Tono-Bungay

Tono-Bungay Page 4

by H. G. Wells

  CHAPTER THE SECOND

  THE DAWN COMES, AND MY UNCLE APPEARS IN A NEW SILK HAT

  I

  Throughout my student days I had not seen my uncle. I refrained fromgoing to him in spite of an occasional regret that in this way Iestranged myself from my aunt Susan, and I maintained a sulky attitudeof mind towards him. And I don't think that once in all that time I gavea thought to that mystic word of his that was to alter all the worldfor us. Yet I had not altogether forgotten it. It was with a touch ofmemory, dim transient perplexity if no more--why did this thing seem insome way personal?--that I read a new inscription upon the hoardings:

  THE SECRET OF VIGOUR, TONO-BUNGAY.

  That was all. It was simple and yet in some way arresting. I foundmyself repeating the word after I had passed; it roused one's attentionlike the sound of distant guns. "Tono"--what's that? and deep, rich,unhurrying;--"BUN--gay!"

  Then came my uncle's amazing telegram, his answer to my hostilenote: "Come to me at once you are wanted three hundred a year certaintono-bungay."

  "By Jove!" I cried, "of course!

  "It's something--. A patent-medicine! I wonder what he wants with me."

  In his Napoleonic way my uncle had omitted to give an address. Histelegram had been handed in at Farringdon Road, and after complexmeditations I replied to Ponderevo, Farringdon Road, trusting to therarity of our surname to reach him.

  "Where are you?" I asked.

  His reply came promptly:

  "192A, Raggett Street, E.C."

  The next day I took an unsanctioned holiday after the morning's lecture.I discovered my uncle in a wonderfully new silk hat--oh, a splendidhat! with a rolling brim that went beyond the common fashion. It wasdecidedly too big for him--that was its only fault. It was stuck on theback of his head, and he was in a white waistcoat and shirt sleeves.He welcomed me with a forgetfulness of my bitter satire and my hostileabstinence that was almost divine. His glasses fell off at the sight ofme. His round inexpressive eyes shone brightly. He held out his plumpshort hand.

  "Here we are, George! What did I tell you? Needn't whisper it now, myboy. Shout it--LOUD! spread it about! Tell every one! Tono--TONO--,TONO-BUNGAY!"

  Raggett Street, you must understand, was a thoroughfare over which someone had distributed large quantities of cabbage stumps and leaves. Itopened out of the upper end of Farringdon Street, and 192A was a shopwith the plate-glass front coloured chocolate, on which several of thesame bills I had read upon the hoardings had been stuck. The floor wascovered by street mud that had been brought in on dirty boots, and threeenergetic young men of the hooligan type, in neck-wraps and caps, werepacking wooden cases with papered-up bottles, amidst much straw andconfusion. The counter was littered with these same swathed bottles, ofa pattern then novel but now amazingly familiar in the world, the bluepaper with the coruscating figure of a genially nude giant, and theprinted directions of how under practically all circumstances to takeTono-Bungay. Beyond the counter on one side opened a staircase downwhich I seem to remember a girl descending with a further consignmentof bottles, and the rest of the background was a high partition, alsochocolate, with "Temporary Laboratory" inscribed upon it in whiteletters, and over a door that pierced it, "Office." Here I rapped,inaudible amid much hammering, and then entered unanswered to findmy uncle, dressed as I have described, one hand gripping a sheath ofletters, and the other scratching his head as he dictated to one ofthree toiling typewriter girls. Behind him was a further partition anda door inscribed "ABSOLUTELY PRIVATE--NO ADMISSION," thereon. Thispartition was of wood painted the universal chocolate, up to about eightfeet from the ground, and then of glass. Through the glass I saw dimlya crowded suggestion of crucibles and glass retorts, and--byJove!--yes!--the dear old Wimblehurst air-pump still! It gave me quitea little thrill--that air-pump! And beside it was the electricalmachine--but something--some serious trouble--had happened to that. Allthese were evidently placed on a shelf just at the level to show.

  "Come right into the sanctum," said my uncle, after he had finishedsomething about "esteemed consideration," and whisked me through thedoor into a room that quite amazingly failed to verify the promise ofthat apparatus. It was papered with dingy wall-paper that had peeled inplaces; it contained a fireplace, an easy-chair with a cushion, a tableon which stood two or three big bottles, a number of cigar-boxes onthe mantel, whisky Tantalus and a row of soda syphons. He shut the doorafter me carefully.

  "Well, here we are!" he said. "Going strong! Have a whisky, George?No!--Wise man! Neither will I! You see me at it! At it--hard!"

  "Hard at what?"

  "Read it," and he thrust into my hand a label--that label that hasnow become one of the most familiar objects of the chemist's shop, thegreenish-blue rather old-fashioned bordering, the legend, the namein good black type, very clear, and the strong man all set about withlightning flashes above the double column of skilful lies in red--thelabel of Tono-Bungay. "It's afloat," he said, as I stood puzzling atthis. "It's afloat. I'm afloat!" And suddenly he burst out singing inthat throaty tenor of his--

  "I'm afloat, I'm afloat on the fierce flowing tide, The ocean's my homeand my bark is my bride!

  "Ripping song that is, George. Not so much a bark as a solution, butstill--it does! Here we are at it! By-the-by! Half a mo'! I've thoughtof a thing." He whisked out, leaving me to examine this nuclear spot atleisure while his voice became dictatorial without. The den struck me asin its large grey dirty way quite unprecedented and extraordinary. Thebottles were all labelled simply A, B, C, and so forth, and that dearold apparatus above, seen from this side, was even more patiently "onthe shelf" than when it had been used to impress Wimblehurst. I sawnothing for it but to sit down in the chair and await my uncle'sexplanations. I remarked a frock-coat with satin lapels behind the door;there was a dignified umbrella in the corner and a clothes-brush anda hat-brush stood on a side-table. My uncle returned in five minuteslooking at his watch--a gold watch--"Gettin' lunch-time, George," hesaid. "You'd better come and have lunch with me!"

