Tono Bungay

I had a ridiculous persuasion that I was “saving the situation.”

“I’m going,” I said quite consciously and dramatically.  I saw the whole affair—­how shall I put it?—­in American colours.

I sat down beside him.  “Give me all the data you’ve got,” I said, “and I’ll pull this thing off.”

“But nobody knows exactly where—­”

“Nasmyth does, and he’ll tell me.”

“He’s been very close,” said my uncle, and regarded me.

“He’ll tell me all right, now he’s smashed.”

He thought.  “I believe he will.”

“George,” he said, “if you pull this thing off—­Once or twice before you’ve stepped in—­with that sort of Woosh of yours—­”

He left the sentence unfinished.

“Give me that note-book,” I said, “and tell me all you know.  Where’s the ship?  Where’s Pollack?  And where’s that telegram from?  If that quap’s to be got, I’ll get it or bust.  If you’ll hold on here until I get back with it.”...

And so it was I jumped into the wildest adventure of my life.

I requisitioned my uncle’s best car forthwith.  I went down that night to the place of despatch named on Nasmyth’s telegram, Bampton S.O.  Oxon, routed him out with a little trouble from that centre, made things right with him and got his explicit directions; and I was inspecting the Maud Mary with young Pollack, his cousin and aide, the following afternoon.  She was rather a shock to me and not at all in my style, a beast of a brig inured to the potato trade, and she reeked from end to end with the faint, subtle smell of raw potatoes so that it prevailed even over the temporary smell of new paint.  She was a beast of a brig, all hold and dirty framework, and they had ballasted her with old iron and old rails and iron sleepers, and got a miscellaneous lot of spades and iron wheelbarrows against the loading of the quap.  I thought her over with Pollack, one of those tall blond young men who smoke pipes and don’t help much, and then by myself, and as a result I did my best to sweep Gravesend clean of wheeling planks, and got in as much cord and small rope as I could for lashing.  I had an idea we might need to run up a jetty.  In addition to much ballast she held, remotely hidden in a sort of inadvertent way a certain number of ambiguous cases which I didn’t examine, but which I gathered were a provision against the need of a trade.

The captain was a most extraordinary creature, under the impression we were after copper ore; he was a Roumanian Jew, with twitching, excitable features, who had made his way to a certificate after some preliminary naval experiences in the Black Sea.  The mate was an Essex man of impenetrable reserve.  The crew were astoundingly ill-clad and destitute and dirty; most of them youths, unwashed, out of colliers.  One, the cook was a mulatto; and one, the best-built fellow of them all, was a Breton.  There was some subterfuge about our position on board—­I forget the particulars now—­I was called the supercargo and Pollack was the steward.  This added to the piratical flavour that insufficient funds and Gordon-Nasmyth’s original genius had already given the enterprise.

Those two days of bustle at Gravesend, under dingy skies, in narrow, dirty streets, were a new experience for me.  It is like nothing else in my life.  I realised that I was a modern and a civilised man.  I found the food filthy and the coffee horrible; the whole town stank in my nostrils, the landlord of the Good Intent on the quay had a stand-up quarrel with us before I could get even a hot bath, and the bedroom I slept in was infested by a quantity of exotic but voracious flat parasites called locally “bugs,” in the walls, in the woodwork, everywhere.  I fought them with insect powder, and found them comatose in the morning.  I was dipping down into the dingy underworld of the contemporary state, and I liked it no better than I did my first dip into it when I stayed with my Uncle Nicodemus Frapp at the bakery at Chatham—­where, by-the-by, we had to deal with cockroaches of a smaller, darker variety, and also with bugs of sorts.

Let me confess that through all this time before we started I was immensely self-conscious, and that Beatrice played the part of audience in my imagination throughout.  I was, as I say, “saving the situation,” and I was acutely aware of that.  The evening before we sailed, instead of revising our medicine-chest as I had intended, I took the car and ran across country to Lady Grove to tell my aunt of the journey I was making, dress, and astonish Lady Osprey by an after dinner call.

The two ladies were at home and alone beside a big fire that seemed wonderfully cheerful after the winter night.  I remember the effect of the little parlour in which they sat as very bright and domestic.  Lady Osprey, in a costume of mauve and lace, sat on a chintz sofa and played an elaborately spread-out patience by the light of a tall shaded lamp; Beatrice, in a whiteness that showed her throat, smoked a cigarette in an armchair and read with a lamp at her elbow.  The room was white-panelled and chintz-curtained.  About those two bright centres of light were warm dark shadow, in which a circular mirror shone like a pool of brown water.  I carried off my raid by behaving like a slave of etiquette.  There were moments when I think I really made Lady Osprey believe that my call was an unavoidable necessity, that it would have been negligent of me not to call just how and when I did.  But at the best those were transitory moments.

They received me with disciplined amazement.  Lady Osprey was interested in my face and scrutinised the scar.  Beatrice stood behind her solicitude.  Our eyes met, and in hers I could see startled interrogations.

