Tono Bungay

H >> H. G. Wells >> Tono Bungay


I had never seen my uncle so immensely serious.

"Got to get the hang of etiquette," he went on to the fire. "Horses
even. Practise everything. Dine every night in evening dress.... Get
a brougham or something. Learn up golf and tennis and things. Country
gentleman. Oh Fay. It isn't only freedom from Goochery."

"Eh?" I said.

"Oh!--Gawshery, if you like!"

"French, George," said my aunt. "But I'M not ol' Gooch. I made that face
for fun."

"It isn't only freedom from Gawshery. We got to have Style. See! Style!
Just all right and one better. That's what I call Style. We can do it,
and we will."

He mumbled his cigar and smoked for a space, leaning forward and looking
into the fire.

"What is it," he asked, "after all? What is it? Tips about eating; tips
about drinking. Clothes. How to hold yourself, and not say jes' the
few little things they know for certain are wrong--jes' the shibboleth
things."

He was silent again, and the cigar crept up from the horizontal towards
the zenith as the confidence of his mouth increased.

"Learn the whole bag of tricks in six months." he said, becoming more
cheerful. "Ah, Susan? Beat it out! George, you in particular ought to
get hold of it. Ought to get into a good club, and all that."

"Always ready to learn!" I said. "Ever since you gave me the chance of
Latin. So far we don't seem to have hit upon any Latin-speaking stratum
in the population."

"We've come to French," said my aunt, "anyhow."

"It's a very useful language," said my uncle. "Put a point on things.
Zzzz. As for accent, no Englishman has an accent. No Englishman
pronounces French properly. Don't you tell ME. It's a Bluff.--It's all a
Bluff. Life's a Bluff--practically. That's why it's so important, Susan,
for us to attend to Style. Le Steel Say Lum. The Style it's the man.
Whad you laughing at, Susan? George, you're not smoking. These cigars
are good for the mind.... What do YOU think of it all? We got to adapt
ourselves. We have--so far.... Not going to be beat by these silly
things."

IV

"What do you think of it, George?" he insisted.

What I said I thought of it I don't now recall. Only I have very
distinctly the impression of meeting for a moment my aunt's impenetrable
eye. And anyhow he started in with his accustomed energy to rape the
mysteries of the Costly Life, and become the calmest of its lords. On
the whole, I think he did it--thoroughly. I have crowded memories,
a little difficult to disentangle, of his experimental stages, his
experimental proceedings. It's hard at times to say which memory comes
in front of which. I recall him as presenting on the whole a series of
small surprises, as being again and again, unexpectedly, a little more
self-confident, a little more polished, a little richer and finer, a
little more aware of the positions and values of things and men.

There was a time--it must have been very early--when I saw him deeply
impressed by the splendours of the dining-room of the National Liberal
Club. Heaven knows who our host was or what that particular little
"feed" was about now!--all that sticks is the impression of our
straggling entry, a string of six or seven guests, and my uncle looking
about him at the numerous bright red-shaded tables, at the exotics in
great Majolica jars, at the shining ceramic columns and pilasters, at
the impressive portraits of Liberal statesmen and heroes, and all that
contributes to the ensemble of that palatial spectacle. He was betrayed
into a whisper to me, "This is all Right, George!" he said. That artless
comment seems almost incredible as I set it down; there came a time
so speedily when not even the clubs of New York could have overawed my
uncle, and when he could walk through the bowing magnificence of the
Royal Grand Hotel to his chosen table in that aggressively exquisite
gallery upon the river, with all the easy calm of one of earth's
legitimate kings.

The two of them learnt the new game rapidly and well; they experimented
abroad, they experimented at home. At Chiselhurst, with the aid of
a new, very costly, but highly instructive cook, they tried over
everything they heard of that roused their curiosity and had any
reputation for difficulty, from asparagus to plover's eggs. They
afterwards got a gardener who could wait at table--and he brought the
soil home to one. Then there came a butler.

I remember my aunt's first dinner-gown very brightly, and how she stood
before the fire in the drawing-room confessing once unsuspected pretty
arms with all the courage she possessed, and looking over her shoulder
at herself in a mirror.

"A ham," she remarked reflectively, "must feel like this. Just a
necklace."...

I attempted, I think, some commonplace compliment.

My uncle appeared at the door in a white waistcoat and with his hands in
his trouser pockets; he halted and surveyed her critically.