  "How's Aunt Susan?" I asked.

  "Exuberant. Never saw her so larky. This has bucked her up somethingwonderful--all this."

  "All what?"

  "Tono-Bungay."

  "What is Tono-Bungay?" I asked.

  My uncle hesitated. "Tell you after lunch, George," he said. "Comealong!" and having locked up the sanctum after himself, led the wayalong a narrow dirty pavement, lined with barrows and swept at times byavalanche-like porters bearing burthens to vans, to Farringdon Street.He hailed a passing cab superbly, and the cabman was infinitelyrespectful. "Schafer's," he said, and off we went side by side--and withme more and more amazed at all these things--to Schafer's Hotel, thesecond of the two big places with huge lace curtain-covered windows,near the corner of Blackfriars Bridge.

  I will confess I felt a magic charm in our relative proportions as thetwo colossal, pale-blue-and-red liveried porters of Schafers' held openthe inner doors for us with a respectful salutation that in some mannerthey seemed to confine wholly to my uncle. Instead of being aboutfour inches taller, I felt at least the same size as he, and very muchslenderer. Still more respectful--waiters relieved him of the new hatand the dignified umbrella, and took his orders for our lunch. He gavethem with a fine assurance.

  He nodded to several of the waiters.

  "They know me, George, already," he said. "Point me out. Live place! Eyefor coming men!"

  The detailed business of the lunch engaged our attention for a while,and then I leant across my plate. "And NOW?" said I.

  "It's the secret of vigour. Didn't you read that label?"

  "Yes, but--"

  "It's selling like hot cakes."

  "And what is it?" I pressed.

  "Well," said my uncle, and then leant forward and spoke softly undercover of his hand, "It's nothing more or less than..."

  (But here an unfortunate scruple intervenes. After all, Tono-Bungay isstill a marketable commodity and in the hands of purchasers, who bou
ghtit from--among other vendors--me. No! I am afraid I cannot give itaway--)

  "You see," said my uncle in a slow confidential whisper, with eyesvery wide and a creased forehead, "it's nice because of the" (here hementioned a flavouring matter and an aromatic spirit), "it's stimulatingbecause of" (here he mentioned two very vivid tonics, one with amarked action on the kidney.) "And the" (here he mentioned two otheringredients) "makes it pretty intoxicating. Cocks their tails. Thenthere's" (but I touch on the essential secret.) "And there you are. Igot it out of an old book of recipes--all except the" (here he mentionedthe more virulent substance, the one that assails the kidneys), "whichis my idea! Modern touch! There you are!"

  He reverted to the direction of our lunch.

  Presently he was leading the way to the lounge--sumptuous piece in redmorocco and yellow glazed crockery, with incredible vistas of setteesand sofas and things, and there I found myself grouped with him in twoexcessively upholstered chairs with an earthenware Moorish table betweenus bearing coffee and Benedictine, and I was tasting the delights of atenpenny cigar. My uncle smoked a similar cigar in an habituated manner,and he looked energetic and knowing and luxurious and most unexpectedlya little bounder, round the end of it. It was just a trivial flawupon our swagger, perhaps that we both were clear our cigars had to be"mild." He got obliquely across the spaces of his great armchair so asto incline confidentially to my ear, he curled up his little legs, andI, in my longer way, adopted a corresponding receptive obliquity. I feltthat we should strike an unbiased observer as a couple of very deep andwily and developing and repulsive persons.

  "I want to let you into this"--puff--"George," said my uncle round theend of his cigar. "For many reasons."

  His voice grew lower and more cunning. He made explanations that to myinexperience did not completely explain. I retain an impression of along credit and a share with a firm of wholesale chemists, of a creditand a prospective share with some pirate printers, of a third share fora leading magazine and newspaper proprietor.

  "I played 'em off one against the other," said my uncle. I took hispoint in an instant. He had gone to each of them in turn and said theothers had come in.

  "I put up four hundred pounds," said my uncle, "myself and my all. Andyou know--"

  He assumed a brisk confidence. "I hadn't five hundred pence. At least--"

  For a moment he really was just a little embarrassed. "I DID" he said,"produce capital. You see, there was that trust affair of yours--Iought, I suppose--in strict legality--to have put that straight first.Zzzz....

  "It was a bold thing to do," said my uncle, shifting the venue fromthe region of honour to the region of courage. And then with acharacteristic outburst of piety, "Thank God it's all come right!

  "And now, I suppose, you ask where do YOU come in? Well, fact is I'vealways believed in you, George. You've got--it's a sort of dismal grit.Bark your shins, rouse you, and you'll go! You'd rush any position youhad a mind to rush. I know a bit about character, George--trust me.You've got--" He clenched his hands and thrust them out suddenly, and atthe same time said, with explosive violence, "Wooosh! Yes. You have! Theway you put away that Latin at Wimblehurst; I've never forgotten it.

  "Wo-oo-oo-osh! Your science and all that! Wo-oo-oo-osh! I know mylimitations. There's things I can do, and" (he spoke in a whisper, asthough this was the first hint of his life's secret) "there's things Ican't. Well, I can create this business, but I can't make it go. I'm toovoluminous--I'm a boiler-over, not a simmering stick-at-it. You keep onHOTTING UP AND HOTTING UP. Papin's digester. That's you, steady andlong and piling up,--then, wo-oo-oo-oo-osh. Come in and stiffen theseniggers. Teach them that wo-oo-oo-oo-osh. There you are! That's what I'mafter. You! Nobody else believes you're more than a boy. Come right inwith me and be a man. Eh, George? Think of the fun of it--a thing onthe go--a Real Live Thing! Wooshing it up! Making it buzz and spin!Whoo-oo-oo."--He made alluring expanding circles in the air with hishand. "Eh?"

  His proposal, sinking to confidential undertones again, took moredefinite shape. I was to give all my time and energy to developing andorganising. "You shan't write a single advertisement, or give a singleassurance" he declared. "I can do all that." And the telegram was noflourish; I was to have three hundred a year. Three hundred a year.("That's nothing," said my uncle, "the thing to freeze on to, when thetime comes, is your tenth of the vendor's share.")

