Tono Bungay

But my story has made a jump from June to October, and during that time my relations with Beatrice and the countryside that was her setting had developed in many directions.  She came and went, moving in an orbit for which I had no data, going to London and Paris, into Wales and Northampton, while her stepmother, on some independent system of her own, also vanished and recurred intermittently.  At home they obeyed the rule of an inflexible old maid, Charlotte, and Beatrice exercised all the rights of proprietorship in Carnaby’s extensive stables.  Her interest in me was from the first undisguised.  She found her way to my worksheds and developed rapidly, in spite of the sincere discouragement of Cothope, into a keen amateur of aeronautics.  She would come sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes afoot with an Irish terrier, sometimes riding.  She would come for three or four days every day, vanish for a fortnight or three weeks, return.

It was not long before I came to look for her.  From the first I found her immensely interesting.  To me she was a new feminine type altogether—­I have made it plain, I think, how limited was my knowledge of women.  But she made me not simply interested in her, but in myself.  She became for me something that greatly changes a man’s world.  How shall I put it?  She became an audience.  Since I’ve emerged from the emotional developments of the affair I have thought it out in a hundred aspects, and it does seem to me that this way in which men and women make audiences for one another is a curiously influential force in their lives.  For some it seems an audience is a vital necessity, they seek audiences as creatures seek food; others again, my uncle among them, can play to an imaginary audience.  I, I think, have lived and can live without one.  In my adolescence I was my own audience and my own court of honour.  And to have an audience in one’s mind is to play a part, to become self-conscious and dramatic.  For many years I had been self-forgetful and scientific.  I had lived for work and impersonal interests until I found scrutiny, applause and expectation in Beatrice’s eyes.  Then I began to live for the effect I imagined I made upon her, to make that very soon the principal value in my life.  I played to her.  I did things for the look of them.  I began to dream more and more of beautiful situations and fine poses and groupings with her and for her.

I put these things down because they puzzle me.  I think I was in love with Beatrice, as being in love is usually understood; but it was quite a different state altogether from my passionate hunger for Marion, or my keen, sensuous desire for and pleasure in Effie.  These were selfish, sincere things, fundamental and instinctive, as sincere as the leap of a tiger.  But until matters drew to a crisis with Beatrice, there was an immense imaginative insurgence of a quite different quality.  I am setting down here very gravely, and perhaps absurdly, what are no doubt elementary commonplaces for innumerable people.  This love that grew up between Beatrice and myself was, I think—­I put it quite tentatively and rather curiously—­romantic love.  That unfortunate and truncated affair of my uncle and the Scrymgeour lady was really of the same stuff, if a little different in quality.  I have to admit that.  The factor of audience was of primary importance in either else.

Its effect upon me was to make me in many respects adolescent again.  It made me keener upon the point of honour, and anxious and eager to do high and splendid things, and in particular, brave things.  So far it ennobled and upheld me.  But it did also push me towards vulgar and showy things.  At bottom it was disingenuous; it gave my life the quality of stage scenery, with one side to the audience, another side that wasn’t meant to show, and an economy of substance.  It certainly robbed my work of high patience and quality.  I cut down the toil of research in my eagerness and her eagerness for fine flourishes in the air, flights that would tell.  I shirked the longer road.

And it robbed me, too, of any fine perception of absurdity.

Yet that was not everything in our relationship.  The elemental thing was there also.  It came in very suddenly.

It was one day in the summer, though I do not now recall without reference to my experimental memoranda whether it was in July or August.  I was working with a new and more bird-like aeroplane with wing curvatures studied from Lilienthal, Pilcher and Phillips, that I thought would give a different rhythm for the pitching oscillations than anything I’d had before.  I was soaring my long course from the framework on the old barrow by my sheds down to Tinker’s Corner.  It is a clear stretch of downland, except for two or three thickets of box and thorn to the right of my course; one transverse trough, in which there is bush and a small rabbit warren, comes in from the east.  I had started, and was very intent on the peculiar long swoop with which any new arrangement flew.  Then, without any sort of notice, right ahead of me appeared Beatrice, riding towards Tinker’s Corner to waylay and talk to me.  She looked round over her shoulder, saw me coming, touched her horse to a gallop, and then the brute bolted right into the path of my machine.

There was a queer moment of doubt whether we shouldn’t all smash together.  I had to make up my mind very quickly whether I would pitch-up and drop backward at once and take my chance of falling undamaged—­a poor chance it would have been—­in order to avoid any risk to her, or whether I would lift against the wind and soar right over her.  This latter I did.  She had already got her horse in hand when I came up to her.  Her woman’s body lay along his neck, and she glanced up as I, with wings aspread, and every nerve in a state of tension, swept over her.

Then I had landed, and was going back to where her horse stood still and trembling.

We exchanged no greetings.  She slid from her saddle into my arms, and for one instant I held her.

“Those great wings,” she said, and that was all.

She lay in my arms, and I thought for a moment she had fainted.

“Very near a nasty accident,” said Cothope, coming up and regarding our grouping with disfavour.  He took her horse by the bridle.  “Very dangerous thing coming across us like that.”

Beatrice disengaged herself from me, stood for a moment trembling, and then sat down on the turf “I’ll just sit down for a moment,” she said.

“Oh!” she said.

She covered her face with her hands, while Cothope looked at her with an expression between suspicion and impatience.

For some moments nobody moved.  Then Cothope remarked that perhaps he’d better get her water.

As for me, I was filled with a new outrageous idea, begotten I scarcely know how from this incident, with its instant contacts and swift emotions, and that was that I must make love to and possess Beatrice.  I see no particular reason why that thought should have come to me in that moment, but it did.  I do not believe that before then I had thought of our relations in such terms at all.  Suddenly, as I remember it, the factor of passion came.  She crouched there, and I stood over her, and neither of us said a word.  But it was just as though something had been shouted from the sky.

Cothope had gone twenty paces perhaps when she uncovered her face.  “I shan’t want any water,” she said.  “Call him back.”