Tono Bungay

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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.