Tono Bungay

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.