Tono Bungay

Who can tell the story of the slow estrangement of two married people, the weakening of first this bond and then that of that complex contact?  Least of all can one of the two participants.  Even now, with an interval of fifteen years to clear it up for me, I still find a mass of impressions of Marion as confused, as discordant, as unsystematic and self-contradictory as life.  I think of this thing and love her, of that and hate her—­of a hundred aspects in which I can now see her with an unimpassioned sympathy.  As I sit here trying to render some vision of this infinitely confused process, I recall moments of hard and fierce estrangement, moments of clouded intimacy, the passage of transition all forgotten.  We talked a little language together whence were “friends,” and I was “Mutney” and she was “Ming,” and we kept up such an outward show that till the very end Smithie thought our household the most amiable in the world.

I cannot tell to the full how Marion thwarted me and failed in that life of intimate emotions which is the kernel of love.  That life of intimate emotions is made up of little things.  A beautiful face differs from an ugly one by a difference of surfaces and proportions that are sometimes almost infinitesimally small.  I find myself setting down little things and little things; none of them do more than demonstrate those essential temperamental discords I have already sought to make clear.  Some readers will understand—­to others I shall seem no more than an unfeeling brute who couldn’t make allowances….  It’s easy to make allowances now; but to be young and ardent and to make allowances, to see one’s married life open before one, the life that seemed in its dawn a glory, a garden of roses, a place of deep sweet mysteries and heart throbs and wonderful silences, and to see it a vista of tolerations and baby-talk; a compromise, the least effectual thing in all one’s life.

Every love romance I read seemed to mock our dull intercourse, every poem, every beautiful picture reflected upon the uneventful succession of grey hours we had together.  I think our real difference was one of aesthetic sensibility.

I do still recall as the worst and most disastrous aspect of all that time, her absolute disregard of her own beauty.  It’s the pettiest thing to record, I know, but she could wear curl-papers in my presence.  It was her idea, too, to “wear out” her old clothes and her failures at home when “no one was likely to see her”—­“no one” being myself.  She allowed me to accumulate a store of ungracious and slovenly memories….

All our conceptions of life differed.  I remember how we differed about furniture.  We spent three or four days in Tottenham Court Road, and she chose the things she fancied with an inexorable resolution,—­sweeping aside my suggestions with—­“Oh, you want such queer things.”  She pursued some limited, clearly seen and experienced ideal—­that excluded all other possibilities.  Over every mantel was a mirror that was draped, our sideboard was wonderfully good and splendid with beveled glass, we had lamps on long metal stalks and cozy corners and plants in grog-tubs.  Smithie approved it all.  There wasn’t a place where one could sit and read in the whole house.  My books went upon shelves in the dining-room recess.  And we had a piano though Marion’s playing was at an elementary level.

You know, it was the cruelest luck for Marion that I, with my restlessness, my scepticism, my constantly developing ideas, had insisted on marriage with her.  She had no faculty of growth or change; she had taken her mould, she had set in the limited ideas of her peculiar class.  She preserved her conception of what was right in drawing-room chairs and in marriage ceremonial and in every relation of life with a simple and luminous honesty and conviction, with an immense unimaginative inflexibility—­as a tailor-bird builds its nest or a beaver makes its dam.

Let me hasten over this history of disappointments and separation.  I might tell of waxings and waning of love between us, but the whole was waning.  Sometimes she would do things for me, make me a tie or a pair of slippers, and fill me with none the less gratitude because the things were absurd.  She ran our home and our one servant with a hard, bright efficiency.  She was inordinately proud of house and garden.  Always, by her lights, she did her duty by me.

Presently the rapid development of Tono-Bungay began to take me into the provinces, and I would be away sometimes for a week together.  This she did not like; it left her “dull,” she said, but after a time she began to go to Smithie’s again and to develop an independence of me.  At Smithie’s she was now a woman with a position; she had money to spend.  She would take Smithie to theatres and out to lunch and talk interminably of the business, and Smithie became a sort of permanent weekender with us.  Also Marion got a spaniel and began to dabble with the minor arts, with poker-work and a Kodak and hyacinths in glasses.  She called once on a neighbour.  Her parents left Walham Green—­her father severed his connection with the gas-works—­and came to live in a small house I took for them near us, and they were much with us.

Odd the littleness of the things that exasperate when the fountains of life are embittered!  My father-in-law was perpetually catching me in moody moments and urging me to take to gardening.  He irritated me beyond measure.

“You think too much,” he would say.  “If you was to let in a bit with a spade, you might soon ’ave that garden of yours a Vision of Flowers.  That’s better than thinking, George.”

