Tono Bungay

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


"Yes," he mused. "And I've got a sort of idea my sculpture,--but now it
is to come in and WHY,--I've no idea at all." He hugged his knees for a
space. "That's what puzzles me, Ponderevo, no end."

He became animated. "If you will look in that cupboard," he said,
"you will find an old respectable looking roll on a plate and a knife
somewhere and a gallipot containing butter. You give them me and I'll
make my breakfast, and then if you don't mind watching me paddle about
at my simple toilet I'll get up. Then we'll go for a walk and talk about
this affair of life further. And about Art and Literature and anything
else that crops up on the way.... Yes, that's the gallipot. Cockroach
got in it? Chuck him out--damned interloper...."

So in the first five minutes of our talk, as I seem to remember it
now, old Ewart struck the note that ran through all that morning's
intercourse....

To me it was a most memorable talk because it opened out quite new
horizons of thought. I'd been working rather close and out of touch
with Ewart's free gesticulating way. He was pessimistic that day and
sceptical to the very root of things. He made me feel clearly, what
I had not felt at all before, the general adventurousness of life,
particularly of life at the stage we had reached, and also the absence
of definite objects, of any concerted purpose in the lives that were
going on all round us. He made me feel, too, how ready I was to take up
commonplace assumptions. Just as I had always imagined that somewhere
in social arrangements there was certainly a Head-Master who would
intervene if one went too far, so I had always had a sort of implicit
belief that in our England there were somewhere people who understood
what we were all, as a nation, about. That crumpled into his pit of
doubt and vanished.

He brought out, sharply cut and certain, the immense effect of
purposelessness in London that I was already indistinctly feeling. We
found ourselves at last returning through Highgate Cemetery and Waterlow
Park--and Ewart was talking.

"Look at it there," he said, stopping and pointing to the great vale of
London spreading wide and far. "It's like a sea--and we swim in it. And
at last down we go, and then up we come--washed up here." He swung
his arms to the long slopes about us, tombs and headstones in long
perspectives, in limitless rows.

"We're young, Ponderevo, but sooner or later our whitened memories will
wash up on one of these beaches, on some such beach as this. George
Ponderevo, F.R.S., Sidney Ewart, R.I.P. Look at the rows of 'em!"

He paused. "Do you see that hand? The hand, I mean, pointing upward,
on the top of a blunted obelisk. Yes. Well, that's what I do for a
living--when I'm not thinking, or drinking, or prowling, or making love,
or pretending I'm trying to be a sculptor without either the money
or the morals for a model. See? And I do those hearts afire and those
pensive angel guardians with the palm of peace. Damned well I do 'em and
damned cheap! I'm a sweated victim, Ponderevo..."

That was the way of it, anyhow. I drank deep of talk that day; we went
into theology, into philosophy; I had my first glimpse of socialism. I
felt as though I had been silent in a silence since I and he had parted.
At the thought of socialism Ewart's moods changed for a time to a sort
of energy. "After all, all this confounded vagueness might be altered.
If you could get men to work together..."

It was a good talk that rambled through all the universe. I thought I
was giving my mind refreshment, but indeed it was dissipation. All sorts
of ideas, even now, carry me back as it were to a fountain-head, to
Waterlow Park and my resuscitated Ewart. There stretches away south
of us long garden slopes and white gravestones and the wide expanse of
London, and somewhere in the picture is a red old wall, sun-warmed, and
a great blaze of Michaelmas daisies set off with late golden sunflowers
and a drift of mottled, blood-red, fallen leaves. It was with me that
day as though I had lifted my head suddenly out of dull and immediate
things and looked at life altogether.... But it played the very devil
with the copying up of my arrears of notes to which I had vowed the
latter half of that day.

After that reunion Ewart and I met much and talked much, and in our
subsequent encounters his monologue was interrupted and I took my share.
He had exercised me so greatly that I lay awake at nights thinking
him over, and discoursed and answered him in my head as I went in the
morning to the College. I am by nature a doer and only by the way a
critic; his philosophical assertion of the incalculable vagueness of
life which fitted his natural indolence roused my more irritable and
energetic nature to active protests. "It's all so pointless," I said,
"because people are slack and because it's in the ebb of an age. But
you're a socialist. Well, let's bring that about! And there's a purpose.
There you are!"

