Tono Bungay

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.

I don’t remember that the Walham Green menage and the quality of these people, nor the light they threw on Marion, detracted in the slightest degree at that time from the intent resolve that held me to make her mine.  I didn’t like them.  But I took them as part of the affair.  Indeed, on the whole, I think they threw her up by an effect of contrast; she was so obviously controlling them, so consciously superior to them.

More and more of my time did I give to this passion that possessed me.  I began to think chiefly of ways of pleasing Marion, of acts of devotion, of treats, of sumptuous presents for her, of appeals she would understand.  If at times she was manifestly unintelligent, in her ignorance became indisputable, I told myself her simple instincts were worth all the education and intelligence in the world.  And to this day I think I wasn’t really wrong about her.  There was something extraordinarily fine about her, something simple and high, that flickered in and out of her ignorance and commonness and limitations like the tongue from the mouth of a snake….

One night I was privileged to meet her and bring her home from an entertainment at the Birkbeck Institute.  We came back on the underground railway and we travelled first-class—­that being the highest class available.  We were alone in the carriage, and for the first time I ventured to put my arm about her.

“You mustn’t,” she said feebly.

“I love you,” I whispered suddenly with my heart beating wildly, drew her to me, drew all her beauty to me and kissed her cool and unresisting lips.

“Love me?” she said, struggling away from me, “Don’t!” and then, as the train ran into a station, “You must tell no one….  I don’t know….  You shouldn’t have done that….”

Then two other people got in with us and terminated my wooing for a time.

When we found ourselves alone together, walking towards Battersea, she had decided to be offended.  I parted from her unforgiven and terribly distressed.

When we met again, she told me I must never say “that” again.

I had dreamt that to kiss her lips was ultimate satisfaction.  But it was indeed only the beginning of desires.  I told her my one ambition was to marry her.

“But,” she said, “you’re not in a position—­ What’s the good of talking like that?”

I stared at her.  “I mean to,” I said.

“You can’t,” she answered.  “It will be years”

“But I love you,” I insisted.

I stood not a yard from the sweet lips I had kissed; I stood within arm’s length of the inanimate beauty I desired to quicken, and I saw opening between us a gulf of years, toil, waiting, disappointments and an immense uncertainty.

“I love you,” I said.  “Don’t you love me?”

She looked me in the face with grave irresponsive eyes.

“I don’t know,” she said.  “I like you, of course….  One has to be sensibl…”

I can remember now my sense of frustration by her unresilient reply.  I should have perceived then that for her my ardour had no quickening fire.  But how was I to know?  I had let myself come to want her, my imagination endowed her with infinite possibilities.  I wanted her and wanted her, stupidly and instinctively….

“But,” I said “Love—!”

“One has to be sensible,” she replied.  “I like going about with you.  Can’t we keep as we are?’”