"Couldn't tell you from a duchess, Susan," he remarked. "I'd like
to have you painted, standin' at the fire like that. Sargent! You
look--spirited, somehow. Lord!--I wish some of those damned tradesmen at
Wimblehurst could see you."...

They did a lot of week-ending at hotels, and sometimes I went down with
them. We seemed to fall into a vast drifting crowd of social learners. I
don't know whether it is due simply to my changed circumstances, but it
seems to me there have been immensely disproportionate developments of
the hotel-frequenting and restaurant-using population during the last
twenty years. It is not only, I think, that there are crowds of people
who, like we were, are in the economically ascendant phase, but whole
masses of the prosperous section of the population must be altering its
habits, giving up high-tea for dinner and taking to evening dress, using
the week-end hotels as a practise-ground for these new social arts. A
swift and systematic conversion to gentility has been going on, I am
convinced, throughout the whole commercial upper-middle class since I
was twenty-one. Curiously mixed was the personal quality of the
people one saw in these raids. There were conscientiously refined
and low-voiced people reeking with proud bashfulness; there were
aggressively smart people using pet diminutives for each other loudly
and seeking fresh occasions for brilliant rudeness; there were awkward
husbands and wives quarrelling furtively about their manners and ill
at ease under the eye of the winter; cheerfully amiable and often
discrepant couples with a disposition to inconspicuous corners, and the
jolly sort, affecting an unaffected ease; plump happy ladies who laughed
too loud, and gentlemen in evening dress who subsequently "got their
pipes." And nobody, you knew, was anybody, however expensively they
dressed and whatever rooms they took.

I look back now with a curious remoteness of spirit to those crowded
dining-rooms with their dispersed tables and their inevitable red-shaded
lights and the unsympathetic, unskillful waiters, and the choice of
"Thig or Glear, Sir?" I've not dined in that way, in that sort of place,
now for five years--it must be quite five years, so specialised and
narrow is my life becoming.

My uncle's earlier motor-car phases work in with these associations,
and there stands out a little bright vignette of the hall of the
Magnificent, Bexhill-on-Sea, and people dressed for dinner and sitting
about amidst the scarlet furniture--satin and white-enameled woodwork
until the gong should gather them; and my aunt is there, very
marvelously wrapped about in a dust cloak and a cage-like veil, and
there are hotel porters and under-porters very alert, and an obsequious
manager; and the tall young lady in black from the office is surprised
into admiration, and in the middle of the picture is my uncle, making
his first appearance in that Esquimaux costume I have already mentioned,
a short figure, compactly immense, hugely goggled, wearing a sort of
brown rubber proboscis, and surmounted by a table-land of motoring cap.

V

So it was we recognised our new needs as fresh invaders of the upper
levels of the social system, and set ourselves quite consciously to
the acquisition of Style and Savoir Faire. We became part of what is
nowadays quite an important element in the confusion of our world, that
multitude of economically ascendant people who are learning how to spend
money. It is made up of financial people, the owners of the businesses
that are eating up their competitors, inventors of new sources of
wealth, such as ourselves; it includes nearly all America as one sees
it on the European stage. It is a various multitude having only this
in common: they are all moving, and particularly their womankind are
moving, from conditions in which means were insistently finite, things
were few, and customs simple, towards a limitless expenditure and the
sphere of attraction of Bond Street, Fifth Avenue, and Paris. Their
general effect is one of progressive revolution, of limitless rope.

They discover suddenly indulgences their moral code never foresaw and
has no provision for, elaborations, ornaments, possessions beyond their
wildest dreams. With an immense astonished zest they begin shopping
begin a systematic adaptation to a new life crowded and brilliant
with things shopped, with jewels, maids, butlers, coachmen, electric
broughams, hired town and country houses. They plunge into it as
one plunges into a career; as a class, they talk, think, and dream
possessions. Their literature, their Press, turns all on that; immense
illustrated weeklies of unsurpassed magnificence guide them in domestic
architecture, in the art of owning a garden, in the achievement of the
sumptuous in motor-cars, in an elaborate sporting equipment, in the
purchase and control of their estates, in travel and stupendous hotels.
Once they begin to move they go far and fast. Acquisition becomes the
substance of their lives. They find a world organised to gratify that
passion. In a brief year or so they are connoisseurs. They join in
the plunder of the eighteenth century, buy rare old books, fine old
pictures, good old furniture. Their first crude conception of dazzling
suites of the newly perfect is replaced almost from the outset by a
jackdaw dream of accumulating costly discrepant old things.