  Three hundred a year certain, anyhow! It was an enormous income to me.For a moment I was altogether staggered. Could there be that much moneyin the whole concern? I looked about me at the sumptuous furniture ofSchafer's Hotel. No doubt there were many such incomes.

  My head was spinning with unwonted Benedictine and Burgundy.

  "Let me go back and look at the game again," I said. "Let me seeupstairs and round about."

  I did.

  "What do you think of it all?" my uncle asked at last.

  "Well, for one thing," I said, "why don't you have those girls workingin a decently ventilated room? Apart from any other consideration,they'd work twice as briskly. And they ought to cover the corks beforelabelling round the bottle."

  "Why?" said my uncle.

  "Because--they sometimes make a mucker of the cork job, and then thelabel's wasted."

  "Come and change it, George," said my uncle, with sudden fervour "Comehere and make a machine of it. You can. Make it all slick, and then makeit woosh. I know you can. Oh! I know you can."

  II

  I seem to remember very quick changes of mind after that lunch. Themuzzy exaltation of the unaccustomed stimulants gave way very rapidlyto a model of pellucid and impartial clairvoyance which is one of myhabitual mental states. It is intermittent; it leaves me for weekstogether, I know, but back it comes at last like justice on circuit,and calls up all my impression, all my illusions, all my willful andpassionate proceedings. We came downstairs again into that inner roomwhich pretended to be a scientific laboratory through its high glasslights, and indeed was a lurking place. My uncle pressed a cigarette onme, and I took it and stood before the empty fireplace while he proppedhis umbrella in the corner, deposited the new silk hat that was a littletoo big for him on the table, blew copiously and produced a secondcigar.

  It came into my head that he had shrunken very much in size since theWimblehurst days, that the cannon ball he had swallowed was rather moreevident and shameless than it had been, his skin less fresh and the nosebetween his glasses, which still didn't quite fit, much redder. And justthen he seemed much laxer in his muscles and not quite as alertly quickin his movements. But he evidently wasn't aware of the degenerativenature of his changes as he sat there, looking suddenly quite littleunder my eyes.

  "Well, George!" he said, quite happily unconscious of my silentcriticism, "what do you think of it all?"

  "Well," I said, "in the first place--it's a damned swindle!"

  "Tut! tut!" said my uncle. "It's as straight as--It's fair trading!"

  "So much the worse for trading," I said.

  "It's the sort of thing everybody does. After all, there's no harm inthe stuff--and it may do good. It might do a lot of good--giving peopleconfidence, f'rinstance, against an epidemic. See? Why not? don't seewhere your swindle comes in."

  "H'm," I said. "It's a thing you either see or don't see."

  "I'd like to know what sort of trading isn't a swindle in its way.Everybody who does a large advertised trade is selling something commonon the strength of saying it's uncommon. Look at Chickson--they made hima baronet. Look at Lord Radmore, who did it on lying about the alkali insoap! Rippin' ads those were of his too!"

  "You don't mean to say you think doing this stuff up in bottles andswearing it's the quintessence of strength and making poor devils buy itat that, is straight?"

  "Why not, George? How do we know it mayn't be the quintessence to themso far as they're concerned?"

  "Oh!" I said, and shrugged my shoulders.

  "There's Faith. You put Faith in 'em.... I grant our labels are a bitemphatic. Christian
Science, really. No good setting people against themedicine. Tell me a solitary trade nowadays that hasn't to be--emphatic.It's the modern way! Everybody understands it--everybody allows for it."

  "But the world would be no worse and rather better, if all this stuff ofyours was run down a conduit into the Thames."

  "Don't see that, George, at all. 'Mong other things, all our peoplewould be out of work. Unemployed! I grant you Tono-Bungay MAY be--notQUITE so good a find for the world as Peruvian bark, but the pointis, George--it MAKES TRADE! And the world lives on trade. Commerce! Aromantic exchange of commodities and property. Romance. 'Magination.See? You must look at these things in a broad light. Look at thewood--and forget the trees! And hang it, George! we got to do thesethings! There's no way unless you do. What do YOU mean to do--anyhow?"

  "There's ways of living," I said, "Without either fraud or lying."

  "You're a bit stiff, George. There's no fraud in this affair, I'll betmy hat. But what do you propose to do? Go as chemist to some one who ISrunning a business, and draw a salary without a share like I offer you.Much sense in that! It comes out of the swindle as you call it--just thesame."

  "Some businesses are straight and quiet, anyhow; supply a sound articlethat is really needed, don't shout advertisements."

  "No, George. There you're behind the times. The last of that sort wassold up 'bout five years ago."

  "Well, there's scientific research."

  "And who pays for that? Who put up that big City and Guilds place atSouth Kensington? Enterprising business men! They fancy they'll have abit of science going on, they want a handy Expert ever and again, andthere you are! And what do you get for research when you've doneit? Just a bare living and no outlook. They just keep you to makediscoveries, and if they fancy they'll use 'em they do."

  "One can teach."

  "How much a year, George? How much a year? I suppose you must respectCarlyle! Well, you take Carlyle's test--solvency. (Lord! what a bookthat French Revolution of his is!) See what the world pays teachers anddiscoverers and what it pays business men! That shows the ones it reallywants. There's a justice in these big things, George, over and above theapparent injustice. I tell you it wants trade. It's Trade that makes theworld go round! Argosies! Venice! Empire!"

  My uncle suddenly rose to his feet.

  "You think it over, George. You think it over! And come up on Sundayto the new place--we got rooms in Gower Street now--and see your aunt.She's often asked for you, George often and often, and thrown it up atme about that bit of property--though I've always said and alwayswill, that twenty-five shillings in the pound is what I'll pay you andinterest up to the nail. And think it over. It isn't me I ask you tohelp. It's yourself. It's your aunt Susan. It's the whole concern.It's the commerce of your country. And we want you badly. I tell youstraight, I know my limitations. You could take this place, you couldmake it go! I can see you at it--looking rather sour. Woosh is the word,George."