“I’m going,” I said, “to the west coast of Africa.”

They asked questions, but it suited my mood to be vague.

“We’ve interests there.  It is urgent I should go.  I don’t know when I may return.”

After that I perceived Beatrice surveyed me steadily.

The conversation was rather difficult.  I embarked upon lengthy thanks for their kindness to me after my accident.  I tried to understand Lady Osprey’s game of patience, but it didn’t appear that Lady Osprey was anxious for me to understand her patience.  I came to the verge of taking my leave

“You needn’t go yet,” said Beatrice, abruptly.

She walked across to the piano, took a pile of music from the cabinet near, surveyed Lady Osprey’s back, and with a gesture to me dropped it all deliberately on to the floor.

“Must talk,” she said, kneeling close to me as I helped her to pick it up.  “Turn my pages.  At the piano.”

“I can’t read music.”

“Turn my pages.”

Presently we were at the piano, and Beatrice was playing with noisy inaccuracy.  She glanced over her shoulder and Lady Osprey had resumed her patience.  The old lady was very pink, and appeared to be absorbed in some attempt to cheat herself without our observing it.

“Isn’t West Africa a vile climate?” “Are you going to live there?” “Why are you going?”

Beatrice asked these questions in a low voice and gave me no chance to answer.  Then taking a rhythm from the music before her, she said—­

“At the back of the house is a garden—­a door in the wall—­on the lane.  Understand?”

I turned over the pages without any effect on her playing.

“When?” I asked.

She dealt in chords.  “I wish I could play this!” she said.  “Midnight.”

She gave her attention to the music for a time.

“You may have to wait.”

“I’ll wait.”

She brought her playing to an end by—­as school boys say—­“stashing it up.”

“I can’t play to-night,” she said, standing up and meeting my eyes.  “I wanted to give you a parting voluntary.”

“Was that Wagner, Beatrice?” asked Lady Osprey looking up from her cards.  “It sounded very confused.”

I took my leave.  I had a curious twinge of conscience as I parted from Lady Osprey.  Either a first intimation of middle-age or my inexperience in romantic affairs was to blame, but I felt a very distinct objection to the prospect of invading this good lady’s premises from the garden door.  I motored up to the pavilion, found Cothope reading in bed, told him for the first time of West Africa, spent an hour with him in settling all the outstanding details of Lord Roberts B, and left that in his hands to finish against my return.  I sent the motor back to Lady Grove, and still wearing my fur coat—­for the January night was damp and bitterly cold—­walked to Bedley Corner.  I found the lane to the back of the Dower House without any difficulty, and was at the door in the wall with ten minutes to spare.  I lit a cigar and fell to walking up and down.  This queer flavour of intrigue, this nocturnal garden-door business, had taken me by surprise and changed my mental altitudes.  I was startled out of my egotistical pose and thinking intently of Beatrice, of that elfin quality in her that always pleased me, that always took me by surprise, that had made her for example so instantly conceive this meeting.

She came within a minute of midnight; the door opened softly and she appeared, a short, grey figure in a motor-coat of sheepskin, bareheaded to the cold drizzle.  She flitted up to me, and her eyes were shadows in her dusky face.

“Why are you going to West Africa?” she asked at once.

“Business crisis.  I have to go.”

“You’re not going—?  You’re coming back?”

“Three or four months,” I said, “at most.”

“Then, it’s nothing to do with me?”

“Nothing,” I said.  “Why should it have?”

“Oh, that’s all right.  One never knows what people think or what people fancy.”  She took me by the arm, “Let’s go for a walk,” she said.

I looked about me at darkness and rain.

“That’s all right,” she laughed.  “We can go along the lane and into the Old Woking Road.  Do you mind?  Of course you don’t.  My head.  It doesn’t matter.  One never meets anybody.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve wandered like this before….  Of course.  Did you think”—­she nodded her head back at her home—­“that’s all?”

“No, by Jove!” I cried; “it’s manifest it isn’t.”

She took my arm and turned me down the lane.  “Night’s my time,” she said by my side.  “There’s a touch of the werewolf in my blood.  One never knows in these old families….  I’ve wondered often….  Here we are, anyhow, alone in the world.  Just darkness and cold and a sky of clouds and wet.  And we—­together.

I like the wet on my face and hair, don’t you?  When do you sail?”

I told her to-morrow.

“Oh, well, there’s no to-morrow now.  You and I!” She stopped and confronted me.

“You don’t say a word except to answer!”

“No,” I said.

“Last time you did all the talking.”

“Like a fool.  Now—­”

We looked at each other’s two dim faces.  “You’re glad to be here?”

“I’m glad—­I’m beginning to be—­it’s more than glad.”

She put her hands on my shoulders and drew me down to kiss her.

“Ah!” she said, and for a moment or so we just clung to one another.

“That’s all,” she said, releasing herself.  “What bundles of clothes we are to-night.  I felt we should kiss some day again.  Always.  The last time was ages ago.”