I seem to remember my uncle taking to shopping quite suddenly. In
the Beckenham days and in the early Chiselhurst days he was chiefly
interested in getting money, and except for his onslaught on the
Beckenham house, bothered very little about his personal surroundings
and possessions. I forget now when the change came and he began to
spend. Some accident must have revealed to him this new source of power,
or some subtle shifting occurred in the tissues of his brain. He began
to spend and "shop." So soon as he began to shop, he began to shop
violently. He began buying pictures, and then, oddly enough, old clocks.
For the Chiselhurst house he bought nearly a dozen grandfather clocks
and three copper warming pans. After that he bought much furniture. Then
he plunged into art patronage, and began to commission pictures and to
make presents to churches and institutions. His buying increased with a
regular acceleration. Its development was a part of the mental changes
that came to him in the wild excitements of the last four years of his
ascent. Towards the climax he was a furious spender; he shopped with
large unexpected purchases, he shopped like a mind seeking expression,
he shopped to astonish and dismay; shopped crescendo, shopped
fortissimo, con molto espressione until the magnificent smash of Crest
Hill eroded his shopping for ever. Always it was he who shopped. My aunt
did not shine as a purchaser. It is a curious thing, due to I know not
what fine strain in her composition, that my aunt never set any great
store upon possessions. She plunged through that crowded bazaar of
Vanity Fair during those feverish years, spending no doubt freely and
largely, but spending with detachment and a touch of humorous contempt
for the things, even the "old" things, that money can buy. It came to
me suddenly one afternoon just how detached she was, as I saw her going
towards the Hardingham, sitting up, as she always did, rather stiffly
in her electric brougham, regarding the glittering world with interested
and ironically innocent blue eyes from under the brim of a hat that
defied comment. "No one," I thought, "would sit so apart if she hadn't
dreams--and what are her dreams?"

I'd never thought.

And I remember, too, an outburst of scornful description after she had
lunched with a party of women at the Imperial Cosmic Club. She came
round to my rooms on the chance of finding me there, and I gave her
tea. She professed herself tired and cross, and flung herself into my
chair....

"George," she cried, "the Things women are! Do _I_ stink of money?"

"Lunching?" I asked.

She nodded.

"Plutocratic ladies?"

"Yes."

"Oriental type?"

"Oh! Like a burst hareem!... Bragging of possessions.... They feel you.
They feel your clothes, George, to see if they are good!"

I soothed her as well as I could. "They ARE Good aren't they?" I said.

"It's the old pawnshop in their blood," she said, drinking tea; and then
in infinite disgust, "They run their hands over your clothes--they paw
you."

I had a moment of doubt whether perhaps she had not been discovered in
possession of unsuspected forgeries. I don't know. After that my eyes
were quickened, and I began to see for myself women running their hands
over other women's furs, scrutinising their lace, even demanding to
handle jewelry, appraising, envying, testing. They have a kind of
etiquette. The woman who feels says, "What beautiful sables?" "What
lovely lace?" The woman felt admits proudly: "It's Real, you know,"
or disavows pretension modestly and hastily, "It's Rot Good." In
each other's houses they peer at the pictures, handle the selvage of
hangings, look at the bottoms of china....

I wonder if it IS the old pawnshop in the blood.

I doubt if Lady Drew and the Olympians did that sort of thing, but
here I may be only clinging to another of my former illusions about
aristocracy and the State. Perhaps always possessions have been Booty,
and never anywhere has there been such a thing as house and furnishings
native and natural to the women and men who made use of them....

VI

For me, at least, it marked an epoch in my uncle's career when I learnt
one day that he had "shopped" Lady Grove. I realised a fresh, wide,
unpreluded step. He took me by surprise with the sudden change of scale
from such portable possessions as jewels and motor-cars to a stretch of
countryside. The transaction was Napoleonic; he was told of the place;
he said "snap"; there were no preliminary desirings or searchings. Then
he came home and said what he had done. Even my aunt was for a day or
so measurably awestricken by this exploit in purchase, and we both went
down with him to see the house in a mood near consternation. It struck
us then as a very lordly place indeed. I remember the three of
us standing on the terrace that looked westward, surveying the
sky-reflecting windows of the house, and a feeling of unwarrantable
intrusion comes back to me.