  And he smiled endearingly.

  "I got to dictate a letter," he said, ending the smile, and vanishedinto the outer room.

  III

  I didn't succumb without a struggle to my uncle's allurements. Indeed, Iheld out for a week while I contemplated life and my prospects. It was acrowded and muddled contemplation. It invaded even my sleep.

  My interview with the Registrar, my talk with my uncle, my abruptdiscovery of the hopeless futility of my passion for Marion, hadcombined to bring me to sense of crisis. What was I going to do withlife?

  I remember certain phases of my indecisions very well.

  I remember going home from our talk. I went down Farringdon Street tothe Embankment because I thought to go home by Holborn and Oxford Streetwould be too crowded for thinking.... That piece of Embankmentfrom Blackfriars to Westminster still reminds me of that momentoushesitation.

  You know, from first to last, I saw the business with my eyes open, Isaw its ethical and moral values quite clearly. Never for a moment doI remember myself faltering from my persuasion that the sale ofTono-Bungay was a thoroughly dishonest proceeding. The stuff was, Iperceived, a mischievous trash, slightly stimulating, aromatic andattractive, likely to become a bad habit and train people in thehabitual use of stronger tonics and insidiously dangerous to people withdefective kidneys. It would cost about sevenpence the large bottle tomake, including bottling, and we were to sell it at half a crown plusthe cost of the patent medicine stamp. A thing that I will confessdeterred me from the outset far more than the sense of dishonesty inthis affair, was the supreme silliness of the whole concern. I stillclung to the idea that the world of men was or should be a sane and justorganisation, and the idea that I should set myself gravely, just atthe fine springtime of my life, to developing a monstrous bottling andpacking warehouse, bottling rubbish for the consumption of foolish,credulous and depressed people, had in it a touch of insanity. My earlybeliefs still clung to me. I felt assured that somewhere there must bea hitch in the fine prospect of ease and wealth under such conditions;that somewhere, a little overgrown, perhaps, but still traceable, lay aneglected, wasted path of use and honour for me.

  My inclination to refuse the whole thing increased rather thandiminished at first as I went along the Embankment. In my uncle'spresence there had been a sort of glamour that had prevented an outrightrefusal. It was a revival of affection for him I felt in his presence, Ithink, in part, and in part an instinctive feeling that I must considerhim as my host. But much more was it a curious persuasion he had theknack of inspiring--a persuasion not so much of his integrity andcapacity as of the reciprocal and yielding foolishness of the world. Onefelt that he was silly and wild, but in some way silly and wild afterthe fashion of the universe. After all, one must live somehow. Iastonished him and myself by temporising.

  "No," said I, "I'll think it over!"

  And as I went along the embankment the first effect was all againstmy uncle. He shrank--for a little while he continued to shrink--inperspective until he was only a very small shabby little man in a dirtyback street, sending off a few hundred bottles of rubbish to foolishbuyers. The great buildings on the right of us, the Inns and the SchoolBoard place--as it was then--Somerset House, the big hotels, the greatbridges, Westminster's outlines ahead, had an effect of grey largenessthat reduced him to the proportions of a busy black beetle in a crack inthe floor.

  And then my eye caught the advertisements on the south side of "Sorber'sFood," of "Cracknell's Ferric Wine," very bright and prosperous signs,illuminated at night, and I realised how astonishingly they looked athome there, how evidently part they were in the whole thing.

  I saw a man come charging out of Palace Yard--the policeman touched hishelmet to him--with a hat and a bearing astonishingly like my uncle's.After all,--didn't Cracknell himself sit in the House?

  Tono-Bungay shouted at me from a hoarding near Adelphi Terrace; I sawit afar off near Carfax Street; it cried out again upon me in KensingtonHigh Street, and burst into a perfect clamour; six or seven times Isaw it as I drew near my diggings. It certainly had an air of beingsomething more than a dream.

  Yes, I thought it over--thoroughly enough.... Trade rules the world.Wealth rather than trade! The thing was true, and true too was myuncle's proposition that the quickest way to get wealth is to sell thecheapest thing possible in the dearest bottle. He was frightfully rightafter all. Pecunnia non olet,--a Roman emperor said that. Perhaps mygreat heroes in Plutarch were no more than such men, fine now onlybecause they are distant; perhaps after all this Socialism to which Ihad been drawn was only a foolish dream, only the more foolish becauseall its promises were conditionally true. Morris and these othersplayed with it wittingly; it gave a zest, a touch of substance, to theiraesthetic pleasures. Never would there be good faith enough to bringsuch things about. They knew it; every one, except a few young fools,knew it. As I crossed the corner of St. James's Park wrapped in thought,I dodged back just in time to escape a prancing pair of greys. A stout,common-looking woman, very magnificently dressed, regarded me f
rom thecarriage with a scornful eye. "No doubt," thought I, "a pill-vendor'swife...."

  Running through all my thoughts, surging out like a refrain, was myuncle's master-stroke, his admirable touch of praise: "Make it allslick--and then make it go Woosh. I know you can! Oh! I KNOW you can!"

  IV

  Ewart as a moral influence was unsatisfactory. I had made up my mind toput the whole thing before him, partly to see how he took it, and partlyto hear how it sounded when it was said. I asked him to come and eatwith me in an Italian place near Panton Street where one could get acurious, interesting, glutting sort of dinner for eighteen-pence. Hecame with a disconcerting black-eye that he wouldn't explain. "Not somuch a black-eye," he said, "as the aftermath of a purple patch....What's your difficulty?"

  "I'll tell you with the salad," I said.

  But as a matter of fact I didn't tell him. I threw out that I wasdoubtful whether I ought to go into trade, or stick to teaching inview of my deepening socialist proclivities; and he, warming with theunaccustomed generosity of a sixteen-penny Chianti, ran on from thatwithout any further inquiry as to my trouble.

  His utterances roved wide and loose.