Ewart gave me all my first conceptions of socialism; in a little while
I was an enthusiastic socialist and he was a passive resister to the
practical exposition of the theories he had taught me. "We must join
some organisation," I said. "We ought to do things.... We ought to go
and speak at street corners. People don't know."

You must figure me a rather ill-dressed young man in a state of great
earnestness, standing up in that shabby studio of his and saying these
things, perhaps with some gesticulations, and Ewart with a clay-smudged
face, dressed perhaps in a flannel shirt and trousers, with a pipe in
his mouth, squatting philosophically at a table, working at some chunk
of clay that never got beyond suggestion.

"I wonder why one doesn't want to," he said.

It was only very slowly I came to gauge Ewart's real position in the
scheme of things, to understand how deliberate and complete was this
detachment of his from the moral condemnation and responsibilities that
played so fine a part in his talk. His was essentially the nature of
an artistic appreciator; he could find interest and beauty in endless
aspects of things that I marked as evil, or at least as not negotiable;
and the impulse I had towards self-deception, to sustained and
consistent self-devotion, disturbed and detached and pointless as it was
at that time, he had indeed a sort of admiration for but no sympathy.
Like many fantastic and ample talkers he was at bottom secretive, and
he gave me a series of little shocks of discovery throughout our
intercourse.

The first of these came in the realisation that he quite seriously meant
to do nothing in the world at all towards reforming the evils he laid
bare in so easy and dexterous a manner. The next came in the sudden
appearance of a person called "Milly"--I've forgotten her surname--whom
I found in his room one evening, simply attired in a blue wrap--the
rest of her costume behind the screen--smoking cigarettes and sharing
a flagon of an amazingly cheap and self-assertive grocer's wine Ewart
affected, called "Canary Sack." "Hullo!" said Ewart, as I came in. "This
is Milly, you know. She's been being a model--she IS a model really....
(keep calm, Ponderevo!) Have some sack?"

Milly was a woman of thirty, perhaps, with a broad, rather pretty face,
a placid disposition, a bad accent and delightful blond hair that waved
off her head with an irrepressible variety of charm; and whenever Ewart
spoke she beamed at him. Ewart was always sketching this hair of hers
and embarking upon clay statuettes of her that were never finished. She
was, I know now, a woman of the streets, whom Ewart had picked up in
the most casual manner, and who had fallen in love with him, but my
inexperience in those days was too great for me to place her then, and
Ewart offered no elucidations. She came to him, he went to her, they
took holidays together in the country when certainly she sustained her
fair share of their expenditure. I suspect him now even of taking money
from her. Odd old Ewart! It was a relationship so alien to my orderly
conceptions of honour, to what I could imagine any friend of mine doing,
that I really hardly saw it with it there under my nose. But I see it
and I think I understand it now....

Before I fully grasped the discursive manner in which Ewart was
committed to his particular way in life, I did, I say, as the broad
constructive ideas of socialism took hold of me, try to get him to work
with me in some definite fashion as a socialist.

"We ought to join on to other socialists," I said.

"They've got something."

"Let's go and look at some first."

After some pains we discovered the office of the Fabian Society, lurking
in a cellar in Clement's Inn; and we went and interviewed a rather
discouraging secretary who stood astraddle in front of a fire and
questioned us severely and seemed to doubt the integrity of our
intentions profoundly. He advised us to attend the next open meeting in
Clifford's Inn and gave us the necessary data. We both contrived to get
to the affair, and heard a discursive gritty paper on Trusts and one of
the most inconclusive discussions you can imagine. Three-quarters of
the speakers seemed under some jocular obsession which took the form
of pretending to be conceited. It was a sort of family joke, and as
strangers to the family we did not like it.... As we came out through
the narrow passage from Clifford's Inn to the Strand, Ewart suddenly
pitched upon a wizened, spectacled little man in a vast felt hat and a
large orange tie.

"How many members are there in this Fabian Society of yours?" he asked.

The little man became at once defensive in his manner.

"About seven hundred," he said; "perhaps eight."

"Like--like the ones here?"

The little man gave a nervous self-satisfied laugh. "I suppose they're
up to sample," he said.

