Tono Bungay

For nearly all the time that my uncle was incubating and hatching Crest Hill I was busy in a little transverse valley between that great beginning and Lady Grove with more and more costly and ambitious experiments in aerial navigation.  This work was indeed the main substance of my life through all the great time of the Tono-Bungay symphony.

I have told already how I came to devote myself to this system of inquiries, how in a sort of disgust with the common adventure of life I took up the dropped ends of my college studies, taking them up again with a man’s resolution instead of a boy’s ambition.  From the first I did well at this work.  It—­was, I think, largely a case of special aptitude, of a peculiar irrelevant vein of faculty running through my mind.  It is one of those things men seem to have by chance, that has little or nothing to do with their general merit, and which it is ridiculous to be either conceited or modest about.  I did get through a very big mass of work in those years, working for a time with a concentrated fierceness that left little of such energy or capacity as I possess unused.  I worked out a series of problems connected with the stability of bodies pitching in the air and the internal movements of the wind, and I also revolutionised one leading part at last of the theory of explosive engines.  These things are to be found in the Philosophical Transactions, the Mathematical Journal, and less frequently in one or two other such publications, and they needn’t detain us here.  Indeed, I doubt if I could write about them here.  One acquires a sort of shorthand for one’s notes and mind in relation to such special work.  I have never taught; nor lectured, that is to say, I have never had to express my thoughts about mechanical things in ordinary everyday language, and I doubt very much if I could do so now without extreme tedium.

My work was, to begin with, very largely theoretical.  I was able to attack such early necessities of verification as arose with quite little models, using a turntable to get the motion through the air, and cane, whalebone and silk as building material.  But a time came when incalculable factors crept in, factors of human capacity and factors of insufficient experimental knowledge, when one must needs guess and try.  Then I had to enlarge the scale of my operations, and soon I had enlarged them very greatly.  I set to work almost concurrently on the balance and stability of gliders and upon the steering of inflated bags, the latter a particularly expensive branch of work.  I was no doubt moved by something of the same spirit of lavish expenditure that was running away with my uncle in these developments.  Presently my establishment above Lady Grove had grown to a painted wood chalet big enough to accommodate six men, and in which I would sometimes live for three weeks together; to a gasometer, to a motor-house, to three big corrugated-roofed sheds and lock-up houses, to a stage from which to start gliders, to a workshop and so forth.  A rough road was made.  We brought up gas from Cheaping and electricity from Woking, which place I found also afforded a friendly workshop for larger operations than I could manage.  I had the luck also to find a man who seemed my heaven-sent second-in-command—­Cothope his name was.  He was a self-educated-man; he had formerly been a sapper and he was one of the best and handiest working engineers alive.  Without him I do not think I could have achieved half what I have done.  At times he has been not so much my assistant as my collaborator, and has followed my fortunes to this day.  Other men came and went as I needed them.

I do not know how far it is possible to convey to any one who has not experienced it, the peculiar interest, the peculiar satisfaction that lies in a sustained research when one is not hampered by want of money.  It is a different thing from any other sort of human effort.  You are free from the exasperating conflict with your fellow-creatures altogether—­at least so far as the essential work goes; that for me is its peculiar merit.  Scientific truth is the remotest of mistresses; she hides in strange places, she is attained by tortuous and laborious roads, but she is always there!  Win to her and she will not fail you; she is yours and mankind’s for ever.  She is reality, the one reality I have found in this strange disorder of existence.  She will not sulk with you nor misunderstand you nor cheat you of your reward upon some petty doubt.  You cannot change her by advertisement or clamour, nor stifle her in vulgarities.  Things grow under your hands when you serve her, things that are permanent as nothing else is permanent in the whole life of man.  That, I think, is the peculiar satisfaction of science and its enduring reward….

The taking up of experimental work produced a great change in my personal habits.  I have told how already once in my life at Wimblehurst I had a period of discipline and continuous effort, and how, when I came to South Kensington, I became demoralised by the immense effect of London, by its innumerable imperative demands upon my attention and curiosity.  And I parted with much of my personal pride when I gave up science for the development of Tono-Bungay.  But my poverty kept me abstinent and my youthful romanticism kept me chaste until my married life was well under way.  Then in all directions I relaxed.  I did a large amount of work, but I never troubled to think whether it was my maximum nor whether the moods and indolences that came to me at times were avoidable things.  With the coming of plenty I ate abundantly and foolishly, drank freely and followed my impulses more and more carelessly.  I felt no reason why I should do anything else.  Never at any point did I use myself to the edge of my capacity.  The emotional crisis of my divorce did not produce any immediate change in these matters of personal discipline.  I found some difficulty at first in concentrating my mind upon scientific work, it was so much more exacting than business, but I got over that difficulty by smoking.  I became an inordinate cigar smoker; it gave me moods of profound depression, but I treated these usually by the homeopathic method,—­by lighting another cigar.  I didn’t realise at all how loose my moral and nervous fibre had become until I reached the practical side of my investigations and was face to face with the necessity of finding out just how it felt to use a glider and just what a man could do with one.

