Tono Bungay

But before I finish this chapter and book altogether and go on with the great adventure of my uncle’s career.  I may perhaps tell what else remains to tell of Marion and Effie, and then for a time set my private life behind me.

For a time Marion and I corresponded with some regularity, writing friendly but rather uninforming letters about small business things.  The clumsy process of divorce completed itself.

She left the house at Ealing and went into the country with her aunt and parents, taking a small farm near Lewes in Sussex.  She put up glass, she put in heat for her father, happy man! and spoke of figs and peaches.  The thing seemed to promise well throughout a spring and summer, but the Sussex winter after London was too much for the Ramboats.  They got very muddy and dull; Mr. Ramboat killed a cow by improper feeding, and that disheartened them all.  A twelvemonth saw the enterprise in difficulties.  I had to help her out of this, and then they returned to London and she went into partnership with Smithie at Streatham, and ran a business that was intimated on the firm’s stationery as “Robes.”  The parents and aunt were stowed away in a cottage somewhere.  After that the letters became infrequent.  But in one I remember a postscript that had a little stab of our old intimacy:  “Poor old Miggles is dead.”

Nearly eight years slipped by.  I grew up.  I grew in experience, in capacity, until I was fully a man, but with many new interests, living on a larger scale in a wider world than I could have dreamt of in my Marion days.  Her letters become rare and insignificant.  At last came a gap of silence that made me curious.  For eighteen months or more I had nothing from Marion save her quarterly receipts through the bank.  Then I damned at Smithie, and wrote a card to Marion.

“Dear Marion,” I said, “how goes it?”

She astonished me tremendously by telling me she had married again—­“a Mr. Wachorn, a leading agent in the paper-pattern trade.”  But she still wrote on the Ponderevo and Smith (Robes) notepaper, from the Ponderevo and Smith address.

And that, except for a little difference of opinion about the continuance of alimony which gave me some passages of anger, and the use of my name by the firm, which also annoyed me, is the end of Marion’s history for me, and she vanishes out of this story.  I do not know where she is or what she is doing.  I do not know whether she is alive or dead.  It seems to me utterly grotesque that two people who have stood so close to one another as she and I should be so separated, but so it is between us.

Effie, too, I have parted from, though I still see her at times.  Between us there was never any intention of marriage nor intimacy of soul.  She had a sudden, fierce, hot-blooded passion for me and I for her, but I was not her first lover nor her last.  She was in another world from Marion.  She had a queer, delightful nature; I’ve no memory of ever seeing her sullen or malicious.  She was—­indeed she was magnificently—­eupeptic.  That, I think, was the central secret of her agreeableness, and, moreover, that she was infinitely kind-hearted.  I helped her at last into an opening she coveted, and she amazed me by a sudden display of business capacity.  She has now a typewriting bureau in Riffle’s Inn, and she runs it with a brisk vigour and considerable success, albeit a certain plumpness has overtaken her.  And she still loves her kind.  She married a year or so ago a boy half her age—­a wretch of a poet, a wretched poet, and given to drugs, a thing with lank fair hair always getting into his blue eyes, and limp legs.  She did it, she said, because he needed nursing….

But enough of this disaster of my marriage and of my early love affairs; I have told all that is needed for my picture to explain how I came to take up aeroplane experiments and engineering science; let me get back to my essential story, to Tono-Bungay and my uncle’s promotions and to the vision of the world these things have given me.