Tono Bungay

So I remember my uncle in that first phase, young, but already a little fat, restless, fretful, garrulous, putting in my fermenting head all sorts of discrepant ideas.  Certainly he was educational….

For me the years at Wimblehurst were years of pretty active growth.  Most of my leisure and much of my time in the shop I spent in study.  I speedily mastered the modicum of Latin necessary for my qualifying examinations, and—­a little assisted by the Government Science and Art Department classes that were held in the Grammar School—­went on with my mathematics.  There were classes in physics, in chemistry, in mathematics and machine drawing, and I took up these subjects with considerable avidity.  Exercise I got chiefly in the form of walks.  There was some cricket in the summer and football in the winter sustained by young men’s clubs that levied a parasitic blackmail of the big people and the sitting member, but I was never very keen at these games.  I didn’t find any very close companions among the youths of Wimblehurst.  They struck me, after my cockney schoolmates, as loutish and slow, servile and furtive, spiteful and mean.  We used to swagger, but these countrymen dragged their feet and hated an equal who didn’t; we talked loud, but you only got the real thoughts of Wimblehurst in a knowing undertone behind its hand.  And even then they weren’t much in the way of thoughts.

No, I didn’t like those young countrymen, and I’m no believer in the English countryside under the Bladesover system as a breeding ground for honourable men.  One hears a frightful lot of nonsense about the Rural Exodus and the degeneration wrought by town life upon our population.  To my mind, the English townsman, even in the slums, is infinitely better spiritually, more courageous, more imaginative and cleaner, than his agricultural cousin.  I’ve seen them both when they didn’t think they were being observed, and I know.  There was something about my Wimblehurst companions that disgusted me.  It’s hard to define.  Heaven knows that at that cockney boarding-school at Goudhurst we were coarse enough; the Wimblehurst youngsters had neither words nor courage for the sort of thing we used to do—­for our bad language, for example; but, on the other hand, they displayed a sort of sluggish, real lewdness, lewdness is the word—­a baseness of attitude.  Whatever we exiled urbans did at Goudhurst was touched with something, however coarse, of romantic imagination.  We had read the Boys of England, and told each other stories.  In the English countryside there are no books at all, no songs, no drama, no valiant sin even; all these things have never come or they were taken away and hidden generations ago, and the imagination aborts and bestialises.  That, I think, is where the real difference against the English rural man lies.  It is because I know this that I do not share in the common repinings because our countryside is being depopulated, because our population is passing through the furnace of the towns.  They starve, they suffer, no doubt, but they come out of it hardened, they come out of it with souls.

Of an evening the Wimblehurst blade, shiny-faced from a wash and with some loud finery, a coloured waistcoat or a vivid tie, would betake himself to the Eastry Arms billiard-room, or to the bar parlour of some minor pub where nap could be played.  One soon sickened of his slow knowingness, the cunning observation of his deadened eyes, his idea of a “good story,” always, always told in undertones, poor dirty worm! his shrewd, elaborate maneuvers for some petty advantage, a drink to the good or such-like deal.  There rises before my eyes as I write, young Hopley Dodd, the son of the Wimblehurst auctioneer, the pride of Wimblehurst, its finest flower, with his fur waistcoat and his bulldog pipe, his riding breeches—­he had no horse—­and his gaiters, as he used to sit, leaning forward and watching the billiard-table from under the brim of his artfully tilted hat.  A half-dozen phrases constituted his conversation:  “hard lines!” he used to say, and “Good baazness,” in a bass bleat.  Moreover, he had a long slow whistle that was esteemed the very cream of humorous comment.  Night after night he was there.

Also you knew he would not understand that I could play billiards, and regarded every stroke I made as a fluke.  For a beginner I didn’t play so badly, I thought.  I’m not so sure now; that was my opinion at the time.  But young Dodd’s scepticism and the “good baazness” finally cured me of my disposition to frequent the Eastry Arms, and so these noises had their value in my world.