The little man dropped out of existence and we emerged upon the Strand.
Ewart twisted his arm into a queerly eloquent gesture that gathered up
all the tall facades of the banks, the business places, the projecting
clock and towers of the Law Courts, the advertisements, the luminous
signs, into one social immensity, into a capitalistic system gigantic
and invincible.

"These socialists have no sense of proportion," he said. "What can you
expect of them?"

IV

Ewart, as the embodiment of talk, was certainly a leading factor in my
conspicuous failure to go on studying. Social theory in its first crude
form of Democratic Socialism gripped my intelligence more and more
powerfully. I argued in the laboratory with the man who shared my bench
until we quarreled and did not speak and also I fell in love.

The ferment of sex had been creeping into my being like a slowly
advancing tide through all my Wimblehurst days, the stimulus of London
was like the rising of a wind out of the sea that brings the waves in
fast and high. Ewart had his share in that. More and more acutely and
unmistakably did my perception of beauty, form and sound, my desire
for adventure, my desire for intercourse, converge on this central and
commanding business of the individual life. I had to get me a mate.

I began to fall in love faintly with girls I passed in the street,
with women who sat before me in trains, with girl fellow-students,
with ladies in passing carriages, with loiterers at the corners, with
neat-handed waitresses in shops and tea-rooms, with pictures even
of girls and women. On my rare visits to the theatre I always became
exalted, and found the actresses and even the spectators about me
mysterious, attractive, creatures of deep interest and desire. I had
a stronger and stronger sense that among these glancing, passing
multitudes there was somewhere one who was for me. And in spite of every
antagonistic force in the world, there was something in my very marrow
that insisted: "Stop! Look at this one! Think of her! Won't she do?
This signifies--this before all things signifies! Stop! Why are you
hurrying by? This may be the predestined person--before all others."

It is odd that I can't remember when first I saw Marion, who became my
wife--whom I was to make wretched, who was to make me wretched, who
was to pluck that fine generalised possibility of love out of my early
manhood and make it a personal conflict. I became aware of her as one of
a number of interesting attractive figures that moved about in my world,
that glanced back at my eyes, that flitted by with a kind of averted
watchfulness. I would meet her coming through the Art Museum, which
was my short cut to the Brompton Road, or see her sitting, reading as I
thought, in one of the bays of the Education Library. But really, as I
found out afterwards, she never read. She used to come there to eat a
bun in quiet. She was a very gracefully-moving figure of a girl then,
very plainly dressed, with dark brown hair I remember, in a knot low
on her neck behind that confessed the pretty roundness of her head
and harmonised with the admirable lines of ears and cheek, the grave
serenity of mouth and brow.

She stood out among the other girls very distinctly because they dressed
more than she did, struck emphatic notes of colour, startled one by
novelties in hats and bows and things. I've always hated the rustle, the
disconcerting colour boundaries, the smart unnatural angles of women's
clothes. Her plain black dress gave her a starkness....

I do remember, though, how one afternoon I discovered the peculiar
appeal of her form for me. I had been restless with my work and had
finally slipped out of the Laboratory and come over to the Art Museum
to lounge among the pictures. I came upon her in an odd corner of the
Sheepshanks gallery, intently copying something from a picture that hung
high. I had just been in the gallery of casts from the antique, my mind
was all alive with my newly awakened sense of line, and there she stood
with face upturned, her body drooping forward from the hips just a
little--memorably graceful--feminine.

After that I know I sought to see her, felt a distinctive emotion at
her presence, began to imagine things about her. I no longer thought
of generalised womanhood or of this casual person or that. I thought of
her.

An accident brought us together. I found myself one Monday morning in an
omnibus staggering westward from Victoria--I was returning from a Sunday
I'd spent at Wimblehurst in response to a unique freak of hospitality
on the part of Mr. Mantell. She was the sole other inside passenger.
And when the time came to pay her fare, she became an extremely scared,
disconcerted and fumbling young woman; she had left her purse at home.

Luckily I had some money.

She looked at me with startled, troubled brown eyes; she permitted my
proffered payment to the conductor with a certain ungraciousness that
seemed a part of her shyness, and then as she rose to go, she thanked me
with an obvious affectation of ease.

"Thank you so much," she said in a pleasant soft voice; and then less
gracefully, "Awfully kind of you, you know."