Or in a torrent of exasperation, “I CARN’T think, George, why you don’t get a bit of glass ’ere.  This sunny corner you c’d do wonders with a bit of glass.”

And in the summer time he never came in without performing a sort of conjuring trick in the hall, and taking cucumbers and tomatoes from unexpected points of his person.  “All out o’ my little bit,” he’d say in exemplary tones.  He left a trail of vegetable produce in the most unusual places, on mantel boards, sideboards, the tops of pictures.  Heavens! how the sudden unexpected tomato could annoy me!...

It did much to widen our estrangement that Marion and my aunt failed to make friends, became, by a sort of instinct, antagonistic.

My aunt, to begin with, called rather frequently, for she was really anxious to know Marion.  At first she would arrive like a whirlwind and pervade the house with an atmosphere of hello!  She dressed already with that cheerfully extravagant abandon that signalised her accession to fortune, and dressed her best for these visits.

She wanted to play the mother to me, I fancy, to tell Marion occult secrets about the way I wore out my boots and how I never could think to put on thicker things in cold weather.  But Marion received her with that defensive suspiciousness of the shy person, thinking only of the possible criticism of herself; and my aunt, perceiving this, became nervous and slangy…

“She says such queer things,” said Marion once, discussing her.  “But I suppose it’s witty.”

“Yes,” I said; “it is witty.”

“If I said things like she does—­”

The queer things my aunt said were nothing to the queer things she didn’t say.  I remember her in our drawing-room one day, and how she cocked her eye—­it’s the only expression—­at the India-rubber plant in a Doulton-ware pot which Marion had placed on the corner of the piano.

She was on the very verge of speech.  Then suddenly she caught my expression, and shrank up like a cat that has been discovered looking at the milk.

Then a wicked impulse took her.

“Didn’t say an old word, George,” she insisted, looking me full in the eye.

I smiled.  “You’re a dear,” I said, “not to,” as Marion came lowering into the room to welcome her.  But I felt extraordinarily like a traitor—­to the India-rubber plant, I suppose—­for all that nothing had been said…

“Your aunt makes Game of people,” was Marion’s verdict, and, open-mindedly:  “I suppose it’s all right… for her.”

Several times we went to the house in Beckenham for lunch, and once or twice to dinner.  My aunt did her peculiar best to be friends, but Marion was implacable.  She was also, I know, intensely uncomfortable, and she adopted as her social method, an exhausting silence, replying compactly and without giving openings to anything that was said to her.

The gaps between my aunt’s visits grew wider and wider.

My married existence became at last like a narrow deep groove in the broad expanse of interests in which I was living.  I went about the world; I met a great number of varied personalities; I read endless books in trains as I went to and fro.  I developed social relationships at my uncle’s house that Marion did not share.  The seeds of new ideas poured in upon me and grew in me.  Those early and middle years of one’s third decade are, I suppose, for a man the years of greatest mental growth.  They are restless years and full of vague enterprise.

Each time I returned to Ealing, life there seemed more alien, narrow, and unattractive—­and Marion less beautiful and more limited and difficult—­until at last she was robbed of every particle of her magic.  She gave me always a cooler welcome, I think, until she seemed entirely apathetic.  I never asked myself then what heartaches she might hide or what her discontents might be.

I would come home hoping nothing, expecting nothing.

This was my fated life, and I had chosen it.  I became more sensitive to the defects I had once disregarded altogether; I began to associate her sallow complexion with her temperamental insufficiency, and the heavier lines of her mouth and nostril with her moods of discontent.  We drifted apart; wider and wider the gap opened.  I tired of baby-talk and stereotyped little fondlings; I tired of the latest intelligence from those wonderful workrooms, and showed it all too plainly; we hardly spoke when we were alone together.  The mere unreciprocated physical residue of my passion remained—­an exasperation between us.

No children came to save us.  Marion had acquired at Smithie’s a disgust and dread of maternity.  All that was the fruition and quintessence of the “horrid” elements in life, a disgusting thing, a last indignity that overtook unwary women.  I doubt indeed a little if children would have saved us; we should have differed so fatally about their upbringing.

Altogether, I remember my life with Marion as a long distress, now hard, now tender.  It was in those days that I first became critical of my life and burdened with a sense of error and maladjustment.  I would lie awake in the night, asking myself the purpose of things, reviewing my unsatisfying, ungainly home-life, my days spent in rascal enterprise and rubbish-selling, contrasting all I was being and doing with my adolescent ambitions, my Wimblehurst dreams.  My circumstances had an air of finality, and I asked myself in vain why I had forced myself into them.