I made no friends among the young men of the place at all, and though I was entering upon adolescence I have no love-affair to tell of here.  Not that I was not waking up to that aspect of life in my middle teens I did, indeed, in various slightly informal ways scrape acquaintance with casual Wimblehurst girls; with a little dressmaker’s apprentice I got upon shyly speaking terms, and a pupil teacher in the National School went further and was “talked about” in connection with me but I was not by any means touched by any reality of passion for either of these young people; love—­love as yet came to me only in my dreams.  I only kissed these girls once or twice.  They rather disconcerted than developed those dreams.  They were so clearly not “it.”  I shall have much to say of love in this story, but I may break it to the reader now that it is my role to be a rather ineffectual lover.  Desire I knew well enough—­indeed, too well; but love I have been shy of.  In all my early enterprises in the war of the sexes, I was torn between the urgency of the body and a habit of romantic fantasy that wanted every phase of the adventure to be generous and beautiful.  And I had a curiously haunting memory of Beatrice, of her kisses in the bracken and her kiss upon the wall, that somehow pitched the standard too high for Wimblehurst’s opportunities.  I will not deny I did in a boyish way attempt a shy, rude adventure or so in love-making at Wimblehurst; but through these various influences, I didn’t bring things off to any extent at all.  I left behind me no devastating memories, no splendid reputation.  I came away at last, still inexperienced and a little thwarted, with only a natural growth of interest and desire in sexual things.

If I fell in love with any one in Wimblehurst it was with my aunt.  She treated me with a kindliness that was only half maternal—­she petted my books, she knew about my certificates, she made fun of me in a way that stirred my heart to her.  Quite unconsciously I grew fond of her….

My adolescent years at Wimblehurst were on the whole laborious, uneventful years that began in short jackets and left me in many ways nearly a man, years so uneventful that the Calculus of Variations is associated with one winter, and an examination in Physics for Science and Art department Honours marks an epoch.  Many divergent impulses stirred within me, but the master impulse was a grave young disposition to work and learn and thereby in some not very clearly defined way get out of the Wimblehurst world into which I had fallen.  I wrote with some frequency to Ewart, self-conscious, but, as I remember them, not intelligent letters, dated in Latin and with lapses into Latin quotation that roused Ewart to parody.  There was something about me in those days more than a little priggish.  But it was, to do myself justice, something more than the petty pride of learning.  I had a very grave sense of discipline and preparation that I am not ashamed at all to remember.  I was serious.  More serious than I am at the present time.  More serious, indeed, than any adult seems to be.  I was capable then of efforts—­of nobilities….  They are beyond me now.  I don’t see why, at forty, I shouldn’t confess I respect my own youth.  I had dropped being a boy quite abruptly.  I thought I was presently to go out into a larger and quite important world and do significant things there.  I thought I was destined to do something definite to a world that had a definite purpose.  I did not understand then, as I do now, that life was to consist largely in the world’s doing things to me.  Young people never do seem to understand that aspect of things.  And, as I say, among my educational influences my uncle, all unsuspected, played a leading part, and perhaps among other things gave my discontent with Wimblehurst, my desire to get away from that clean and picturesque emptiness, a form and expression that helped to emphasise it.  In a way that definition made me patient.  “Presently I shall get to London,” I said, echoing him.

I remember him now as talking, always talking, in those days.  He talked to me of theology, he talked of politics, of the wonders of science and the marvels of art, of the passions and the affections, of the immortality of the soul and the peculiar actions of drugs; but predominantly and constantly he talked of getting on, of enterprises, of inventions and great fortunes, of Rothschilds, silver kings, Vanderbilts, Goulds, flotations, realisations and the marvelous ways of Chance with men—­in all localities, that is to say, that are not absolutely sunken to the level of Cold Mutton Fat.

When I think of those early talks, I figure him always in one of three positions.  Either we were in the dispensing lair behind a high barrier, he pounding up things in a mortar perhaps, and I rolling pill-stuff into long rolls and cutting it up with a sort of broad, fluted knife, or he stood looking out of the shop door against the case of sponges and spray-diffusers, while I surveyed him from behind the counter, or he leant against the little drawers behind the counter, and I hovered dusting in front.  The thought of those early days brings back to my nostrils the faint smell of scent that was always in the air, marbled now with streaks of this drug and now of that, and to my eyes the rows of jejune glass bottles with gold labels, mirror-reflected, that stood behind him.  My aunt, I remember, used sometimes to come into the shop in a state of aggressive sprightliness, a sort of connubial ragging expedition, and get much fun over the abbreviated Latinity of those gilt inscriptions.  “Ol Amjig, George,” she would read derisively, “and he pretends it’s almond oil!  Snap!—­and that’s mustard.  Did you ever, George?

