Tono Bungay

Well, you begin to understand my breakdown now, I have been copious enough with these apologia.  My work got more and more spiritless, my behaviour degenerated, my punctuality declined; I was more and more outclassed in the steady grind by my fellow-students.  Such supplies of moral energy as I still had at command shaped now in the direction of serving Marion rather than science.

I fell away dreadfully, more and more I shirked and skulked; the humped men from the north, the pale men with thin, clenched minds, the intent, hard-breathing students I found against me, fell at last from keen rivalry to moral contempt.  Even a girl got above me upon one of the lists.  Then indeed I made it a point of honour to show by my public disregard of every rule that I really did not even pretend to try.

So one day I found myself sitting in a mood of considerable astonishment in Kensington Gardens, reacting on a recent heated interview with the school Registrar in which I had displayed more spirit than sense.  I was astonished chiefly at my stupendous falling away from all the militant ideals of unflinching study I had brought up from Wimblehurst.  I had displayed myself, as the Registrar put it, “an unmitigated rotter.”  My failure to get marks in the written examination had only been equalled by the insufficiency of my practical work.

“I ask you,” the Registrar had said, “what will become of you when your scholarship runs out?”

It certainly was an interesting question.  What was going to become of me?

It was clear there would be nothing for me in the schools as I had once dared to hope; there seemed, indeed, scarcely anything in the world except an illpaid assistantship in some provincial organized Science School or grammar school.  I knew that for that sort of work, without a degree or any qualification, one earned hardly a bare living and had little leisure to struggle up to anything better.  If only I had even as little as fifty pounds I might hold out in London and take my B.Sc. degree, and quadruple my chances!  My bitterness against my uncle returned at the thought.  After all, he had some of my money still, or ought to have.  Why shouldn’t I act within my rights, threaten to ’take proceedings’?  I meditated for a space on the idea, and then returned to the Science Library and wrote him a very considerable and occasionally pungent letter.

That letter to my uncle was the nadir of my failure.  Its remarkable consequences, which ended my student days altogether, I will tell in the next chapter.

I say “my failure.”  Yet there are times when I can even doubt whether that period was a failure at all, when I become defensively critical of those exacting courses I did not follow, the encyclopaedic process of scientific exhaustion from which I was distracted.  My mind was not inactive, even if it fed on forbidden food.  I did not learn what my professors and demonstrators had resolved I should learn, but I learnt many things.  My mind learnt to swing wide and to swing by itself.

After all, those other fellows who took high places in the College examinations and were the professor’s model boys haven’t done so amazingly.  Some are professors themselves, some technical experts; not one can show things done such as I, following my own interest, have achieved.  For I have built boats that smack across the water like whiplashes; no one ever dreamt of such boats until I built them; and I have surprised three secrets that are more than technical discoveries, in the unexpected hiding-places of Nature.  I have come nearer flying than any man has done.  Could I have done as much if I had had a turn for obeying those rather mediocre professors at the college who proposed to train my mind?  If I had been trained in research—­that ridiculous contradiction in terms—­should I have done more than produce additions to the existing store of little papers with blunted conclusions, of which there are already too many?  I see no sense in mock modesty upon this matter.  Even by the standards of worldly success I am, by the side of my fellow-students, no failure.  I had my F.R.S. by the time I was thirty-seven, and if I am not very wealthy poverty is as far from me as the Spanish Inquisition.  Suppose I had stamped down on the head of my wandering curiosity, locked my imagination in a box just when it wanted to grow out to things, worked by so-and-so’s excellent method and so-and-so’s indications, where should I be now?

I may be all wrong in this.  It may be I should be a far more efficient man than I am if I had cut off all those divergent expenditures of energy, plugged up my curiosity about society with more currently acceptable rubbish or other, abandoned Ewart, evaded Marion instead of pursuing her, concentrated.  But I don’t believe it!

However, I certainly believed it completely and was filled with remorse on that afternoon when I sat dejectedly in Kensington Gardens and reviewed, in the light of the Registrar’s pertinent questions my first two years in London.