to Walham Green that evening to give back all she
had given me, to beat her altogether at giving. She was
extraordinarily gentle and generous that time, I remember, and
when at last I left her, she kissed me very sweetly.

So we were married.

We were married with all the customary incongruity. I
gave--perhaps after a while not altogether ungrudgingly--and
what I gave, Marion took, with a manifest satisfaction. After
all, I was being sensible. So that we had three livery carriages
to the church (one of the pairs of horses matched) and
coachmen--with improvised flavour and very shabby silk
hats--bearing white favours on their whips, and my uncle
intervened with splendour and insisted upon having a wedding
breakfast sent in from a caterer's in Hammersmith. The table had
a great display of chrysanthemums, and there was orange blossom
in the significant place and a wonderful cake. We also
circulated upwards of a score of wedges of that accompanied by
silver-printed cards in which Marion's name of Ramboat was
stricken out by an arrow in favour of Ponderevo. We had a little
rally of Marion's relations, and several friends and friends'
friends from Smithie's appeared in the church and drifted
vestry-ward. I produced my aunt and uncle a select group of
two. The effect in that shabby little house was one of
exhilarating congestion. The side-board, in which lived the
table-cloth and the "Apartments" card, was used for a display of
the presents, eked out by the unused balance of the
silver-printed cards.

Marion wore the white raiment of a bride, white silk and satin,
that did not suit her, that made her seem large and strange to
me; she obtruded bows and unfamiliar contours. She went through
all this strange ritual of an English wedding with a sacramental
gravity that I was altogether too young and egotistical to
comprehend. It was all extraordinarily central and important to
her; it was no more than an offensive, complicated, and
disconcerting intrusion of a world I was already beginning to
criticise very bitterly, to me. What was all this fuss for? The
mere indecent advertisement that I had been passionately in love
with Marion! I think, however, that Marion was only very
remotely aware of my smouldering exasperation at having in the
end behaved "nicely."  I had played--up to the extent of dressing
my part; I had an admirably cut frock--coat, a new silk hat,
trousers as light as I could endure them--lighter, in fact--a
white waistcoat, night tie, light gloves. Marion, seeing me
despondent had the unusual enterprise to whisper to me that I
looked lovely; I knew too well I didn't look myself. I looked
like a special coloured supplement to Men's Wear, or The Tailor
and Cutter, Full Dress For Ceremonial Occasions. I had even the
disconcerting sensations of an unfamiliar collar. I felt
lost--in a strange body, and when I glanced down myself for
reassurance, the straight white abdomen, the alien legs confirmed
that impression.

My uncle was my best man, and looked like a banker--a little
banker--in flower. He wore a white rose in his buttonhole. He
wasn't, I think, particularly talkative. At least I recall very
little from him.

"George" he said once or twice, "this is a great occasion for
you--a very great occasion."  He spoke a little doubtfully.

You see I had told him nothing about Marion until about a week
before the wedding; both he and my aunt had been taken altogether
by surprise. They couldn't, as people say, "make it out."   My
aunt was intensely interested, much more than my uncle; it was
then, I think, for the first time that I really saw that she
cared for me. She got me alone, I remember, after I had made my
announcement. "Now, George," she said, "tell me everything about
her. Why didn't you tell--ME at least--before?"

I was surprised to find how difficult it was to tell her about
Marion. I perplexed her.

"Then is she beautiful?" she asked at last.

"I don't know what you'll think of her," I parried. "I think--"

"Yes?"

"I think she might be the most beautiful person in the world."  

"And isn't she? To you?"

"Of course," I said, nodding my head. "Yes. She IS..."  

And while I don't remember anything my uncle said or did at the
wedding, I do remember very distinctly certain little things,
scrutiny, solicitude, a curious rare flash of intimacy in my
aunt's eyes. It dawned on me that I wasn't hiding anything from
her at all. She was dressed very smartly, wearing a big-plumed
hat that made her neck seem longer and slenderer than ever, and
when she walked up the aisle with that rolling stride of hers and
her eye all on Marion, perplexed into self-forgetfulness, it
wasn't somehow funny. She was, I do believe, giving my marriage
more thought than I had done, she was concerned beyond measure at
my black rage and Marion's blindness, she was looking with eyes
that knew what loving is--for love.

In the vestry she turned away as we signed, and I verily believe
she was crying, though to this day I can't say why she should
have cried, and she was near crying too when she squeezed my hand
at parting--and she never said a word or looked at me, but just
squeezed my hand....

