Tono Bungay

Well, these general explanations will enable the reader to understand the distressful times we two had together when presently I began to feel on a footing with Marion and to fumble conversationally for the mind and the wonderful passion I felt, obstinately and stupidity, must be in her.  I think she thought me the maddest of sane men; “clever,” in fact, which at Smithie’s was, I suppose, the next thing to insanity, a word intimating incomprehensible and incalculable motives….  She could be shocked at anything, she misunderstood everything, and her weapon was a sulky silence that knitted her brows, spoilt her mouth and robbed her face of beauty.  “Well, if we can’t agree, I don’t see why you should go on talking,” she used to say.  That would always enrage me beyond measure.  Or, “I’m afraid I’m not clever enough to understand that.”

Silly little people!  I see it all now, but then I was no older than she and I couldn’t see anything but that Marion, for some inexplicable reason, wouldn’t come alive.

We would contrive semi-surreptitious walks on Sunday, and part speechless with the anger of indefinable offences.  Poor Marion!  The things I tried to put before her, my fermenting ideas about theology, about Socialism, about aesthetics—­the very words appalled her, gave her the faint chill of approaching impropriety, the terror of a very present intellectual impossibility.  Then by an enormous effort I would suppress myself for a time and continue a talk that made her happy, about Smithie’s brother, about the new girl who had come to the workroom, about the house we would presently live in.  But there we differed a little.  I wanted to be accessible to St. Paul’s or Cannon Street Station, and she had set her mind quite resolutely upon Eating….  It wasn’t by any means quarreling all the time, you understand.  She liked me to play the lover “nicely”; she liked the effect of going about—­we had lunches, we went to Earl’s Court, to Kew, to theatres and concerts, but not often to concerts, because, though Marion “liked” music, she didn’t like “too much of it,” to picture shows—­and there was a nonsensical sort of babytalk I picked up—­I forget where now—­that became a mighty peacemaker.

Her worst offence for me was an occasional excursion into the Smithie style of dressing, debased West Kensington.  For she had no sense at all of her own beauty.  She had no comprehension whatever of beauty of the body, and she could slash her beautiful lines to rags with hat-brims and trimmings.  Thank Heaven! a natural refinement, a natural timidity, and her extremely slender purse kept her from the real Smithie efflorescence!  Poor, simple, beautiful, kindly limited Marion!  Now that I am forty-five, I can look back at her with all my old admiration and none of my old bitterness with a new affection and not a scrap of passion, and take her part against the equally stupid, drivingly-energetic, sensuous, intellectual sprawl I used to be.  I was a young beast for her to have married—­a hound beast.  With her it was my business to understand and control—­and I exacted fellowship, passion….

We became engaged, as I have told; we broke it off and joined again.  We went through a succession of such phases.  We had no sort of idea what was wrong with us.  Presently we were formally engaged.  I had a wonderful interview with her father, in which he was stupendously grave and H—­less, wanted to know about my origins and was tolerant (exasperatingly tolerant) because my mother was a servant, and afterwards her mother took to kissing me, and I bought a ring.  But the speechless aunt, I gathered, didn’t approve—­having doubts of my religiosity.  Whenever we were estranged we could keep apart for days; and to begin with, every such separation was a relief.  And then I would want her; a restless longing would come upon me.  I would think of the flow of her arms, of the soft, gracious bend of her body.  I would lie awake or dream of a transfigured Marion of light and fire.  It was indeed Dame Nature driving me on to womankind in her stupid, inexorable way; but I thought it was the need of Marion that troubled me.  So I always went back to Marion at last and made it up and more or less conceded or ignored whatever thing had parted us, and more and more I urged her to marry me….

In the long run that became a fixed idea.  It entangled my will and my pride; I told myself I was not going to be beaten.  I hardened to the business.  I think, as a matter of fact, my real passion for Marion had waned enormously long before we were married, that she had lived it down by sheer irresponsiveness.  When I felt sure of my three hundred a year she stipulated for delay, twelve months’ delay, “to see how things would turn out.”  There were times when she seemed simply an antagonist holding out irritatingly against something I had to settle.  Moreover, I began to be greatly distracted by the interest and excitement of Tono-Bungay’s success, by the change and movement in things, the going to and fro.  I would forget her for days together, and then desire her with an irritating intensity at last, one Saturday afternoon, after a brooding morning, I determined almost savagely that these delays must end.

I went off to the little home at Walham Green, and made Marion come with me to Putney Common.  Marion wasn’t at home when I got there and I had to fret for a time and talk to her father, who was just back from his office, he explained, and enjoying himself in his own way in the greenhouse.

“I’m going to ask your daughter to marry me!” I said.  “I think we’ve been waiting long enough.”

“I don’t approve of long engagements either,” said her father.  “But Marion will have her own way about it, anyhow.  Seen this new powdered fertiliser?”