Lady Grove, you know, is a very beautiful house indeed, a still and
gracious place, whose age-long seclusion was only effectively broken
with the toot of the coming of the motor-car. An old Catholic family
had died out in it, century by century, and was now altogether
dead. Portions of the fabric are thirteenth century, and its last
architectural revision was Tudor; within, it is for the most part dark
and chilly, save for two or three favoured rooms and its tall-windowed,
oak-galleried hall. Its terrace is its noblest feature; a very wide,
broad lawn it is, bordered by a low stone battlement, and there is
a great cedar in one corner under whose level branches one looks out
across the blue distances of the Weald, blue distances that are made
extraordinarily Italian in quality by virtue of the dark masses of that
single tree. It is a very high terrace; southward one looks down upon
the tops of wayfaring trees and spruces, and westward on a steep slope
of beechwood, through which the road comes. One turns back to the still
old house, and sees a grey and lichenous facade with a very finely
arched entrance. It was warmed by the afternoon light and touched with
the colour of a few neglected roses and a pyracanthus. It seemed to me
that the most modern owner conceivable in this serene fine place
was some bearded scholarly man in a black cassock, gentle-voiced and
white-handed, or some very soft-robed, grey gentlewoman. And there was
my uncle holding his goggles in a sealskin glove, wiping the glass with
a pocket-handkerchief, and asking my aunt if Lady Grove wasn't a "Bit of
all Right."

My aunt made him no answer.

"The man who built this," I speculated, "wore armour and carried a
sword."

"There's some of it inside still," said my uncle.

We went inside. An old woman with very white hair was in charge of the
place and cringed rather obviously to the new master. She evidently
found him a very strange and frightful apparition indeed, and was
dreadfully afraid of him. But if the surviving present bowed down to
us, the past did not. We stood up to the dark, long portraits of the
extinguished race--one was a Holbein--and looked them in their sidelong
eyes. They looked back at us. We all, I know, felt the enigmatical
quality in them. Even my uncle was momentarily embarrassed, I think, by
that invincibly self-complacent expression. It was just as though, after
all, he had not bought them up and replaced them altogether; as though
that, secretly, they knew better and could smile at him.

The spirit of the place was akin to Bladesover, but touched with
something older and remoter. That armour that stood about had once
served in tilt-yards, if indeed it had not served in battle, and this
family had sent its blood and treasure, time after time, upon the most
romantic quest in history, to Palestine. Dreams, loyalties, place and
honour, how utterly had it all evaporated, leaving, at last, the final
expression of its spirit, these quaint painted smiles, these smiles
of triumphant completion! It had evaporated, indeed, long before the
ultimate Durgan had died, and in his old age he had cumbered the place
with Early Victorian cushions and carpets and tapestry table-cloths and
invalid appliances of a type even more extinct, it seemed to us, than
the crusades.... Yes, it was different from Bladesover.

"Bit stuffy, George," said my uncle. "They hadn't much idea of
ventilation when this was built."

One of the panelled rooms was half-filled with presses and a four-poster
bed. "Might be the ghost room," said my uncle; but it did not seem to
me that so retiring a family as the Durgans, so old and completely
exhausted a family as the Durgans, was likely to haunt anybody. What
living thing now had any concern with their honour and judgments and
good and evil deeds? Ghosts and witchcraft were a later innovation--that
fashion came from Scotland with the Stuarts.

Afterwards, prying for epitaphs, we found a marble crusader with a
broken nose, under a battered canopy of fretted stone, outside the
restricted limits of the present Duffield church, and half buried in
nettles. "Ichabod," said my uncle. "Eh? We shall be like that, Susan,
some day.... I'm going to clean him up a bit and put a railing to keep
off the children."

"Old saved at the eleventh hour," said my aunt, quoting one of the less
successful advertisements of Tono-Bungay.

But I don't think my uncle heard her.

