Tono Bungay

MARION I

As I look back on those days in which we built up the great Tono-Bungay property out of human hope and credit for bottles and rent and printing, I see my life as it were arranged in two parallel columns of unequal width, a wider, more diffused, eventful and various one which continually broadens out, the business side of my life, and a narrow, darker and darkling one shot ever and again with a gleam of happiness, my home-life with Marion.  For, of course, I married Marion.

I didn’t, as a matter of fact, marry her until a year after Tono-Bungay was thoroughly afloat, and then only after conflicts and discussions of a quite strenuous sort.  By that time I was twenty-four.  It seems the next thing to childhood now.  We were both in certain directions unusually ignorant and simple; we were temperamentally antagonistic, and we hadn’t—­I don’t think we were capable of—­an idea in common.  She was young and extraordinarily conventional—­she seemed never to have an idea of her own but always the idea of her class—­and I was young and sceptical, enterprising and passionate; the two links that held us together were the intense appeal her physical beauty had for me, and her appreciation of her importance in my thoughts.  There can be no doubt of my passion for her.  In her I had discovered woman desired.  The nights I have lain awake on account of her, writhing, biting my wrists in a fever of longing! ...

I have told how I got myself a silk hat and black coat to please her on Sunday—­to the derision of some of my fellow-students who charged to meet me, and how we became engaged.  But that was only the beginning of our difference.  To her that meant the beginning of a not unpleasant little secrecy, an occasional use of verbal endearments, perhaps even kisses.  It was something to go on indefinitely, interfering in no way with her gossiping spells of work at Smithie’s.  To me it was a pledge to come together into the utmost intimacy of soul and body so soon as we could contrive it….

I don’t know if it will strike the reader that I am setting out to discuss the queer, unwise love relationship and my bungle of a marriage with excessive solemnity.  But to me it seems to reach out to vastly wider issues than our little personal affair.  I’ve thought over my life.  In these last few years I’ve tried to get at least a little wisdom out of it.  And in particular I’ve thought over this part of my life.  I’m enormously impressed by the ignorant, unguided way in which we two entangled ourselves with each other.  It seems to me the queerest thing in all this network of misunderstandings and misstatements and faulty and ramshackle conventions which makes up our social order as the individual meets it, that we should have come together so accidentally and so blindly.  Because we were no more than samples of the common fate.  Love is not only the cardinal fact in the individual life, but the most important concern of the community; after all, the way in which the young people of this generation pair off determines the fate of the nation; all the other affairs of the State are subsidiary to that.  And we leave it to flushed and blundering youth to stumble on its own significance, with nothing to guide in but shocked looks and sentimental twaddle and base whisperings and cant-smeared examples.

I have tried to indicate something of my own sexual development in the preceding chapter.  Nobody was ever frank and decent with me in this relation; nobody, no book, ever came and said to me thus and thus is the world made, and so and so is necessary.  Everything came obscurely, indefinitely, perplexingly; and all I knew of law or convention in the matter had the form of threatenings and prohibitions.  Except through the furtive, shameful talk of my coevals at Goudhurst and Wimblehurst, I was not even warned against quite horrible dangers.  My ideas were made partly of instinct, partly of a romantic imagination, partly woven out of a medley of scraps of suggestion that came to me haphazard.  I had read widely and confusedly “Vathek,” Shelley, Tom Paine, Plutarch, Carlyle, Haeckel, William Morris, the Bible, the Freethinker, the Clarion, “The Woman Who Did,”—­I mention the ingredients that come first to mind.  All sorts of ideas were jumbled up in me and never a lucid explanation.  But it was evident to me that the world regarded Shelley, for example, as a very heroic as well as beautiful person; and that to defy convention and succumb magnificently to passion was the proper thing to do to gain the respect and affection of all decent people.

And the make-up of Marion’s mind in the matter was an equally irrational affair.  Her training had been one, not simply of silences, but suppressions.  An enormous force of suggestion had so shaped her that the intense natural fastidiousness of girlhood had developed into an absolute perversion of instinct.  For all that is cardinal in this essential business of life she had one inseparable epithet—­“horrid.”  Without any such training she would have been a shy lover, but now she was an impossible one.  For the rest she had derived, I suppose, partly from the sort of fiction she got from the Public Library, and partly from the workroom talk at Smithie’s.  So far as the former origin went, she had an idea of love as a state of worship and service on the part of the man and of condescension on the part of the woman.  There was nothing “horrid” about it in any fiction she had read.  The man gave presents, did services, sought to be in every way delightful.  The woman “went out” with him, smiled at him, was kissed by him in decorous secrecy, and if he chanced to offend, denied her countenance and presence.  Usually she did something “for his good” to him, made him go to church, made him give up smoking or gambling, smartened him up.  Quite at the end of the story came a marriage, and after that the interest ceased.

That was the tenor of Marion’s fiction; but I think the work-table conversation at Smithie’s did something to modify that.  At Smithie’s it was recognised, I think, that a “fellow” was a possession to be desired; that it was better to be engaged to a fellow than not; that fellows had to be kept—­they might be mislaid, they might even be stolen.  There was a case of stealing at Smithie’s, and many tears.

Smithie I met before we were married, and afterwards she became a frequent visitor to our house at Ealing.  She was a thin, bright-eyed, hawk-nosed girl of thirtyodd, with prominent teeth, a high-pitched, eager voice and a disposition to be urgently smart in her dress.  Her hats were startling and various, but invariably disconcerting, and she talked in a rapid, nervous flow that was hilarious rather than witty, and broken by little screams of “Oh, my dear!” and “you never did!” She was the first woman I ever met who used scent.  Poor old Smithie!  What a harmless, kindly soul she really was, and how heartily I detested her!  Out of the profits on the Persian robes she supported a sister’s family of three children, she “helped” a worthless brother, and overflowed in help even to her workgirls, but that didn’t weigh with me in those youthfully-narrow times.  It was one of the intense minor irritations of my married life that Smithie’s whirlwind chatter seemed to me to have far more influence with Marion than anything I had to say.  Before all things I coveted her grip upon Marion’s inaccessible mind.

In the workroom at Smithie’s, I gathered, they always spoke of me demurely as “A Certain Person.”  I was rumoured to be dreadfully “clever,” and there were doubts—­not altogether without justification—­of the sweetness of my temper.