Tono Bungay

I do not remember much of my journey to Wimblehurst with my mother except the image of her as sitting bolt upright, as rather disdaining the third-class carriage in which we traveled, and how she looked away from me out of the window when she spoke of my uncle.  “I have not seen your uncle,” she said, “since he was a boy….”  She added grudgingly, “Then he was supposed to be clever.”

She took little interest in such qualities as cleverness.

“He married about three years ago, and set up for himself in Wimblehurst….  So I suppose she had some money.”

She mused on scenes she had long dismissed from her mind.  “Teddy,” she said at last in the tone of one who has been feeling in the dark and finds.  “He was called Teddy… about your age….  Now he must be twenty-six or seven.”

I thought of my uncle as Teddy directly I saw him; there was something in his personal appearance that in the light of that memory phrased itself at once as Teddiness—­a certain Teddidity.  To describe it in and other terms is more difficult.  It is nimbleness without grace, and alertness without intelligence.  He whisked out of his shop upon the pavement, a short figure in grey and wearing grey carpet slippers; one had a sense of a young fattish face behind gilt glasses, wiry hair that stuck up and forward over the forehead, an irregular nose that had its aquiline moments, and that the body betrayed an equatorial laxity, an incipient “bow window” as the image goes.  He jerked out of the shop, came to a stand on the pavement outside, regarded something in the window with infinite appreciation, stroked his chin, and, as abruptly, shot sideways into the door again, charging through it as it were behind an extended hand.

“That must be him,” said my mother, catching at her breath.

We came past the window whose contents I was presently to know by heart, a very ordinary chemist’s window except that there was a frictional electrical machine, an air pump and two or three tripods and retorts replacing the customary blue, yellow, and red bottles above.  There was a plaster of Paris horse to indicate veterinary medicines among these breakables, and below were scent packets and diffusers and sponges and soda-water syphons and such-like things.  Only in the middle there was a rubricated card, very neatly painted by hand, with these words—­

Buy Ponderevo’s Cough Linctus now. 
Now! 
Why? 
Twopence Cheaper than in Winter. 
You Store apples! why not the Medicine
You are Bound to Need?

in which appeal I was to recognise presently my uncle’s distinctive note.

My uncle’s face appeared above a card of infant’s comforters in the glass pane of the door.  I perceived his eyes were brown, and that his glasses creased his nose.  It was manifest he did not know us from Adam.  A stare of scrutiny allowed an expression of commercial deference to appear in front of it, and my uncle flung open the door.

“You don’t know me?” panted my mother.

My uncle would not own he did not, but his curiosity was manifest.  My mother sat down on one of the little chairs before the soap and patent medicine-piled counter, and her lips opened and closed.

“A glass of water, madam,” said my uncle, waved his hand in a sort of curve and shot away.

My mother drank the water and spoke.  “That boy,” she said, “takes after his father.  He grows more like him every day….  And so I have brought him to you.”

“His father, madam?”

“George.”

For a moment the chemist was still at a loss.  He stood behind the counter with the glass my mother had returned to him in his hand.  Then comprehension grew.

“By Gosh!” he said.  “Lord!” he cried.  His glasses fell off.  He disappeared replacing them, behind a pile of boxed-up bottles of blood mixture.  “Eleven thousand virgins!” I heard him cry.  The glass was banged down.  “O-ri-ental Gums!”

He shot away out of the shop through some masked door.  One heard his voice.  “Susan!  Susan!”

Then he reappeared with an extended hand.  “Well, how are you?” he said.  “I was never so surprised in my life.  Fancy!...  You!”

He shook my mother’s impassive hand and then mine very warmly holding his glasses on with his left forefinger.

“Come right in!” he cried—­“come right in!  Better late than never!” and led the way into the parlour behind the shop.

After Bladesover that apartment struck me as stuffy and petty, but it was very comfortable in comparison with the Frapp living-room.  It had a faint, disintegrating smell of meals about it, and my most immediate impression was of the remarkable fact that something was hung about or wrapped round or draped over everything.  There was bright-patterned muslin round the gas-bracket in the middle of the room, round the mirror over the mantel, stuff with ball-fringe along the mantel and casing in the fireplace,—­I first saw ball-fringe here—­and even the lamp on the little bureau wore a shade like a large muslin hat.  The table-cloth had ball-fringe and so had the window curtains, and the carpet was a bed of roses.  There were little cupboards on either side of the fireplace, and in the recesses, ill-made shelves packed with books, and enriched with pinked American cloth.  There was a dictionary lying face downward on the table, and the open bureau was littered with foolscap paper and the evidences of recently abandoned toil.  My eye caught “The Ponderevo Patent Flat, a Machine you can Live in,” written in large firm letters.  My uncle opened a little door like a cupboard door in the corner of this room, and revealed the narrowest twist of staircase I had ever set eyes upon.  “Susan!” he bawled again.  “Wantje.  Some one to see you.  Surprisin’.”

There came an inaudible reply, and a sudden loud bump over our heads as of some article of domestic utility pettishly flung aside, then the cautious steps of someone descending the twist, and then my aunt appeared in the doorway with her hand upon the jamb.

“It’s Aunt Ponderevo,” cried my uncle.  “George’s wife—­and she’s brought over her son!” His eye roamed about the room.  He darted to the bureau with a sudden impulse, and turned the sheet about the patent flat face down.  Then he waved his glasses at us, “You know, Susan, my elder brother George.  I told you about ’im lots of times.”

He fretted across to the hearthrug and took up a position there, replaced his glasses and coughed.

My aunt Susan seemed to be taking it in.  She was then rather a pretty slender woman of twenty-three or four, I suppose, and I remember being struck by the blueness of her eyes and the clear freshness of her complexion.  She had little features, a button nose, a pretty chin and a long graceful neck that stuck out of her pale blue cotton morning dress.  There was a look of half-assumed perplexity on her face, a little quizzical wrinkle of the brow that suggested a faintly amused attempt to follow my uncle’s mental operations, a vain attempt and a certain hopelessness that had in succession become habitual.  She seemed to be saying, “Oh Lord!  What’s he giving me this time?” And as came to know her better I detected, as a complication of her effort of apprehension, a subsidiary riddle to “What’s he giving me?” and that was—­to borrow a phrase from my schoolboy language “Is it keeps?” She looked at my mother and me, and back to her husband again.

“You know,” he said.  “George.”

“Well,” she said to my mother, descending the last three steps of the staircase and holding out her hand! “you’re welcome.  Though it’s a surprise….  I can’t ask you to have anything, I’m afraid, for there isn’t anything in the house.”  She smiled, and looked at her husband banteringly.  “Unless he makes up something with his old chemicals, which he’s quite equal to doing.”

My mother shook hands stiffly, and told me to kiss my aunt….

“Well, let’s all sit down,” said my uncle, suddenly whistling through his clenched teeth, and briskly rubbing his hands together.  He put up a chair for my mother, raised the blind of the little window, lowered it again, and returned to his hearthrug.  “I’m sure,” he said, as one who decides, “I’m very glad to see you.”