  "The reality of life, my dear Ponderevo," I remember him saying veryimpressively and punctuating with the nut-crackers as he spoke, "isChromatic Conflict ... and Form. Get hold of that and let all theseother questions go. The Socialist will tell you one sort of colour andshape is right, the Individualist another. What does it all amountto? What DOES it all amount to? NOTHING! I have no advice to giveanyone,--except to avoid regrets. Be yourself, seek after such beautifulthings as your own sense determines to be beautiful. And don't mindthe headache in the morning.... For what, after all, is a morning,Ponderevo? It isn't like the upper part of a day!"

  He paused impressively.

  "What Rot!" I cried, after a confused attempt to apprehend him.

  "Isn't it! And it's my bedrock wisdom in the matter! Take it orleave it, my dear George; take it or leave it."... He put down thenut-crackers out of my reach and lugged a greasy-looking note-book fromhis pocket. "I'm going to steal this mustard pot," he said.

  I made noises of remonstrance.

  "Only as a matter of design. I've got to do an old beast's tomb.

  "Wholesale grocer. I'll put it on his corners,--four mustard pots. I daresay he'd be glad of a mustard plaster now to cool him, poor devil, wherehe is. But anyhow,--here goes!"

  V

  It came to me in the small hours that the real moral touchstone forthis great doubting of mind was Marion. I lay composing statements ofmy problem and imagined myself delivering them to her--and she,goddess-like and beautiful; giving her fine, simply-worded judgment.

  "You see, it's just to give one's self over to the Capitalistic System,"I imagined myself saying in good Socialist jargon; "it's surrenderingall one's beliefs. We MAY succeed, we MAY grow rich, but where would thesatisfaction be?"

  Then she would say, "No! That wouldn't be right."

  "But the alternative is to wait!"

  Then suddenly she would become a goddess. She would turn upon me franklyand nobly, with shining eyes, with arms held out. "No," she would say,"we love one another. Nothing ignoble shall ever touch us. We love oneanother. Why wait to tell each other that, dear? What does it matterthat we are poor and may keep poor?"

  But indeed the conversation didn't go at all in that direction. At thesight of her my nocturnal eloquence became preposterous and all themoral values altered altogether. I had waited for her outside the doorof the Parsian-robe establishment in Kensington High Street and walkedhome with her thence. I remember how she emerged into the warm eveninglight and that she wore a brown straw hat that made her, for once notonly beautiful but pretty.

  "I like that hat," I said by way of opening; and she smiled her raredelightful smile at me.

  "I love you," I said in an undertone, as we jostled closer on thepavement.

  She shook her head forbiddingly, but she still smiled. Then--"Besensible!"

  The High Street pavement is too narrow and crowded for conversation andwe were some way westward before we spoke again.

  "Look here," I said; "I want you, Marion. Don't you understand? I wantyou."

  "Now!" she cried warningly.

  I do not know if the reader will understand how a passionate lover,an immense admiration and desire, can be shot with a gleam of positivehatred. Such a gleam there was in me at the serene self-complacency ofthat "NOW!" It vanished almost before I felt it. I found no warning init of the antagonisms latent between us.

  "Marion," I said, "this isn't a trifling matter to me. I love you; Iwould die to get you.... Don't you care?"

  "But what is the good?"

  "You don't care," I cried. "You don't care a rap!"

  "You know I care," she answered. "If I didn't--If I didn't like you verymuch, should I let you come and meet me--go about with you?"

  "Well then," I said, "promise to marry me!"

  "If I do, what difference will it make?"

  We were separated by two men carrying a ladder who drove between usunawares.

  "Marion," I asked when we got together again, "I tell you I want you tomarry me."

  "We can't."

  "Why not?"

  "We can't marry--in the street."

  "We could take our chance!"

  "I wish you wouldn't go on talking like this. What is the good?"

  She suddenly gave way to gloom. "It's no good marrying" she said. "One'sonly miserable. I've seen other girls. When one's alone one has a littlepocket-money anyhow, one can go about a little. But think of beingmarried and no money, and perhaps children--you can't be sure...."

  She poured out this concentrated philosophy of her class and type injerky uncompleted sentences, with knitted brows, with discontented eyestowards the westward glow--forgetful, it seemed, for a moment even ofme.

  "Look here, Marion," I said abruptly, "what would you marry on?"

  "What IS the good?" she began.

  "Would you marry on three hundred a year?"

  She looked at me for a moment. "That's six pounds a week," she said."One could manage on that, easily. Smithie's brother--No, he only getstwo hundred and fifty. He married a typewriting girl."

  "Will you marry me if I get three hundred a year?"

  She looked at me again, with a curious gleam of hope.

  "IF!" she said.

  I held out my hand and looked her in the eyes. "It's a bargain," I said.

  She hesitated and touched my hand for an instant. "It's silly," sheremarked as she did so. "It means really we're--" She paused.

  "Yes?" said I.

  "Engaged. You'll have to wait years. What good can it do you?"

  "Not so many years." I answered.

  For a moment she brooded.

  Then she glanced at me with a smile, half-sweet, half-wistful, that hasstuck in my memory for ever.

  "I like you!" she said. "I shall like to be engaged to you."

  And, faint on the threshold of hearing, I caught her ventured "dear!"It's odd that in writing this down my memory passed over all thatintervened and I feel it all again, and once again I'm Marion's boyishlover taking great joy in such rare and little things.

  VI

  At last I went to the address my uncle had given me in Gower Street, andfound my aunt Susan waiting tea for him.

  Directly I came into the room I appreciated the change in outlook thatthe achievement of Tono-Bungay had made almost as vividly as when Isaw my uncle's new hat. The furniture of the room struck upon my eye asalmost stately. The chairs and sofa were covered with chintz which gaveit a dim, remote flavour of Bladesover; the mantel, the cornice, thegas pendant were larger and finer than the sort of thing I had grownaccustomed to in London. And I was shown in by a real housemaid withreal tails to her cap, and great quantities of reddish hair. There wasmy aunt too looking bright and pretty, in a blue-patterned tea-wrap withbows that seemed to me the quintessence of fashion. She was sitting ina chair by the op
en window with quite a pile of yellow-labelled bookson the occasional table beside her. Before the large, paper-decoratedfireplace stood a three-tiered cake-stand displaying assorted cakes,and a tray with all the tea equipage except the teapot, was on the largecentre-table. The carpet was thick, and a spice of adventure was givenit by a number of dyed sheep-skin mats.