I got into this relaxed habit of living in spite of very real tendencies in my nature towards discipline.  I’ve never been in love with self-indulgence.  That philosophy of the loose lip and the lax paunch is one for which I’ve always had an instinctive distrust.  I like bare things, stripped things, plain, austere and continent things, fine lines and cold colours.  But in these plethoric times when there is too much coarse stuff for everybody and the struggle for life takes the form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbour’s eye, when there is no urgent demand either for personal courage, sound nerves or stark beauty, we find ourselves by accident.  Always before these times the bulk of the people did not over-eat themselves, because they couldn’t, whether they wanted to do so or not, and all but a very few were kept “fit” by unavoidable exercise and personal danger.  Now, if only he pitch his standard low enough and keep free from pride, almost any one can achieve a sort of excess.  You can go through contemporary life fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and elemental necessities, the sweat of your death-bed.  So I think it was with my uncle; so, very nearly, it was with me.

But the glider brought me up smartly.  I had to find out how these things went down the air, and the only way to find out is to go down with one.  And for a time I wouldn’t face it.

There is something impersonal about a book, I suppose.  At any rate I find myself able to write down here just the confession I’ve never been able to make to any one face to face, the frightful trouble it was to me to bring myself to do what I suppose every other coloured boy in the West Indies could do without turning a hair, and that is to fling myself off for my first soar down the wind.  The first trial was bound to be the worst; it was an experiment I made with life, and the chance of death or injury was, I supposed, about equal to the chance of success.  I believed that with a dawn-like lucidity.  I had begun with a glider that I imagined was on the lines of the Wright brothers’ aeroplane, but I could not be sure.  It might turn over.  I might upset it.  It might burrow its nose at the end and smash itself and me.  The conditions of the flight necessitated alert attention; it wasn’t a thing to be done by jumping off and shutting one’s eyes or getting angry or drunk to do it.  One had to use one’s weight to balance.  And when at last I did it it was horrible—­for ten seconds.  For ten seconds or so, as I swept down the air flattened on my infernal framework and with the wind in my eyes, the rush of the ground beneath me filled me with sick and helpless terror; I felt as though some violent oscillatory current was throbbing in brain and back bone, and I groaned aloud.  I set my teeth and groaned.  It was a groan wrung out of me in spite of myself.  My sensations of terror swooped to a climax.  And then, you know, they ended!

Suddenly my terror was over and done with.  I was soaring through the air right way up, steadily, and no mischance had happened.  I felt intensely alive and my nerves were strung like a bow.  I shifted a limb, swerved and shouted between fear and triumph as I recovered from the swerve and heeled the other way and steadied myself.

I thought I was going to hit a rook that was flying athwart me,—­it was queer with what projectile silence that jumped upon me out of nothingness, and I yelled helplessly, “Get out of the way!” The bird doubled itself up like a partly inverted V, flapped, went up to the right abruptly and vanished from my circle of interest.  Then I saw the shadow of my aeroplane keeping a fixed distance before me and very steady, and the turf as it seemed streaming out behind it.  The turf!—­it wasn’t after all streaming so impossibly fast.

When I came gliding down to the safe spread of level green I had chosen, I was as cool and ready as a city clerk who drops off an omnibus in motion, and I had learnt much more than soaring.  I tilted up her nose at the right moment, levelled again and grounded like a snowflake on a windless day.  I lay flat for an instant and then knelt up and got on my feet atremble, but very satisfied with myself.  Cothope was running down the hill to me. ...

But from that day I went into training, and I kept myself in training for many months.  I had delayed my experiments for very nearly six weeks on various excuses because of my dread of this first flight, because of the slackness of body and spirit that had come to me with the business life.  The shame of that cowardice spurred me none the less because it was probably altogether my own secret.  I felt that Cothope at any rate might suspect.  Well,—­he shouldn’t suspect again.

It is curious that I remember that shame and self accusation and its consequences far more distinctly than I recall the weeks of vacillation before I soared.  For a time I went altogether without alcohol, I stopped smoking altogether and ate very sparingly, and every day I did something that called a little upon my nerves and muscles.  I soared as frequently as I could.  I substituted a motor-bicycle for the London train and took my chances in the southward traffic, and I even tried what thrills were to be got upon a horse.  But they put me on made horses, and I conceived a perhaps unworthy contempt for the certitudes of equestrian exercise in comparison with the adventures of mechanism.  Also I walked along the high wall at the back of Lady Grove garden, and at last brought myself to stride the gap where the gate comes.  If I didn’t altogether get rid of a certain giddy instinct by such exercises, at least I trained my will until it didn’t matter.  And soon I no longer dreaded flight, but was eager to go higher into the air, and I came to esteem soaring upon a glider, that even over the deepest dip in the ground had barely forty feet of fall beneath it, a mere mockery of what flight might be.  I began to dream of the keener freshness in the air high above the beechwoods, and it was rather to satisfy that desire than as any legitimate development of my proper work that presently I turned a part of my energies and the bulk of my private income to the problem of the navigable balloon.