Tono Bungay

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


It is curious how at times one's impressions will all fuse and run
together into a sort of unity and become continuous with things that
have hitherto been utterly alien and remote. That rush down the river
became mysteriously connected with this book.

As I passed down the Thames I seemed in a new and parallel manner to be
passing all England in review. I saw it then as I had wanted my readers
to see it. The thought came to me slowly as I picked my way through the
Pool; it stood out clear as I went dreaming into the night out upon the
wide North Sea.

It wasn't so much thinking at the time as a sort of photographic thought
that came and grew clear. X2 went ripping through the dirty oily water
as scissors rip through canvas, and the front of my mind was all intent
with getting her through under the bridges and in and out among the
steam-boats and barges and rowing-boats and piers. I lived with my
hands and eyes hard ahead. I thought nothing then of any appearances but
obstacles, but for all that the back of my mind took the photographic
memory of it complete and vivid....

"This," it came to me, "is England. That is what I wanted to give in my
book. This!"

We started in the late afternoon. We throbbed out of our yard above
Hammersmith Bridge, fussed about for a moment, and headed down stream.
We came at an easy rush down Craven Reach, past Fulham and Hurlingham,
past the long stretches of muddy meadow And muddy suburb to Battersea
and Chelsea, round the cape of tidy frontage that is Grosvenor Road and
under Vauxhall Bridge, and Westminster opened before us. We cleared
a string of coal barges and there on the left in the October sunshine
stood the Parliament houses, and the flag was flying and Parliament was
sitting.

I saw it at the time unseeingly; afterwards it came into my mind as the
centre of the whole broad panoramic effect of that afternoon. The stiff
square lace of Victorian Gothic with its Dutch clock of a tower came
upon me suddenly and stared and whirled past in a slow half pirouette
and became still, I know, behind me as if watching me recede. "Aren't
you going to respect me, then?" it seemed to say.

Not I! There in that great pile of Victorian architecture the landlords
and the lawyers, the bishops, the railway men and the magnates of
commerce go to and fro--in their incurable tradition of commercialised
Bladesovery, of meretricious gentry and nobility sold for riches. I have
been near enough to know. The Irish and the Labour-men run about among
their feet, making a fuss, effecting little, they've got no better plans
that I can see. Respect it indeed! There's a certain paraphernalia of
dignity, but whom does it deceive? The King comes down in a gilt coach
to open the show and wears long robes and a crown; and there's a display
of stout and slender legs in white stockings and stout and slender legs
in black stockings and artful old gentlemen in ermine. I was reminded
of one congested afternoon I had spent with my aunt amidst a cluster of
agitated women's hats in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords and
how I saw the King going to open Parliament, and the Duke of Devonshire
looking like a gorgeous pedlar and terribly bored with the cap of
maintenance on a tray before him hung by slings from his shoulder. A
wonderful spectacle!

It is quaint, no doubt, this England--it is even dignified in
places--and full of mellow associations. That does not alter the quality
of the realities these robes conceal. The realities are greedy trade,
base profit--seeking, bold advertisement; and kingship and chivalry,
spite of this wearing of treasured robes, are as dead among it all
as that crusader my uncle championed against the nettles outside the
Duffield church.

I have thought much of that bright afternoon's panorama.

To run down the Thames so is to run one's hand over the pages in the
book of England from end to end. One begins in Craven Reach and it is as
if one were in the heart of old England. Behind us are Kew and Hampton
Court with their memories of Kings and Cardinals, and one runs at first
between Fulham's episcopal garden parties and Hurlingham's playground
for the sporting instinct of our race. The whole effect is English.
There is space, there are old trees and all the best qualities of
the home-land in that upper reach. Putney, too, looks Anglican on a
dwindling scale. And then for a stretch the newer developments slop
over, one misses Bladesover and there come first squalid stretches of
mean homes right and left and then the dingy industrialism of the
south side, and on the north bank the polite long front of nice houses,
artistic, literary, administrative people's residences, that stretches
from Cheyne Walk nearly to Westminster and hides a wilderness of slums.
What a long slow crescendo that is, mile after mile, with the houses
crowding closelier, the multiplying succession of church towers, the
architectural moments, the successive bridges, until you come out into
the second movement of the piece with Lambeth's old palace under your
quarter and the houses of Parliament on your bow! Westminster Bridge
is ahead of you then, and through it you flash, and in a moment the
round-faced clock tower cranes up to peer at you again and New
Scotland Yard squares at you, a fat beef-eater of a policeman disguised
miraculously as a Bastille.

