Tono Bungay

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.