Tono Bungay

My uncle was not altogether swallowed up in business and ambition.  He kept in touch with modern thought.  For example, he was, I know, greatly swayed by what he called “This Overman idee, Nietzsche—­all that stuff.”

He mingled those comforting suggestions of a potent and exceptional human being emancipated from the pettier limitations of integrity with the Napoleonic legend.  It gave his imagination a considerable outlet.  That Napoleonic legend!  The real mischief of Napoleon’s immensely disastrous and accidental career began only when he was dead and the romantic type of mind was free to elaborate his character.  I do believe that my uncle would have made a far less egregious smash if there had been no Napoleonic legend to misguide him.  He was in many ways better and infinitely kinder than his career.  But when in doubt between decent conduct and a base advantage, that cult came in more and more influentially:  “think of Napoleon; think what the inflexibly-wilful Napoleon would have done with such scruples as yours;” that was the rule, and the end was invariably a new step in dishonour.

My uncle was in an unsystematic way a collector of Napoleonic relics; the bigger the book about his hero the more readily he bought it; he purchased letters and tinsel and weapons that bore however remotely upon the Man of Destiny, and he even secured in Geneva, though he never brought home, an old coach in which Buonaparte might have ridden; he crowded the quiet walls of Lady Grove with engravings and figures of him, preferring, my aunt remarked, the more convex portraits with the white vest and those statuettes with the hands behind the back which threw forward the figure.  The Durgans watched him through it all, sardonically.

And he would stand after breakfast at times in the light of the window at Lady Grove, a little apart, with two fingers of one hand stuck between his waistcoat-buttons and his chin sunken, thinking,—­the most preposterous little fat man in the world.  It made my aunt feel, she said, “like an old Field Marshal—­knocks me into a cocked hat, George!”

Perhaps this Napoleonic bias made him a little less frequent with his cigars than he would otherwise have been, but of that I cannot be sure, and it certainly caused my aunt a considerable amount of vexation after he had read Napoleon and the Fair Sex, because for a time that roused him to a sense of a side of life he had in his commercial preoccupations very largely forgotten.  Suggestion plays so great a part in this field.  My uncle took the next opportunity and had an “affair”!

It was not a very impassioned affair, and the exact particulars never of course reached me.  It is quite by chance I know anything of it at all.  One evening I was surprised to come upon my uncle in a mixture of Bohemia and smart people at an At Home in the flat of Robbert, the R.A. who painted my aunt, and he was standing a little apart in a recess, talking or rather being talked to in undertones by a plump, blond little woman in pale blue, a Helen Scrymgeour who wrote novels and was organising a weekly magazine.  I elbowed a large lady who was saying something about them, but I didn’t need to hear the thing she said to perceive the relationship of the two.  It hit me like a placard on a hoarding.  I was amazed the whole gathering did not see it.  Perhaps they did.  She was wearing a remarkably fine diamond necklace, much too fine for journalism, and regarding him with that quality of questionable proprietorship, of leashed but straining intimacy, that seems inseparable from this sort of affair.  It is so much more palpable than matrimony.  If anything was wanted to complete my conviction it was my uncles’s eyes when presently he became aware of mine, a certain embarrassment and a certain pride and defiance.  And the next day he made an opportunity to praise the lady’s intelligence to me concisely, lest I should miss the point of it all.

After that I heard some gossip—­from a friend of the lady’s.  I was much too curious to do anything but listen.  I had never in all my life imagined my uncle in an amorous attitude.  It would appear that she called him her “God in the Car”—­after the hero in a novel of Anthony Hope’s.  It was essential to the convention of their relations that he should go relentlessly whenever business called, and it was generally arranged that it did call.  To him women were an incident, it was understood between them; Ambition was the master-passion.  A great world called him and the noble hunger for Power.  I have never been able to discover just how honest Mrs. Scrymgeour was in all this, but it is quite possible the immense glamour of his financial largeness prevailed with her and that she did bring a really romantic feeling to their encounters.  There must have been some extraordinary moments….

I was a good deal exercised and distressed about my aunt when I realised what was afoot.  I thought it would prove a terrible humiliation to her.  I suspected her of keeping up a brave front with the loss of my uncle’s affections fretting at her heart, but there I simply underestimated her.  She didn’t hear for some time and when she did hear she was extremely angry and energetic.  The sentimental situation didn’t trouble her for a moment.  She decided that my uncle “wanted smacking.”  She accentuated herself with an unexpected new hat, went and gave him an inconceivable talking-to at the Hardingham, and then came round to “blow-up” me for not telling her what was going on before….

I tried to bring her to a proper sense of the accepted values in this affair, but my aunt’s originality of outlook was never so invincible.  “Men don’t tell on one another in affairs of passion,” I protested, and such-like worldly excuses.

“Women!” she said in high indignation, “and men!  It isn’t women and men—­it’s him and me, George!  Why don’t you talk sense?

“Old passion’s all very well, George, in its way, and I’m the last person to be jealous.  But this is old nonsense….  I’m not going to let him show off what a silly old lobster he is to other women….  I’ll mark every scrap of his underclothes with red letters, ’Ponderevo-Private’—­every scrap.

“Going about making love indeed,—­in abdominal belts!—­at his time of life!”

I cannot imagine what passed between her and my uncle.  But I have no doubt that for once her customary badinage was laid aside.  How they talked then I do not know, for I who knew them so well had never heard that much of intimacy between them.  At any rate it was a concerned and preoccupied “God in the Car” I had to deal with in the next few days, unusually Zzzz-y and given to slight impatient gestures that had nothing to do with the current conversation.  And it was evident that in all directions he was finding things unusually difficult to explain.

All the intimate moments in this affair were hidden from me, but in the end my aunt triumphed.  He did not so much throw as jerk over Mrs. Scrymgeour, and she did not so much make a novel of it as upset a huge pailful of attenuated and adulterated female soul upon this occasion.  My aunt did not appear in that, even remotely.  So that it is doubtful if the lady knew the real causes of her abandonment.  The Napoleonic hero was practically unmarried, and he threw over his lady as Napoleon threw over Josephine for a great alliance.

It was a triumph for my aunt, but it had its price.  For some time it was evident things were strained between them.  He gave up the lady, but he resented having to do so, deeply.  She had meant more to his imagination than one could have supposed.  He wouldn’t for a long time “come round.”  He became touchy and impatient and secretive towards my aunt, and she, I noted, after an amazing check or so, stopped that stream of kindly abuse that had flowed for so long and had been so great a refreshment in their lives.  They were both the poorer for its cessation, both less happy.  She devoted herself more and more to Lady Grove and the humours and complications of its management.  The servants took to her—­as they say—­she god-mothered three Susans during her rule, the coachman’s, the gardener’s, and the Up Hill gamekeeper’s.  She got together a library of old household books that were in the vein of the place.  She revived the still-room, and became a great artist in jellies and elder and cowslip wine.