  "Hello!" said my aunt as I appeared. "It's George!"

  "Shall I serve the tea now, Mem?" said the real housemaid, surveying ourgreeting coldly.

  "Not till Mr. Ponderevo comes, Meggie," said my aunt, and grimaced withextraordinary swiftness and virulence as the housemaid turned her back.

  "Meggie she calls herself," said my aunt as the door closed, and left meto infer a certain want of sympathy.

  "You're looking very jolly, aunt," said I.

  "What do you think of all this old Business he's got?" asked my aunt.

  "Seems a promising thing," I said.

  "I suppose there is a business somewhere?"

  "Haven't you seen it?"

  "'Fraid I'd say something AT it George, if I did. So he won't let me. Itcame on quite suddenly. Brooding he was and writing letters and sizzlingsomething awful--like a chestnut going to pop. Then he came home oneday saying Tono-Bungay till I thought he was clean off his onion, andsinging--what was it?"

  "'I'm afloat, I'm afloat,'" I guessed.

  "The very thing. You've heard him. And saying our fortunes were made.Took me out to the Ho'burm Restaurant, George,--dinner, and we hadchampagne, stuff that blows up the back of your nose and makes you goSO, and he said at last he'd got things worthy of me--and we moved herenext day. It's a swell house, George. Three pounds a week for the rooms.And he says the Business'll stand it."

  She looked at me doubtfully.

  "Either do that or smash," I said profoundly.

  We discussed the question for a moment mutely with our eyes. My auntslapped the pile of books from Mudie's.

  "I've been having such a Go of reading, George. You never did!"

  "What do you think of the business?" I asked.

  "Well, they've let him have money," she said, and thought and raised hereyebrows.

  "It's been a time," she went on. "The flapping about! Me sitting doingnothing and him on the go like a rocket. He's done wonders. But he wantsyou, George--he wants you. Sometimes he's full of hope--talks of whenwe're going to have a carriage and be in society--makes it seem sonatural and topsy-turvy, I hardly know whether my old heels aren't uphere listening to him, and my old head on the floor.... Then he getsdepressed. Says he wants restraint. Says he can make a splash but can'tkeep on. Says if you don't come in everything will smash--But you arecoming in?"

  She paused and looked at me.

  "Well--"

  "You don't say you won't come in!"

  "But look here, aunt," I said, "do you understand quite?... It's a quackmedicine. It's trash."

  "There's no law against selling quack medicine that I know of," saidmy aunt. She thought for a minute and became unusually grave. "It's ouronly chance, George," she said. "If it doesn't go..."

  There came the slamming of a door, and a loud bellowing from the nextapartment through the folding doors. "Here-er Shee Rulk lies Poo TomBo--oling."

  "Silly old Concertina! Hark at him, George!" She raised her voice."Don't sing that, you old Walrus, you! Sing 'I'm afloat!'"

  One leaf of the folding doors opened and my uncle appeared.

  "Hullo, George! Come along at last? Gossome tea-cake, Susan?"

  "Thought it over George?" he said abruptly.

  "Yes," said I.

  "Coming in?"

  I paused for a last moment and nodded yes.

  "Ah!" he cried. "Why couldn't you say that a week ago?"

  "I've had false ideas about the world," I said. "Oh! they don't matternow! Yes, I'll come, I'll take my chance with you, I won't hesitateagain."

  And I didn't. I stuck to that resolution for seven long years.

  CHAPTER THE THIRD

  HOW WE MADE TONO-BUNGAY HUM

  I

  So I made my peace with my uncle, and we set out upon thisbright enterprise of selling slightly injurious rubbish atone-and-three-halfpence and two-and-nine a bottle, including theGovernment stamp. We made Tono-Bungay hum! It brought us wealth,influence, respect, the confidence of endless people. All that my unclepromised me proved truth and understatement; Tono-Bungay carried me tofreedoms and powers that no life of scientific research, no passionateservice of humanity could ever have given me....

  It was my uncle's genius that did it. No doubt he needed me,--I was,I will admit, his indispensable right hand; but his was the brain toconceive. He wrote every advertisement; some of them even he sketched.You must remember that his were the days before the Time took toenterprise and the vociferous hawking of that antiquatedEncyclopedia. That alluring, button-holing, let-me-just-tell-you-quite-soberly-something-you-ought-to-know style ofnewspaper advertisement, with every now and then a convulsive jump ofsome attractive phrase into capitals, was then almost a novelty. "Manypeople who are MODERATELY well think they are QUITE well," was one ofhis early efforts. The jerks in capitals were, "DO NOT NEED DRUGS ORMEDICINE," and "SIMPLY A PROPER REGIMEN TO GET YOU IN TONE." One waswarned against the chemist or druggist who pushed "much-advertisednostrums" on one's attention. That trash did more harm than good. Thething needed was regimen--and Tono-Bungay!

  Very early, too, was that bright little quarter column, at least it wasusually a quarter column in the evening papers: "HILARITY--Tono-Bungay.Like Mountain Air in the Veins." The penetrating trio of questions: "Areyou bored with your Business? Are you bored with your Dinner. Are youbored with your Wife?"--that, too, was in our Gower Street days. Boththese we had in our first campaign when we worked London south central,and west; and then, too, we had our first poster--the HEALTH, BEAUTY,AND STRENGTH one. That was his design; I happen still to have got by methe first sketch he made for it. I have reproduced it here with one ortwo others to enable the reader to understand the mental quality thatinitiated these familiar ornaments of London.

  (The second one is about eighteen months later, the germ of thewell-known "Fog" poster; the third was designed for an influenzaepidemic, but never issued.)

