Tono Bungay

“Oh, Crikey!” said my aunt, reading a letter behind her coffee-machine.  “Here’s a young woman, George!”

We were breakfasting together in the big window bay at Lady Grove that looks upon the iris beds; my uncle was in London.

I sounded an interrogative note and decapitated an egg.

“Who’s Beatrice Normandy?” asked my aunt.  “I’ve not heard of her before.”

“She the young woman?”

“Yes.  Says she knows you.  I’m no hand at old etiquette, George, but her line is a bit unusual.  Practically she says she’s going to make her mother—­”

“Eh?  Step-mother, isn’t it?”

“You seem to know a lot about her.  She says ’mother’—­Lady Osprey.  They’re to call on me, anyhow, next Wednesday week at four, and there’s got to be you for tea.”

“Eh?”

“You—­for tea.

“H’m.  She had rather—­force of character.  When I knew her before.”

I became aware of my aunt’s head sticking out obliquely from behind the coffee-machine and regarding me with wide blue curiosity.  I met her gaze for a moment, flinched, coloured, and laughed.

“I’ve known her longer than I’ve known you,” I said, and explained at length.

My aunt kept her eye on me over and round the coffee-machine as I did so.  She was greatly interested, and asked several elucidatory questions.

“Why didn’t you tell me the day you saw her?  You’ve had her on your mind for a week,” she said.

“It is odd I didn’t tell you,” I admitted.

“You thought I’d get a Down on her,” said my aunt conclusively.  “That’s what you thought” and opened the rest of her letters.

The two ladies came in a pony-carriage with conspicuous punctuality, and I had the unusual experience of seeing my aunt entertaining callers.  We had tea upon the terrace under the cedar, but old Lady Osprey, being an embittered Protestant, had never before seen the inside of the house, and we made a sort of tour of inspection that reminded me of my first visit to the place.  In spite of my preoccupation with Beatrice, I stored a queer little memory of the contrast between the two other women; my aunt, tall, slender and awkward, in a simple blue homekeeping dress, an omnivorous reader and a very authentic wit, and the lady of pedigree, short and plump, dressed with Victorian fussiness, living at the intellectual level of palmistry and genteel fiction, pink in the face and generally flustered by a sense of my aunt’s social strangeness and disposed under the circumstances to behave rather like an imitation of the more queenly moments of her own cook.  The one seemed made of whalebone, the other of dough.  My aunt was nervous, partly through the intrinsic difficulty of handling the lady and partly because of her passionate desire to watch Beatrice and me, and her nervousness took a common form with her, a wider clumsiness of gesture and an exacerbation of her habitual oddity of phrase which did much to deepen the pink perplexity of the lady of title.  For instance, I heard my aunt admit that one of the Stuart Durgan ladies did look a bit “balmy on the crumpet”; she described the knights of the age of chivalry as “korvorting about on the off-chance of a dragon”; she explained she was “always old mucking about the garden,” and instead of offering me a Garibaldi biscuit, she asked me with that faint lisp of hers, to “have some squashed flies, George.”  I felt convinced Lady Osprey would describe her as “a most eccentric person” on the very first opportunity;—­ “a most eccentric person.”  One could see her, as people say, “shaping” for that.

Beatrice was dressed very quietly in brown, with a simple but courageous broad-brimmed hat, and an unexpected quality of being grown-up and responsible.  She guided her step-mother through the first encounter, scrutinised my aunt, and got us all well in movement through the house, and then she turned her attention to me with a quick and half-confident smile.

“We haven’t met,” she said, “since—­”

“It was in the Warren.”

“Of course,” she said, “the Warren!  I remembered it all except just the name….  I was eight.”

Her smiling eyes insisted on my memories being thorough.  I looked up and met them squarely, a little at a loss for what I should say.

“I gave you away pretty completely,” she said, meditating upon my face.  “And afterwards I gave way Archie.”

She turned her face away from the others, and her voice fell ever so little.

“They gave him a licking for telling lies!” she said, as though that was a pleasant memory.  “And when it was all over I went to our wigwam.  You remember the wigwam?”

“Out in the West Wood?”

“Yes—­and cried—­for all the evil I had done you, I suppose….  I’ve often thought of it since.”...

Lady Osprey stopped for us to overtake her.  “My dear!” she said to Beatrice.  “Such a beautiful gallery!” Then she stared very hard at me, puzzled in the most naked fashion to understand who I might be.

“People say the oak staircase is rather good,” said my aunt, and led the way.

Lady Osprey, with her skirts gathered for the ascent to the gallery and her hand on the newel, turned and addressed a look full of meaning overflowing indeed with meanings—­at her charge.  The chief meaning no doubt was caution about myself, but much of it was just meaning at large.  I chanced to catch the response in a mirror and detected Beatrice with her nose wrinkled into a swift and entirely diabolical grimace.  Lady Osprey became a deeper shade of pink and speechless with indignation—­it was evident she disavowed all further responsibility, as she followed my aunt upstairs.

“It’s dark, but there’s a sort of dignity,” said Beatrice very distinctly, regarding the hall with serene tranquillity, and allowing the unwilling feet on the stairs to widen their distance from us.  She stood a step up, so that she looked down a little upon me and over me at the old hall.

She turned upon me abruptly when she thought her step-mother was beyond ear-shot.

“But how did you get here?” she asked.