If I had not been so grim in spirit, I think I should have found
much of my wedding amusing. I remember a lot of ridiculous
detail that still declines to be funny in my memory. The
officiating clergyman had a cold, and turned his "n's" to "d's,"
and he made the most mechanical compliment conceivable about the
bride's age when the register was signed. Every bride he had
ever married had had it, one knew. And two middle-aged
spinsters, cousins of Marion's and dressmakers at Barking, stand
out. They wore marvellously bright and gay blouses and dim old
skirts, and had an immense respect for Mr. Ramboat. They threw
rice; they brought a whole bag with them and gave handfuls away
to unknown little boys at the church door and so created a
Lilliputian riot; and one had meant to throw a slipper. It was a
very warm old silk slipper, I know, because she dropped it out of
a pocket in the aisle--there was a sort of jumble in the
aisle--and I picked it up for her. I don't think she actually
threw it, for as we drove away from the church I saw her in a
dreadful, and, it seemed to me, hopeless, struggle with her
pocket; and afterwards my eye caught the missile of good fortune
lying, it or its fellow, most obviously mislaid, behind the
umbrella-stand in the hall....

The whole business was much more absurd, more incoherent, more
human than I had anticipated, but I was far too young and serious
to let the latter quality atone for its shortcomings. I am so
remote from this phase of my youth that I can look back at it all
as dispassionately as one looks at a picture--at some wonderful,
perfect sort of picture that is inexhaustible; but at the time
these things filled me with unspeakable resentment. Now I go
round it all, look into its details, generalise about its
aspects. I'm interested, for example, to square it with my
Bladesover theory of the British social scheme. Under stress of
tradition we were all of us trying in the fermenting chaos of
London to carry out the marriage ceremonies of a Bladesover
tenant or one of the chubby middling sort of people in some
dependent country town. There a marriage is a public function
with a public significance. There the church is to a large
extent the gathering-place of the community, and your going to
be married a thing of importance to every one you pass on the
road. It is a change of status that quite legitimately interests
the whole neighbourhood. But in London there are no neighbours,
nobody knows, nobody cares. An absolute stranger in an office
took my notice, and our banns were proclaimed to ears that had
never previously heard our names. The clergyman, even, who
married us had never seen us before, and didn't in any degree
intimate that he wanted to see us again.

Neighbours in London! The Ramboats did not know the names of the
people on either side of them. As I waited for Marion before we
started off upon our honeymoon flight, Mr. Ramboat, I remember,
came and stood beside me and stared out of the window.

"There was a funeral over there yesterday," he said, by way of
making conversation, and moved his head at the house opposite.
"Quite a smart affair it was with a glass 'earse...."  

And our little procession of three carriages with
white-favour-adorned horses and drivers, went through all the
huge, noisy, indifferent traffic like a lost china image in the
coal-chute of an ironclad. Nobody made way for us, nobody cared
for us; the driver of an omnibus jeered; for a long time we
crawled behind an unamiable dust-cart. The irrelevant clatter
and tumult gave a queer flavour of indecency to this public
coming  together of lovers. We seemed to have obtruded ourselves

shamelessly. The crowd that gathered outside the church would
have gathered in the same spirit and with greater alacrity for a
street accident....

At Charing Cross--we were going to Hastings--the experienced eye
of the guard detected the significance of our unusual costume
and he secured us a compartment.

"Well," said I, as the train moved out of the station, "That's
all over!" And I turned to Marion--a little unfamiliar still, in
her unfamiliar clothes--and smiled.

She regarded me gravely, timidly.

"You're not cross?" she asked.

"Cross! Why?"

"At having it all proper."  

"My dear Marion!" said I, and by way of answer took and kissed
her white-gloved, leather-scented hand....

I don't remember much else about the journey, an hour or so it
was of undistinguished time--for we were both confused and a
little fatigued and Marion had a slight headache and did not want
caresses. I fell into a reverie about my aunt, and realised as
if it were a new discovery, that I cared for her very greatly. I
was acutely sorry I had not told her earlier of my marriage.

But you will not want to hear the history of my honeymoon. I
have told all that was needed to serve my present purpose. Thus
and thus it was the Will in things had its way with me. Driven
by forces I did not understand, diverted altogether from the
science, the curiosities and work to which I had once given
myself, I fought my way through a tangle of traditions, customs,
obstacles and absurdities, enraged myself, limited myself, gave
myself to occupations I saw with the clearest vision were
dishonourable and vain, and at last achieved the end of purblind
Nature, the relentless immediacy of her desire, and held, far
short of happiness, Marion weeping and reluctant in my arms.