For a stretch you have the essential London; you have Charing Cross
railway station, heart of the world, and the Embankment on the north
side with its new hotels overshadowing its Georgian and Victorian
architecture, and mud and great warehouses and factories, chimneys, shot
towers, advertisements on the south. The northward skyline grows more
intricate and pleasing, and more and more does one thank God for Wren.
Somerset House is as picturesque as the civil war, one is reminded again
of the original England, one feels in the fretted sky the quality of
Restoration Lace.

And then comes Astor's strong box and the lawyers' Inns.

(I had a passing memory of myself there, how once I had trudged along
the Embankment westward, weighing my uncle's offer of three hundred
pounds a year....)

Through that central essential London reach I drove, and X2 bored
her nose under the foam regardless of it all like a black hound going
through reeds--on what trail even I who made her cannot tell.

And in this reach, too, one first meets the seagulls and is reminded of
the sea. Blackfriars one takes--just under these two bridges and just
between them is the finest bridge moment in the world--and behold,
soaring up, hanging in the sky over a rude tumult of warehouses, over a
jostling competition of traders, irrelevantly beautiful and altogether
remote, Saint Paul's! "Of course!" one says, "Saint Paul's!" It is the
very figure of whatever fineness the old Anglican culture achieved,
detached, a more dignified and chastened Saint Peter's, colder, greyer,
but still ornate; it has never been over thrown, never disavowed, only
the tall warehouses and all the roar of traffic have forgotten it,
every one has forgotten it; the steamships, the barges, go heedlessly by
regardless of it, intricacies of telephone wires and poles cut blackly
into its thin mysteries, and presently, when in a moment the traffic
permits you and you look round for it, it has dissolved like a cloud
into the grey blues of the London sky.

And then the traditional and ostensible England falls from you
altogether. The third movement begins, the last great movement in the
London symphony, in which the trim scheme of the old order is altogether
dwarfed and swallowed up. Comes London Bridge, and the great warehouses
tower up about you, waving stupendous cranes, the gulls circle and
scream in your ears, large ships lie among their lighters, and one is
in the port of the world. Again and again in this book I have written
of England as a feudal scheme overtaken by fatty degeneration and
stupendous accidents of hypertrophy.

For the last time I must strike that note as the memory of the dear
neat little sunlit ancient Tower of London lying away in a gap among the
warehouses comes back to me, that little accumulation of buildings so
provincially pleasant and dignified, overshadowed by the vulgarest,
most typical exploit of modern England, the sham Gothic casings to the
ironwork of the Tower Bridge. That Tower Bridge is the very balance and
confirmation of Westminster's dull pinnacles and tower. That sham Gothic
bridge; in the very gates of our mother of change, the Sea!

But after that one is in a world of accident and nature. For the third
part of the panorama of London is beyond all law, order, and precedence;
it is the seaport and the sea. One goes down the widening reaches
through a monstrous variety of shipping, great steamers, great
sailing-ships, trailing the flags of all the world, a monstrous
confusion of lighters, witches' conferences of brown-sailed barges,
wallowing tugs, a tumultuous crowding and jostling of cranes and spars,
and wharves and stores, and assertive inscriptions. Huge vistas of dock
open right and left of one, and here and there beyond and amidst it all
are church towers, little patches of indescribably old-fashioned and
worn-out houses, riverside pubs and the like, vestiges of townships that
were long since torn to fragments and submerged in these new growths.
And amidst it all no plan appears, no intention, no comprehensive
desire. That is the very key of it all. Each day one feels that the
pressure of commerce and traffic grew, grew insensibly monstrous, and
first this man made a wharf and that erected a crane, and then this
company set to work and then that, and so they jostled together to make
this unassimilable enormity of traffic. Through it we dodged and drove
eager for the high seas.