  These things were only incidental in my department.

  I had to polish them up for the artist and arrange the business ofprinting and distribution, and after my uncle had had a violent andneedless quarrel with the advertising manager of the Daily Regulatorabout the amount of display given to one of his happy thoughts, I alsotook up the negotiations of advertisements for the press.

  We discussed and worked out distribution together first in thedrawing-room floor in Gower Street with my aunt sometimes helping veryshrewdly, and then, with a steadily improving type of cigar and olderand older whisky, in his smuggery at their first house, the one inBeckenham. Often we worked far into the night sometimes until dawn.

  We really worked infernally hard, and, I recall, we worked with a verydecided enthusiasm, not simply on my uncle's part but mine, It wasa game, an absurd but absurdly interesting game, and the points werescored in cases of bottles. People think a happy notion is enough tomake a man rich, that fortunes can be made without toil. It's a dream,as every millionaire (except one or two lucky gamblers) can testify;I doubt if J.D. Rockefeller in the early days of Standard Oil, workedharder than we did. We worked far into the night--and we also worked allday. We made a rule to be always dropping in at the factory unannouncedto keep things right--for at first we could afford no properlyresponsible underlings--and we traveled London, pretending to be our ownrepresentatives and making all sorts of special arrangements.

  But none of this was my special work, and as soon as we could get othermen in, I dropped the traveling, though my uncle found it particularlyinteresting and kept it up for years. "Does me good, George, to see thechaps behind their counters like I was once," he explained. My specialand distinctive duty was to give Tono-Bungay substance and an outwardand visible bottle,
to translate my uncle's great imaginings into thecreation of case after case of labelled bottles of nonsense, and thepunctual discharge of them by railway, road and steamer towardstheir ultimate goal in the Great Stomach of the People. By all modernstandards the business was, as my uncle would say, "absolutely bonafide." We sold our stuff and got the money, and spent the money honestlyin lies and clamour to sell more stuff. Section by section we spreadit over the whole of the British Isles; first working the middle-classLondon suburbs, then the outer suburbs, then the home counties, thengoing (with new bills and a more pious style of "ad") into Wales, agreat field always for a new patent-medicine, and then into Lancashire.

  My uncle had in his inner office a big map of England, and as we tookup fresh sections of the local press and our consignments invaded newareas, flags for advertisements and pink underlines for orders showedour progress.

  "The romance of modern commerce, George!" my uncle would say, rubbinghis hands together and drawing in air through his teeth. "The romance ofmodern commerce, eh? Conquest. Province by province. Like sogers."

  We subjugated England and Wales; we rolled over the Cheviots with aspecial adaptation containing eleven per cent. of absolute alcohol;"Tono-Bungay: Thistle Brand." We also had the Fog poster adapted to akilted Briton in a misty Highland scene.

  Under the shadow of our great leading line we were presently takingsubsidiary specialties into action; "Tono-Bungay Hair Stimulant" wasour first supplement. Then came "Concentrated Tono-Bungay" for theeyes. That didn't go, but we had a considerable success with the HairStimulant. We broached the subject, I remember, in a little catechismbeginning: "Why does the hair fall out? Because the follicles arefagged. What are the follicles?..." So it went on to the climax thatthe Hair Stimulant contained all "The essential principles of that mostreviving tonic, Tono-Bungay, together with an emollient and nutritiousoil derived from crude Neat's Foot Oil by a process of refinement,separation and deodorization.... It will be manifest to any one ofscientific attainments that in Neat's Foot Oil derived from the hoofsand horns of beasts, we must necessarily have a natural skin and hairlubricant."

  And we also did admirable things with our next subsidiaries,"Tono-Bungay Lozenges," and "Tono-Bungay Chocolate." These we urged uponthe public for their extraordinary nutritive and recuperative valuein cases of fatigue and strain. We gave them posters and illustratedadvertisements showing climbers hanging from marvelously verticalcliffs, cyclist champions upon the track, mounted messengers engaged inAix-to-Ghent rides, soldiers lying out in action under a hot sun. "Youcan GO for twenty-four hours," we declared, "on Tono-Bungay Chocolate."We didn't say whether you could return on the same commodity. We alsoshowed a dreadfully barristerish barrister, wig, side-whiskers, teeth,a horribly life-like portrait of all existing barristers, talking at atable, and beneath, this legend: "A Four Hours' Speech on Tono-BungayLozenges, and as fresh as when he began." Then brought in regimentsof school-teachers, revivalist ministers, politicians and the like. Ireally do believe there was an element of "kick" in the strychninein these lozenges, especially in those made according to our earlierformula. For we altered all our formulae--invariably weakening themenormously as sales got ahead.

  In a little while--so it seems to me now--we were employing travelersand opening up Great Britain at the rate of a hundred square miles aday. All the organisation throughout was sketched in a crude, entangled,half-inspired fashion by my uncle, and all of it had to be worked outinto a practicable scheme of quantities and expenditure by me. We had alot of trouble finding our travelers; in the end at least half of themwere Irish-Americans, a wonderful breed for selling medicine. We hadstill more trouble over our factory manager, because of the secrets ofthe inner room, and in the end we got a very capable woman, Mrs. HamptonDiggs, who had formerly managed a large millinery workroom, whom wecould trust to keep everything in good working order without finding outanything that wasn't put exactly under her loyal and energetic nose.She conceived a high opinion of Tono-Bungay and took it in all formsand large quantities so long as I knew her. It didn't seem to do her anyharm. And she kept the girls going quite wonderfully.

  My uncle's last addition to the Tono-Bungay group was the Tono-BungayMouthwash. The reader has probably read a hundred times that inspiringinquiry of his, "You are Young Yet, but are you Sure Nothing has Agedyour Gums?"

  And after that we took over the agency for three or four good Americanlines that worked in with our own, and could be handled with it; TexanEmbrocation, and "23--to clear the system" were the chief....