I fancy I made polite noises. But just then I wasn't disposed to be
critical. I was full of the sense of her presence; her arm was stretched
out over me as she moved past me, the gracious slenderness of her body
was near me. The words we used didn't seem very greatly to matter. I had
vague ideas of getting out with her--and I didn't.

That encounter, I have no doubt, exercised me enormously. I lay awake
at night rehearsing it, and wondering about the next phase of our
relationship. That took the form of the return of my twopence. I was
in the Science Library, digging something out of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, when she appeared beside me and placed on the open page an
evidently premeditated thin envelope, bulgingly confessing the coins
within.

"It was so very kind of you," she said, "the other day. I don't know
what I should have done, Mr.--"

I supplied my name. "I knew," I said, "you were a student here."

"Not exactly a student. I--"

"Well, anyhow, I knew you were here frequently. And I'm a student myself
at the Consolidated Technical Schools."

I plunged into autobiography and questionings, and so entangled her in
a conversation that got a quality of intimacy through the fact that,
out of deference to our fellow-readers, we were obliged to speak in
undertones. And I have no doubt that in substance it was singularly
banal. Indeed I have an impression that all our early conversations were
incredibly banal. We met several times in a manner half-accidental, half
furtive and wholly awkward. Mentally I didn't take hold of her. I never
did take hold of her mentally. Her talk, I now know all too clearly, was
shallow, pretentious, evasive. Only--even to this day--I don't remember
it as in any way vulgar. She was, I could see quite clearly, anxious
to overstate or conceal her real social status, a little desirous to
be taken for a student in the art school and a little ashamed that she
wasn't. She came to the museum to "copy things," and this, I gathered,
had something to do with some way of partially earning her living that I
wasn't to inquire into. I told her things about myself, vain things that
I felt might appeal to her, but that I learnt long afterwards made her
think me "conceited." We talked of books, but there she was very much on
her guard and secretive, and rather more freely of pictures. She "liked"
pictures. I think from the outset I appreciated and did not for a moment
resent that hers was a commonplace mind, that she was the unconscious
custodian of something that had gripped my most intimate instinct, that
she embodied the hope of a possibility, was the careless proprietor of a
physical quality that had turned my head like strong wine. I felt I had
to stick to our acquaintance, flat as it was. Presently we should get
through these irrelevant exterior things, and come to the reality of
love beneath.

I saw her in dreams released, as it were, from herself, beautiful,
worshipful, glowing. And sometimes when we were together, we would come
on silences through sheer lack of matter, and then my eyes would feast
on her, and the silence seemed like the drawing back of a curtain--her
superficial self. Odd, I confess. Odd, particularly, the enormous hold
of certain things about her upon me, a certain slight rounded duskiness
of skin, a certain perfection of modelling in her lips, her brow, a
certain fine flow about the shoulders. She wasn't indeed beautiful
to many people--these things are beyond explaining. She had manifest
defects of form and feature, and they didn't matter at all. Her
complexion was bad, but I don't think it would have mattered if it
had been positively unwholesome. I had extraordinarily limited,
extraordinarily painful, desires. I longed intolerably to kiss her lips.

V

The affair was immensely serious and commanding to me. I don't remember
that in these earlier phases I had any thought of turning back at
all. It was clear to me that she regarded me with an eye entirely
more critical than I had for her, that she didn't like my scholarly
untidiness, my want of even the most commonplace style. "Why do you
wear collars like that?" she said, and sent me in pursuit of gentlemanly
neckwear. I remember when she invited me a little abruptly one day to
come to tea at her home on the following Sunday and meet her father
and mother and aunt, that I immediately doubted whether my hitherto
unsuspected best clothes would create the impression she desired me to
make on her belongings. I put off the encounter until the Sunday after,
to get myself in order. I had a morning coat made and I bought a silk
hat, and had my reward in the first glance of admiration she ever gave
me. I wonder how many of my sex are as preposterous. I was, you see,
abandoning all my beliefs, my conventions unasked. I was forgetting
myself immensely. And there was a conscious shame in it all. Never a
word--did I breathe to Ewart--to any living soul of what was going on.