“Look at him, George, looking dignified.  I’d like to put an old label on to him round the middle like his bottles are, with Ol Pondo on it.  That’s Latin for Impostor, George must be.  He’d look lovely with a stopper.”

“You want a stopper,” said my uncle, projecting his face….

My aunt, dear soul, was in those days quite thin and slender, with a delicate rosebud completion and a disposition to connubial badinage, to a sort of gentle skylarking.  There was a silvery ghost of lisping in her speech.  She was a great humourist, and as the constraint of my presence at meals wore off, I became more and more aware of a filmy but extensive net of nonsense she had woven about her domestic relations until it had become the reality of her life.  She affected a derisive attitude to the world at large and applied the epithet “old” to more things than I have ever heard linked to it before or since.  “Here’s the old news-paper,” she used to say—­to my uncle.  “Now don’t go and get it in the butter, you silly old Sardine!”

“What’s the day of the week, Susan?” my uncle would ask.

“Old Monday, Sossidge,” she would say, and add, “I got all my Old Washing to do.  Don’t I know it!”...

She had evidently been the wit and joy of a large circle of schoolfellows, and this style had become a second nature with her.  It made her very delightful to me in that quiet place.  Her customary walk even had a sort of hello! in it.  Her chief preoccupation in life was, I believe, to make my uncle laugh, and when by some new nickname, some new quaintness or absurdity, she achieved that end, she was, behind a mask of sober amazement, the happiest woman on earth.  My uncle’s laugh when it did come, I must admit was, as Baedeker says, “rewarding.”  It began with gusty blowings and snortings, and opened into a clear “Ha ha!” but in fullest development it included, in those youthful days, falling about anyhow and doubling up tightly, and whackings of the stomach, and tears and cries of anguish.  I never in my life heard my uncle laugh to his maximum except at her; he was commonly too much in earnest for that, and he didn’t laugh much at all, to my knowledge, after those early years.  Also she threw things at him to an enormous extent in her resolve to keep things lively in spite of Wimblehurst; sponges out of stock she threw, cushions, balls of paper, clean washing, bread; and once up the yard when they thought that I and the errand boy and the diminutive maid of all work were safely out of the way, she smashed a boxful of eight-ounce bottles I had left to drain, assaulting my uncle with a new soft broom.  Sometimes she would shy things at me—­but not often.  There seemed always laughter round and about her—­all three of us would share hysterics at times—­and on one occasion the two of them came home from church shockingly ashamed of themselves, because of a storm of mirth during the sermon.  The vicar, it seems, had tried to blow his nose with a black glove as well as the customary pocket-handkerchief.  And afterwards she had picked up her own glove by the finger, and looking innocently but intently sideways, had suddenly by this simple expedient exploded my uncle altogether.  We had it all over again at dinner.

“But it shows you,” cried my uncle, suddenly becoming grave, “what Wimblehurst is, to have us all laughing at a little thing like that!  We weren’t the only ones that giggled.  Not by any means!  And, Lord! it was funny!”

Socially, my uncle and aunt were almost completely isolated.  In places like Wimblehurst the tradesmen’s lives always are isolated socially, all of them, unless they have a sister or a bosom friend among the other wives, but the husbands met in various bar-parlours or in the billiard-room of the Eastry Arms.  But my uncle, for the most part, spent his evenings at home.  When first he arrived in Wimblehurst I think he had spread his effect of abounding ideas and enterprise rather too aggressively; and Wimblehurst, after a temporary subjugation, had rebelled and done its best to make a butt of him.  His appearance in a public-house led to a pause in any conversation that was going on.

“Come to tell us about everything, Mr. Pond’revo?” some one would say politely.

“You wait,” my uncle used to answer, disconcerted, and sulk for the rest of his visit.

Or some one with an immense air of innocence would remark to the world generally, “They’re talkin’ of rebuildin’ Wimblehurst all over again, I’m told.  Anybody heard anything of it?  Going to make it a reg’lar smartgoin’, enterprisin’ place—­kind of Crystal Pallas.”

“Earthquake and a pestilence before you get that,” my uncle would mutter, to the infinite delight of every one, and add something inaudible about “Cold Mutton Fat.”...