It was by our captured crusader that the vicar found us. He came round
the corner at us briskly, a little out of breath. He had an air of
having been running after us since the first toot of our horn had warned
the village of our presence. He was an Oxford man, clean-shaven, with
a cadaverous complexion and a guardedly respectful manner, a cultivated
intonation, and a general air of accommodation to the new order of
things. These Oxford men are the Greeks of our plutocratic empire. He
was a Tory in spirit, and what one may call an adapted Tory by stress
of circumstances; that is to say, he was no longer a legitimist; he was
prepared for the substitution of new lords for old. We were pill vendors
he knew, and no doubt horribly vulgar in soul; but then it might have
been some polygamous Indian rajah, a great strain on a good man's tact,
or some Jew with an inherited expression of contempt. Anyhow, we were
English, and neither Dissenters nor Socialists, and he was cheerfully
prepared to do what he could to make gentlemen of both of us. He might
have preferred Americans for some reasons; they are not so obviously
taken from one part of the social system and dumped down in another, and
they are more teachable; but in this world we cannot always be choosers.
So he was very bright and pleasant with us, showed us the church,
gossiped informingly about our neighbours on the countryside--Tux, the
banker; Lord Boom, the magazine and newspaper proprietor; Lord Carnaby,
that great sportsman, and old Lady Osprey. And finally he took us by
way of a village lane--three children bobbed convulsively with eyes
of terror for my uncle--through a meticulous garden to a big, slovenly
Vicarage with faded Victorian furniture and a faded Victorian wife, who
gave us tea and introduced us to a confusing family dispersed among a
lot of disintegrating basket chairs upon the edge of a well-used tennis
lawn.

These people interested me. They were a common type, no doubt, but they
were new to me. There were two lank sons who had been playing singles
at tennis, red-eared youths growing black moustaches, and dressed in
conscientiously untidy tweeds and unbuttoned and ungirt Norfolk jackets.
There were a number of ill-nourished-looking daughters, sensible
and economical in their costume, the younger still with long,
brown-stockinged legs, and the eldest present--there were, we
discovered, one or two hidden away--displaying a large gold cross
and other aggressive ecclesiastical symbols; there were two or three
fox-terriers, a retrieverish mongrel, and an old, bloody-eyed and very
evil-smelling St. Bernard. There was a jackdaw. There was, moreover, an
ambiguous, silent lady that my aunt subsequently decided must be a very
deaf paying guest. Two or three other people had concealed themselves at
our coming and left unfinished teas behind them. Rugs and cushions lay
among the chairs, and two of the latter were, I noted, covered with
Union Jacks.

The vicar introduced us sketchily, and the faded Victorian wife regarded
my aunt with a mixture of conventional scorn and abject respect,
and talked to her in a languid, persistent voice about people in the
neighbourhood whom my aunt could not possibly know.

My aunt received these personalia cheerfully, with her blue eyes
flitting from point to point, and coming back again and again to the
pinched faces of the daughters and the cross upon the eldest's breast.
Encouraged by my aunt's manner, the vicar's wife grew patronising and
kindly, and made it evident that she could do much to bridge the social
gulf between ourselves and the people of family about us.

I had just snatches of that conversation. "Mrs. Merridew brought him
quite a lot of money. Her father, I believe, had been in the Spanish
wine trade--quite a lady though. And after that he fell off his horse
and cracked his brain pan and took to fishing and farming. I'm sure
you'll like to know them. He's most amusing.... The daughter had a
disappointment and went to China as a missionary and got mixed up in a
massacre."...

"The most beautiful silks and things she brought back, you'd hardly
believe!"

"Yes, they gave them to propitiate her. You see, they didn't understand
the difference, and they thought that as they'd been massacring people,
THEY'D be massacred. They didn't understand the difference Christianity
makes."...

"Seven bishops they've had in the family!"

"Married a Papist and was quite lost to them."...

"He failed some dreadful examination and had to go into the militia."...

"So she bit his leg as hard as ever she could and he let go."...

"Had four of his ribs amputated."...

"Caught meningitis and was carried off in a week."

"Had to have a large piece of silver tube let into his throat, and if he
wants to talk he puts his finger on it. It makes him so interesting, I
think. You feel he's sincere somehow. A most charming man in every way."

"Preserved them both in spirits very luckily, and there they are in his
study, though of course he doesn't show them to everybody."

The silent lady, unperturbed by these apparently exciting topics,
scrutinised my aunt's costume with a singular intensity, and was visibly
moved when she unbuttoned her dust cloak and flung it wide. Meanwhile we
men conversed, one of the more spirited daughters listened brightly, and
the youths lay on the grass at our feet. My uncle offered them cigars,
but they both declined,--out of bashfulness, it seemed to me, whereas
the vicar, I think, accepted out of tact. When we were not looking at
them directly, these young men would kick each other furtively.