Tono Bungay

“What do you think of it, George?” he insisted.

What I said I thought of it I don’t now recall.  Only I have very distinctly the impression of meeting for a moment my aunt’s impenetrable eye.  And anyhow he started in with his accustomed energy to rape the mysteries of the Costly Life, and become the calmest of its lords.  On the whole, I think he did it—­thoroughly.  I have crowded memories, a little difficult to disentangle, of his experimental stages, his experimental proceedings.  It’s hard at times to say which memory comes in front of which.  I recall him as presenting on the whole a series of small surprises, as being again and again, unexpectedly, a little more self-confident, a little more polished, a little richer and finer, a little more aware of the positions and values of things and men.

There was a time—­it must have been very early—­when I saw him deeply impressed by the splendours of the dining-room of the National Liberal Club.  Heaven knows who our host was or what that particular little “feed” was about now!—­all that sticks is the impression of our straggling entry, a string of six or seven guests, and my uncle looking about him at the numerous bright red-shaded tables, at the exotics in great Majolica jars, at the shining ceramic columns and pilasters, at the impressive portraits of Liberal statesmen and heroes, and all that contributes to the ensemble of that palatial spectacle.  He was betrayed into a whisper to me, “This is all Right, George!” he said.  That artless comment seems almost incredible as I set it down; there came a time so speedily when not even the clubs of New York could have overawed my uncle, and when he could walk through the bowing magnificence of the Royal Grand Hotel to his chosen table in that aggressively exquisite gallery upon the river, with all the easy calm of one of earth’s legitimate kings.

The two of them learnt the new game rapidly and well; they experimented abroad, they experimented at home.  At Chiselhurst, with the aid of a new, very costly, but highly instructive cook, they tried over everything they heard of that roused their curiosity and had any reputation for difficulty, from asparagus to plover’s eggs.  They afterwards got a gardener who could wait at table—­and he brought the soil home to one.  Then there came a butler.

I remember my aunt’s first dinner-gown very brightly, and how she stood before the fire in the drawing-room confessing once unsuspected pretty arms with all the courage she possessed, and looking over her shoulder at herself in a mirror.

“A ham,” she remarked reflectively, “must feel like this.  Just a necklace.”...

I attempted, I think, some commonplace compliment.

My uncle appeared at the door in a white waistcoat and with his hands in his trouser pockets; he halted and surveyed her critically.

“Couldn’t tell you from a duchess, Susan,” he remarked.  “I’d like to have you painted, standin’ at the fire like that.  Sargent!  You look—­spirited, somehow.  Lord!—­I wish some of those damned tradesmen at Wimblehurst could see you.”...

They did a lot of week-ending at hotels, and sometimes I went down with them.  We seemed to fall into a vast drifting crowd of social learners.  I don’t know whether it is due simply to my changed circumstances, but it seems to me there have been immensely disproportionate developments of the hotel-frequenting and restaurant-using population during the last twenty years.  It is not only, I think, that there are crowds of people who, like we were, are in the economically ascendant phase, but whole masses of the prosperous section of the population must be altering its habits, giving up high-tea for dinner and taking to evening dress, using the week-end hotels as a practise-ground for these new social arts.  A swift and systematic conversion to gentility has been going on, I am convinced, throughout the whole commercial upper-middle class since I was twenty-one.  Curiously mixed was the personal quality of the people one saw in these raids.  There were conscientiously refined and low-voiced people reeking with proud bashfulness; there were aggressively smart people using pet diminutives for each other loudly and seeking fresh occasions for brilliant rudeness; there were awkward husbands and wives quarrelling furtively about their manners and ill at ease under the eye of the winter; cheerfully amiable and often discrepant couples with a disposition to inconspicuous corners, and the jolly sort, affecting an unaffected ease; plump happy ladies who laughed too loud, and gentlemen in evening dress who subsequently “got their pipes.”  And nobody, you knew, was anybody, however expensively they dressed and whatever rooms they took.

I look back now with a curious remoteness of spirit to those crowded dining-rooms with their dispersed tables and their inevitable red-shaded lights and the unsympathetic, unskillful waiters, and the choice of “Thig or Glear, Sir?” I’ve not dined in that way, in that sort of place, now for five years—­it must be quite five years, so specialised and narrow is my life becoming.

My uncle’s earlier motor-car phases work in with these associations, and there stands out a little bright vignette of the hall of the Magnificent, Bexhill-on-Sea, and people dressed for dinner and sitting about amidst the scarlet furniture—­satin and white-enameled woodwork until the gong should gather them; and my aunt is there, very marvelously wrapped about in a dust cloak and a cage-like veil, and there are hotel porters and under-porters very alert, and an obsequious manager; and the tall young lady in black from the office is surprised into admiration, and in the middle of the picture is my uncle, making his first appearance in that Esquimaux costume I have already mentioned, a short figure, compactly immense, hugely goggled, wearing a sort of brown rubber proboscis, and surmounted by a table-land of motoring cap.