I remember how I laughed aloud at the glimpse of the name of a London
County Council steamboat that ran across me. Caxton it was called, and
another was Pepys, and another was Shakespeare. They seemed so wildly
out of place, splashing about in that confusion. One wanted to take them
out and wipe them and put them back in some English gentleman's library.
Everything was alive about them, flash ing, splashing, and passing,
ships moving, tugs panting, hawsers taut, barges going down with men
toiling at the sweeps, the water all a-swirl with the wash of shipping,
scaling into millions of little wavelets, curling and frothing under the
whip of the unceasing wind. Past it all we drove. And at Greenwich to
the south, you know, there stands a fine stone frontage where all the
victories are recorded in a Painted Hall, and beside it is the "Ship"
where once upon a time those gentlemen of Westminster used to have
an annual dinner--before the port of London got too much for them
altogether. The old facade of the Hospital was just warming to the
sunset as we went by, and after that, right and left, the river opened,
the sense of the sea increased and prevailed, reach after reach from
Northfleet to the Nore.

And out you come at last with the sun behind you into the eastern
sea. You speed up and tear the oily water louder and faster, siroo,
siroo-swish-siroo, and the hills of Kent--over which I once fled from
the Christian teachings of Nicodemus Frapp--fall away on the right hand
and Essex on the left. They fall away and vanish into blue haze, and
the tall slow ships behind the tugs, scarce moving ships and wallowing
sturdy tugs, are all wrought of wet gold as one goes frothing by. They
stand out, bound on strange missions of life and death, to the killing
of men in unfamiliar lands. And now behind us is blue mystery and the
phantom flash of unseen lights, and presently even these are gone, and
I and my destroyer tear out to the unknown across a great grey space.
We tear into the great spaces of the future and the turbines fall to
talking in unfamiliar tongues. Out to the open we go, to windy freedom
and trackless ways. Light after light goes down. England and the
Kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions,
glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass--pass. The river
passes--London passes, England passes...

III

This is the note I have tried to emphasise, the note that sounds clear
in my mind when I think of anything beyond the purely personal aspects
of my story.

It is a note of crumbling and confusion, of change and seemingly aimless
swelling, of a bubbling up and medley of futile loves and sorrows.
But through the confusion sounds another note. Through the confusion
something drives, something that is at once human achievement and the
most inhuman of all existing things. Something comes out of it....
How can I express the values of a thing at once so essential and so
immaterial. It is something that calls upon such men as I with an
irresistible appeal.

I have figured it in my last section by the symbol of my destroyer,
stark and swift, irrelevant to most human interests. Sometimes I call
this reality Science, sometimes I call it Truth. But it is something we
draw by pain and effort ont of the heart of life, that we disentangle
and make clear. Other men serve it, I know, in art, in literature, in
social invention, and see it in a thousand different figures, under a
hundred names. I see it always as austerity, as beauty. This thing we
make clear is the heart of life. It is the one enduring thing. Men and
nations, epochs and civilisation pass each making its contribution I do
not know what it is, this something, except that it is supreme. It is,
a something, a quality, an element, one may find now in colours, now in
norms, now in sounds, now in thoughts. It emerges from life with each
year one lives and feels, and generation by generation and age by age,
but the how and why of it are all beyond the compass of my mind....

Yet the full sense of it was with me all that night as I drove, lonely
above the rush and murmur of my engines, out upon the weltering circle
of the sea.

Far out to the northeast there came the flicker of a squadron of
warships waving white swords of light about the sky. I kept them
hull-down, and presently they were mere summer lightning over the watery
edge of the globe.... I fell into thought that was nearly formless, into
doubts and dreams that have no words, and it seemed good to me to drive
ahead and on and or through the windy starlight, over the long black
waves.

IV

It was morning and day before I returned with the four sick and starving
journalists who had got permission to come with me, up the shining
river, and past the old grey Tower....

I recall the back views of those journalists very distinctly, going with
a certain damp weariness of movement, along a side street away from the
river. They were good men and bore me no malice, and they served me up
to the public in turgid degenerate Kiplingese, as a modest button on the
complacent stomach of the Empire. Though as a matter of fact, X2 isn't
intended for the empire, or indeed for the hands of any European power.
We offered it to our own people first, but they would have nothing to
do with me, and I have long since ceased to trouble much about such
questions. I have come to see myself from the outside, my country from
the outside--without illusions. We make and pass.

We are all things that make and pass striving upon a hidden mission, out
to the open sea.