Her father and mother and aunt struck me as the dismalest of people,
and her home in Walham Green was chiefly notable for its black and
amber tapestry carpets and curtains and table-cloths, and the age and
irrelevance of its books, mostly books with faded gilt on the covers.
The windows were fortified against the intrusive eye by cheap lace
curtains and an "art pot" upon an unstable octagonal table. Several
framed Art School drawings of Marion's, bearing official South
Kensington marks of approval, adorned the room, and there was a black
and gilt piano with a hymn-book on the top of it. There were draped
mirrors over all the mantels, and above the sideboard in the dining-room
in which we sat at tea was a portrait of her father, villainously
truthful after the manner of such works. I couldn't see a trace of the
beauty I found in her in either parent, yet she somehow contrived to be
like them both.

These people pretended in a way that reminded me of the Three Great
Women in my mother's room, but they had not nearly so much social
knowledge and did not do it nearly so well. Also, I remarked, they did
it with an eye on Marion. They had wanted to thank me, they said, for
the kindness to their daughter in the matter of the 'bus fare, and so
accounted for anything unusual in their invitation. They posed as simple
gentlefolk, a little hostile to the rush and gadding-about of London,
preferring a secluded and unpretentious quiet.

When Marion got out the white table-cloth from the sideboard-drawer for
tea, a card bearing the word "APARTMENTS" fell to the floor. I picked it
up and gave it to her before I realised from her quickened colour that I
should not have seen it; that probably had been removed from the window
in honour of my coming.

Her father spoke once in a large remote way of he claims of business
engagements, and it was only long afterwards I realised that he was a
supernumerary clerk in the Walham Green Gas Works and otherwise a useful
man at home. He was a large, loose, fattish man with unintelligent brown
eyes magnified by spectacles; he wore an ill-fitting frock-coat and a
paper collar, and he showed me, as his great treasure and interest, a
large Bible which he had grangerised with photographs of pictures. Also
he cultivated the little garden-yard behind the house, and he had a
small greenhouse with tomatoes. "I wish I 'ad 'eat," he said. "One can
do such a lot with 'eat. But I suppose you can't 'ave everything you
want in this world."

Both he and Marion's mother treated her with a deference that struck me
as the most natural thing in the world. Her own manner changed, became
more authoritative and watchful, her shyness disappeared. She had taken
a line of her own I gathered, draped the mirror, got the second-hand
piano, and broken her parents in.

Her mother must once have been a pretty woman; she had regular features
and Marion's hair without its lustre, but she was thin and careworn.
The aunt, Miss Ramboat, was a large, abnormally shy person very like her
brother, and I don't recall anything she said on this occasion.

To begin with there was a good deal of tension, Marion was frightfully
nervous and every one was under the necessity of behaving in a
mysteriously unreal fashion until I plunged, became talkative and made
a certain ease and interest. I told them of the schools, of my lodgings,
of Wimblehurst and my apprenticeship days. "There's a lot of this
Science about nowadays," Mr. Ramboat reflected; "but I sometimes wonder
a bit what good it is?"

I was young enough to be led into what he called "a bit of a
discussion," which Marion truncated before our voices became unduly
raised. "I dare say," she said, "there's much to be said on both sides."

I remember Marion's mother asked me what church I attended, and that
I replied evasively. After tea there was music and we sang hymns. I
doubted if I had a voice when this was proposed, but that was held to be
a trivial objection, and I found sitting close beside the sweep of
hair from Marion's brow had many compensations. I discovered her mother
sitting in the horsehair armchair and regarding us sentimentally. I went
for a walk with Marion towards Putney Bridge, and then there was more
singing and a supper of cold bacon and pie, after which Mr. Ramboat and
I smoked. During that walk, I remember, she told me the import of her
sketchings and copyings in the museum. A cousin of a friend of hers whom
she spoke of as Smithie, had developed an original business in a sort of
tea-gown garment which she called a Persian Robe, a plain sort of wrap
with a gaily embroidered yoke, and Marion went there and worked in the
busy times. In the times that weren't busy she designed novelties in
yokes by an assiduous use of eyes and note-book in the museum, and went
home and traced out the captured forms on the foundation material. "I
don't get much," said Marion, "but it's interesting, and in the busy
times we work all day. Of course the workgirls are dreadfully common,
but we don't say much to them. And Smithie talks enough for ten."

I quite understood the workgirls were dreadfully common.