Tono Bungay

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TONO-BUNGAY

by H.G Wells




BOOK THE FIRST

THE DAYS BEFORE TONO-BUNGAY WAS INVENTED




CHAPTER THE FIRST

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


I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

III

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

Let me try and give you the effect of it.

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

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

But of that in its place.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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