V

Who can tell the story of the slow estrangement of two married
people, the weakening of first this bond and then that of that
complex contact? Least of all can one of the two participants.
Even now, with an interval of fifteen years to clear it up for
me, I still find a mass of impressions of Marion as confused, as
discordant, as unsystematic and self-contradictory as life. I
think of this thing and love her, of that and hate her--of a
hundred aspects in which I can now see her with an unimpassioned
sympathy. As I sit here trying to render some vision of this
infinitely confused process, I recall moments of hard and fierce
estrangement, moments of clouded intimacy, the passage of
transition all forgotten. We talked a little language together
whence were "friends," and I was "Mutney" and she was "Ming," and
we kept up such an outward show that till the very end Smithie
thought our household the most amiable in the world.

I cannot tell to the full how Marion thwarted me and failed in
that life of intimate emotions which is the kernel of love. That
life of intimate emotions is made up of little things. A
beautiful face differs from an ugly one by a difference of
surfaces and proportions that are sometimes almost
infinitesimally small. I find myself setting down little things
and little things; none of them do more than demonstrate those
essential temperamental discords I have already sought to make
clear. Some readers will understand--to others I shall seem no
more than an unfeeling brute who couldn't make allowances....
It's easy to make allowances now; but to be young and ardent and
to make allowances, to see one's married life open before one,
the life that seemed in its dawn a glory, a garden of roses, a
place of deep sweet mysteries and heart throbs and wonderful
silences, and to see it a vista of tolerations and baby-talk; a
compromise, the least effectual thing in all one's life.

Every love romance I read seemed to mock our dull intercourse,
every poem, every beautiful picture reflected upon the uneventful
succession of grey hours we had together. I think our real
difference was one of aesthetic sensibility.

I do still recall as the worst and most disastrous aspect of all
that time, her absolute disregard of her own beauty. It's the
pettiest thing to record, I know, but she could wear curl-papers
in my presence. It was her idea, too, to "wear out" her old
clothes and her failures at home when "no one was likely to see
her"--"no one" being myself. She allowed me to accumulate
a store of ungracious and slovenly memories....

All our conceptions of life differed. I remember how we differed
about furniture. We spent three or four days in Tottenham Court
Road, and she chose the things she fancied with an inexorable
resolution,--sweeping aside my suggestions with--"Oh, YOU want
such queer things."  She pursued some limited, clearly seen and
experienced ideal--that excluded all other possibilities. Over
every mantel was a mirror that was draped, our sideboard was
wonderfully good and splendid with beveled glass, we had lamps on
long metal stalks and cozy corners and plants in grog-tubs.
Smithie approved it all. There wasn't a place where one could
sit and read in the whole house. My books went upon shelves in
the dining-room recess. And we had a piano though Marion's
playing was at an elementary level.

You know, it was the cruelest luck for Marion that I, with my
restlessness, my scepticism, my constantly developing ideas, had
insisted on marriage with her. She had no faculty of growth or
change; she had taken her mould, she had set in the limited ideas
of her peculiar  class. She preserved her conception of what was
right in drawing-room chairs and in marriage ceremonial and in
every relation of life with a simple and luminous honesty and
conviction, with an immense unimaginative inflexibility--as a
tailor-bird builds its nest or a beaver makes its dam.

Let me hasten over this history of disappointments and
separation. I might tell of waxings and waning of love between
us, but the whole was waning. Sometimes she would do things for
me, make me a tie or a pair of slippers, and fill me with none
the less gratitude because the things were absurd. She ran our
home and our one servant with a hard, bright efficiency. She was
inordinately proud of house and garden. Always, by her lights,
she did her duty by me.

Presently the rapid development of Tono-Bungay began to take me
into the provinces, and I would be away sometimes for a week
together. This she did not like; it left her "dull," she said,
but after a time she began to go to Smithie's again and to
develop an independence of me. At Smithie's she was now a woman
with a position;  she had money to spend. She would take Smithie
to theatres and out to lunch and talk interminably of the
business, and Smithie became a sort of permanent weekender with
us. Also Marion got a spaniel and began to dabble with the minor
arts, with poker-work and a Kodak and hyacinths in glasses. She
called once on a neighbour. Her parents left Walham Green--her
father severed his connection with the gas-works--and came to
live in a small house I took for them near us, and they were much
with us.

Odd the littleness of the things that exasperate when the
fountains of life are embittered! My father-in-law was
perpetually catching me in moody moments and urging me to take to
gardening. He irritated me beyond measure.

"You think too much," he would say. "If you was to let in a bit
with a spade, you might soon 'ave that garden of yours a Vision
of Flowers. That's better than thinking, George."