“Here?”

“All this.”  She indicated space and leisure by a wave of the hand at hall and tall windows and sunlit terrace.  “Weren’t you the housekeeper’s son?”

“I’ve adventured.  My uncle has become—­a great financier.  He used to be a little chemist about twenty miles from Bladesover.  We’re promoters now, amalgamators, big people on the new model.”

“I understand.”  She regarded me with interested eyes, visibly thinking me out.

“And you recognised me?” I asked.

“After a second or so.  I saw you recognised me.  I couldn’t place you, but I knew I knew you.  Then Archie being there helped me to remember.”

“I’m glad to meet again,” I ventured.  “I’d never forgotten you.”

“One doesn’t forget those childish things.”

We regarded one another for a moment with a curiously easy and confident satisfaction in coming together again.  I can’t explain our ready zest in one another.  The thing was so.  We pleased each other, we had no doubt in our minds that we pleased each other.  From the first we were at our ease with one another.  “So picturesque, so very picturesque,” came a voice from above, and then:  “Bee-atrice!”

“I’ve a hundred things I want to know about you,” she said with an easy intimacy, as we went up the winding steps….

As the four of us sat at tea together under the cedar on the terrace she asked questions about my aeronautics.  My aunt helped with a word or so about my broken ribs.  Lady Osprey evidently regarded flying as a most indesirable and improper topic—­a blasphemous intrusion upon the angels.  “It isn’t flying,” I explained.  “We don’t fly yet.”

“You never will,” she said compactly.  “You never will.”

“Well,” I said, “we do what we can.”

The little lady lifted a small gloved hand and indicated a height of about four feet from the ground.  “Thus far,” she said, “thus far—­and no FARTHER!  No!”

She became emphatically pink.  “No,” she said again quite conclusively, and coughed shortly.  “Thank you,” she said to her ninth or tenth cake.  Beatrice burst into cheerful laughter with her eye on me.  I was lying on the turf, and this perhaps caused a slight confusion about the primordial curse in Lady Osprey’s mind.

“Upon his belly shall he go,” she said with quiet distinctness, “all the days of his life.”

After which we talked no more of aeronautics.

Beatrice sat bunched together in a chair and regarded me with exactly the same scrutiny, I thought, the same adventurous aggression, that I had faced long ago at the tea-table in my mother’s room.  She was amazingly like that little Princess of my Bladesover memories, the wilful misbehaviours of her hair seemed the same—­her voice; things one would have expected to be changed altogether.  She formed her plans in the same quick way, and acted with the same irresponsible decision.

She stood up abruptly.

“What is there beyond the terrace?” she said, and found me promptly beside her.

I invented a view for her.

At the further corner from the cedar she perched herself up upon the parapet and achieved an air of comfort among the lichenous stones.  “Now tell me,” she said, “all about yourself.  Tell me about yourself; I know such duffers of men!  They all do the same things.  How did you get—­here?  All my men were here.  They couldn’t have got here if they hadn’t been here always.  They wouldn’t have thought it right.  You’ve climbed.”

“If it’s climbing,” I said.

She went off at a tangent.  “It’s—­I don’t know if you’ll understand—­interesting to meet you again.  I’ve remembered you.  I don’t know why, but I have.  I’ve used you as a sort of lay figure—­when I’ve told myself stories.  But you’ve always been rather stiff and difficult in my stories—­in ready-made clothes—­a Labour Member or a Bradlaugh, or something like that.  You’re not like that a bit.  And yet you are!”

She looked at me.  “Was it much of a fight?  They make out it is.

I don’t know why.”

“I was shot up here by an accident,” I said.  “There was no fight at all.  Except to keep honest, perhaps and I made no great figure in that.  I and my uncle mixed a medicine and it blew us up.  No merit in that!  But you’ve been here all the time.  Tell me what you have done first.”

“One thing we didn’t do.”  She meditated for a moment.

“What?” said I.

“Produce a little half-brother for Bladesover.  So it went to the Phillbrick gang.  And they let it!  And I and my step-mother—­we let, too.  And live in a little house.”

She nodded her head vaguely over her shoulder and turned to me again.  “Well, suppose it was an accident.  Here you are!  Now you’re here, what are you going to do?  You’re young.  Is it to be Parliament? heard some men the other day talking about you.  Before I knew you were you.  They said that was what you ought to do.”...

She put me through my intentions with a close and vital curiosity.  It was just as she had tried to imagine me a soldier and place me years ago.  She made me feel more planless and incidental than ever.  “You want to make a flying-machine,” she pursued, “and when you fly?  What then?  Would it be for fighting?

I told her something of my experimental work.  She had never heard of the soaring aeroplane, and was excited by the thought, and keen to hear about it.  She had thought all the work so far had been a mere projecting of impossible machines.  For her Pilcher and Lilienthal had died in vain.  She did not know such men had lived in the world.

“But that’s dangerous!” she said, with a note of discovery.

“Oh!—­it’s dangerous.”

“Bee-atrice!” Lady Osprey called.

Beatrice dropped from the wall to her feet.

“Where do you do this soaring?”

“Beyond the high Barrows.  East of Crest Hill and the wood.”

“Do you mind people coming to see?”

“Whenever you please.  Only let me know”

“I’ll take my chance some day.  Some day soon.”  She looked at me thoughtfully, smiled, and our talk was at an end.