Tono Bungay

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


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.