“Among the fern stalks.”

“Among the bracken.  You remember.  And your lips were cold.  Were mine?  The same lips—­after so long—­after so much!...  And now let’s trudge through this blotted-out world together for a time.  Yes, let me take your arm.  Just trudge.  See?  Hold tight to me because I know the way—­and don’t talk—­don’t talk.  Unless you want to talk….  Let me tell you things!  You see, dear, the whole world is blotted out—­it’s dead and gone, and we’re in this place.  This dark wild place….  We’re dead.  Or all the world is dead.  No!  We’re dead.  No one can see us.  We’re shadows.  We’ve got out of our positions, out of our bodies—­and together.  That’s the good thing of it—­together.  But that’s why the world can’t see us and why we hardly see the world.  Sssh!  Is it all right?”

“It’s all right,” I said.

We stumbled along for a time in a close silence.  We passed a dim-lit, rain-veiled window.

“The silly world,” she said, “the silly world!  It eats and sleeps.  If the wet didn’t patter so from the trees we’d hear it snoring.  It’s dreaming such stupid things—­stupid judgments.  It doesn’t know we are passing, we two—­free of it—­clear of it.  You and I!”

We pressed against each other reassuringly.

“I’m glad we’re dead,” she whispered.  “I’m glad we’re dead.  I was tired of it, dear.  I was so tired of it, dear, and so entangled.”

She stopped abruptly.

We splashed through a string of puddles.  I began to remember things I had meant to say.

“Look here!” I cried.  “I want to help you beyond measure.  You are entangled.  What is the trouble?  I asked you to marry me.  You said you would.  But there’s something.”

My thoughts sounded clumsy as I said them.

“Is it something about my position?...  Or is it something—­perhaps—­about some other man?”

There was an immense assenting silence.

“You’ve puzzled me so.  At first—­I mean quite early—­I thought you meant to make me marry you.”

“I did.”

“And then?”

“To-night,” she said after a long pause, “I can’t explain.  No!  I can’t explain.  I love you!  But—­explanations!  To-night my dear, here we are in the world alone—­and the world doesn’t matter.  Nothing matters.  Here I am in the cold with you and my bed away there deserted.  I’d tell you—­I will tell you when things enable me to tell you, and soon enough they will.  But to-night—­I won’t—­I won’t.”

She left my side and went in front of me.

She turned upon me.  “Look here,” she said, “I insist upon your being dead.  Do you understand?  I’m not joking.  To-night you and I are out of life.  It’s our time together.  There may be other times, but this we won’t spoil.  We’re—­in Hades if you like.  Where there’s nothing to hide and nothing to tell.  No bodies even.  No bothers.  We loved each other—­down there—­and were kept apart, but now it doesn’t matter.  It’s over….  If you won’t agree to that—­I will go home.”

“I wanted,” I began.

“I know.  Oh! my dear, if you’d only understand I understand.  If you’d only not care—­and love me to-night.”

“I do love you,” I said.

“Then love me,” she answered, “and leave all the things that bother you.  Love me!  Here I am!”

“But!—­”

“No!” she said.

“Well, have your way.”

So she carried her point, and we wandered into the night together and Beatrice talked to me of love….

I’d never heard a woman before in all my life who could talk of love, who could lay bare and develop and touch with imagination all that mass of fine emotion every woman, it may be, hides.  She had read of love, she had thought of love, a thousand sweet lyrics had sounded through her brain and left fine fragments in her memory; she poured it out, all of it, shamelessly, skilfully, for me.  I cannot give any sense of that talk, I cannot even tell how much of the delight of it was the magic of her voice, the glow of her near presence.  And always we walked swathed warmly through a chilly air, along dim, interminable greasy roads—­with never a soul abroad it seemed to us, never a beast in the fields.

“Why do people love each other?” I said.

“Why not?”

“But why do I love you?  Why is your voice better than any voice, your face sweeter than any face?”

“And why do I love you?” she asked; “not only what is fine in you, but what isn’t?  Why do I love your dullness, your arrogance?  For I do.  To—­night I love the very raindrops on the fur of your coat!”...

So we talked; and at last very wet, still glowing but a little tired, we parted at the garden door.  We had been wandering for two hours in our strange irrational community of happiness, and all the world about us, and particularly Lady Osprey and her household, had been asleep—­and dreaming of anything rather than Beatrice in the night and rain.

She stood in the doorway, a muffled figure with eyes that glowed.

“Come back,” she whispered.  “I shall wait for you.”

She hesitated.

She touched the lapel of my coat.  “I love you now,” she said, and lifted her face to mine.

I held her to me and was atremble from top to toe.  “O God!” I cried.  “And I must go!”

She slipped from my arms and paused, regarding me.  For an instant the world seemed full of fantastic possibilities.

“Yes, go!” she said, and vanished and slammed the door upon me, leaving me alone like a man new fallen from fairyland in the black darkness of the night.