I went in to talk to Mrs. Ramboat.  “She’ll want time to get her things,” said Mrs. Ramboat….

I and Marion sat down together on a little seat under some trees at the top of Putney Hill, and I came to my point abruptly.

“Look here, Marion,” I said, “are you going to marry me or are you not?”

She smiled at me.  “Well,” she said, “we’re engaged—­aren’t we?”

“That can’t go on for ever.  Will you marry me next week?”

She looked me in the face.  “We can’t,” she said.

“You promised to marry me when I had three hundred a year.”

She was silent for a space.  “Can’t we go on for a time as we are?  We could marry on three hundred a year.  But it means a very little house.  There’s Smithie’s brother.  They manage on two hundred and fifty, but that’s very little.  She says they have a semi-detached house almost on the road, and hardly a bit of garden.  And the wall to next-door is so thin they hear everything.  When her baby cries—­they rap.  And people stand against the railings and talk….  Can’t we wait?  You’re doing so well.”

An extraordinary bitterness possessed me at this invasion of the stupendous beautiful business of love by sordid necessity.  I answered her with immense restraint.

“If,” I said, “we could have a double-fronted, detached house—­at Ealing, say—­with a square patch of lawn in front and a garden behind—­and—­and a tiled bathroom”

“That would be sixty pounds a year at least.”

“Which means five hundred a year….  Yes, well, you see, I told my uncle I wanted that, and I’ve got it.”

“Got what?”

“Five hundred pounds a year.”

“Five hundred pounds!”

I burst into laughter that had more than a taste of bitterness.

“Yes,” I said, “really! and now what do you think?”

“Yes,” she said, a little flushed; “but be sensible!  Do you really mean you’ve got a Rise, all at once, of two hundred a year?”

“To marry on—­yes.”

She scrutinised me a moment.  “You’ve done this as a surprise!” she said, and laughed at my laughter.  She had become radiant, and that made me radiant, too.

“Yes,” I said, “yes,” and laughed no longer bitterly.

She clasped her hands and looked me in the eyes.

She was so pleased that I forgot absolutely my disgust of a moment before.  I forgot that she had raised her price two hundred pounds a year and that I had bought her at that.

“Come!” I said, standing up; “let’s go towards the sunset, dear, and talk about it all.  Do you know—­this is a most beautiful world, an amazingly beautiful world, and when the sunset falls upon you it makes you into shining gold.  No, not gold—­into golden glass….  Into something better that either glass or gold.”...

And for all that evening I wooed her and kept her glad.  She made me repeat my assurances over again and still doubted a little.

We furnished that double-fronted house from attic—­it ran to an attic—­to cellar, and created a garden.

“Do you know Pampas Grass?” said Marion.  “I love Pampas Grass… if there is room.”

“You shall have Pampas Grass,” I declared.  And there were moments as we went in imagination about that house together, when my whole being cried out to take her in my arms—­now.  But I refrained.  On that aspect of life I touched very lightly in that talk, very lightly because I had had my lessons.  She promised to marry me within two months’ time.  Shyly, reluctantly, she named a day, and next afternoon, in heat and wrath, we “broke it off” again for the last time.  We split upon procedure.  I refused flatly to have a normal wedding with wedding cake, in white favours, carriages and the rest of it.  It dawned upon me suddenly in conversation with her and her mother, that this was implied.  I blurted out my objection forthwith, and this time it wasn’t any ordinary difference of opinion; it was a “row.”  I don’t remember a quarter of the things we flung out in that dispute.  I remember her mother reiterating in tones of gentle remonstrance:  “But, George dear, you must have a cake—­to send home.”  I think we all reiterated things.  I seem to remember a refrain of my own:  “A marriage is too sacred a thing, too private a thing, for this display.  Her father came in and stood behind me against the wall, and her aunt appeared beside the sideboard and stood with arms, looking from speaker to speaker, a sternly gratified prophetess.  It didn’t occur to me then!  How painful it was to Marion for these people to witness my rebellion.

“But, George,” said her father, “what sort of marriage do you want?  You don’t want to go to one of those there registry offices?”

“That’s exactly what I’d like to do.  Marriage is too private a thing—­”

“I shouldn’t feel married,” said Mrs. Ramboat.

“Look here, Marion,” I said; “we are going to be married at a registry office.  I don’t believe in all these fripperies and superstitions, and I won’t submit to them.  I’ve agreed to all sorts of things to please you.”

“What’s he agreed to?” said her father—­unheeded.

“I can’t marry at a registry office,” said Marion, sallow-white.

“Very well,” I said.  “I’ll marry nowhere else.”

“I can’t marry at a registry office.”

“Very well,” I said, standing up, white and tense and it amazed me, but I was also exultant; “then we won’t marry at all.”

She leant forward over the table, staring blankly.  But presently her half-averted face began to haunt me as she had sat at the table, and her arm and the long droop of her shoulder.