  I set down these bare facts. To me they are all linked with the figureof my uncle. In some of the old seventeenth and early eighteenth centuryprayerbooks at Bladesover there used to be illustrations with longscrolls coming out of the mouths of the wood-cut figures. I wish I couldwrite all this last chapter on a scroll coming out of the head of myuncle, show it all the time as unfolding and pouring out from a short,fattening, small-legged man with stiff cropped hair, disobedient glasseson a perky little nose, and a round stare behind them. I wish I couldshow you him breathing hard and a little through his nose as his penscrabbled out some absurd inspiration for a poster or a picture page,and make you hear his voice, charged with solemn import like the voiceof a squeaky prophet, saying, "George! list'n! I got an ideer. I got anotion! George!"

  I should put myself into the same picture. Best setting for us, I think,would be the Beckenham snuggery, because there we worked hardest. Itwould be the lamplit room of the early nineties, and the clock upon themantel would indicate midnight or later. We would be sitting on eitherside of the fire, I with a pipe, my uncle with a cigar or cigarette.There would be glasses standing inside the brass fender. Our expressionswould be very grave. My uncle used to sit right back in his armchair;his toes always turned in when he was sitting down and his legs had away of looking curved, as though they hadn't bones or joints but werestuffed with sawdust.

  "George, whad'yer think of T.B. for sea-sickness?" he would say.

  "No good that I can imagine."

  "Oom! No harm TRYING, George. We can but try."

  I would suck my pipe. "Hard to get at. Unless we sold our stuffspecially at the docks. Might do a special at Cook's office, or in theContinental Bradshaw."

  "It 'ud give 'em confidence, George."

  He would Zzzz, with his glasses reflecting the red of the glowing coals.

  "No good hiding our light under a Bushel," he would remark.

  I never really determined whether my uncle regarded Tono-Bungay as afraud, or whether he didn't come to believe in it in a kind of way bythe mere reiteration of his own assertions. I think that his averageattitude was one of kindly, almost parental, toleration. I remembersaying on one occasion, "But you don't suppose this stuff ever did ahuman being the slightest good all?" and how his face assumed a look ofprotest, as of one reproving harshness and dogmatism.

  "You've a hard nature, George," he said. "You're too ready to run thingsdown. How can one TELL? How can one venture to TELL!..."

  I suppose any creative and developing game would have interested mein those years. At any rate, I know I put as much zeal into thisTono-Bungay as any young lieutenant could have done who suddenly foundhimself in command of a ship. It was extraordinarily interesting to meto figure out the advantage accruing from this shortening of the processor that, and to weigh it against the capital cost of the alteration. Imade a sort of machine for sticking on the labels, that I patented; tothis day there is a little trickle of royalties to me from that. I alsocontrived to have our mixture made concentrated, got the bottles, whichall came sliding down a guarded slant-way, nearly filled with distilledwater at one tap, and dripped our magic ingredients in at the next. Thiswas an immense economy of space for the inner sanctum. For the bottlingwe needed special taps, and these, too, I invented and patented.

  We had a sort of endless band of bottles sliding along an inclined glasstrough made slippery with running water. At one end a girl held them upto the light, put aside any that were imperf
ect and placed the others inthe trough; the filling was automatic; at the other end a girl slippedin the cork and drove it home with a little mallet. Each tank, thelittle one for the vivifying ingredients and the big one for distilledwater, had a level indicator, and inside I had a float arrangement thatstopped the slide whenever either had sunk too low. Another girl stoodready with my machine to label the corked bottles and hand them to thethree packers, who slipped them into their outer papers and put them,with a pad of corrugated paper between each pair, into a little groovefrom which they could be made to slide neatly into position in ourstandard packing-case. It sounds wild, I know, but I believe I was thefirst man in the city of London to pack patent medicines through theside of the packing-case, to discover there was a better way in than bythe lid. Our cases packed themselves, practically; had only to be putinto position on a little wheeled tray and when full pulled to the liftthat dropped them to the men downstairs, who padded up the free spaceand nailed on top and side. Our girls, moreover, packed with corrugatedpaper and matchbook-wood box partitions when everybody else was usingexpensive young men to pack through the top of the box with straw, manybreakages and much waste and confusion.

  II

  As I look back at them now, those energetic years seem all compactedto a year or so; from the days of our first hazardous beginning inFarringdon Street with barely a thousand pounds' worth of stuff orcredit all told--and that got by something perilously like snatching--tothe days when my uncle went to the public on behalf of himself and me(one-tenth share) and our silent partners, the drug wholesalers and theprinting people and the owner of that group of magazines and newspapers,to ask with honest confidence for L150,000. Those silent partners wereremarkably sorry, I know, that they had not taken larger shares andgiven us longer credit when the subscriptions came pouring in. My unclehad a clear half to play with (including the one-tenth understood to bemine).

  L150,000--think of it!--for the goodwill in a string of lies and a tradein bottles of mitigated water! Do you realise the madness of the worldthat sanctions such a thing? Perhaps you don't. At times use and wontcertainly blinded me. If it had not been for Ewart, I don't think Ishould have had an inkling of the wonderfulness of this development ofmy fortunes; I should have grown accustomed to it, fallen in with allits delusions as completely as my uncle presently did. He was immenselyproud of the flotation. "They've never been given such value," he said,"for a dozen years." But Ewart, with his gesticulating hairy hands andbony wrists, his single-handed chorus to all this as it playeditself over again in my memory, and he kept my fundamental absurdityilluminated for me during all this astonishing time.

  "It's just on all fours with the rest of things," he remarked; "onlymore so. You needn't think you're anything out of the way."

  I remember one disquisition very distinctly. It was just after Ewart hadbeen to Paris on a mysterious expedition to "rough in" some work fora rising American sculptor. This young man had a commission for anallegorical figure of Truth (draped, of course) for his State Capitol,and he needed help. Ewart had returned with his hair cut en brosse andwith his costume completely translated into French. He wore, I remember,a bicycling suit of purplish-brown, baggy beyond ageing--the onlycreditable thing about it was that it had evidently not been made forhim--a voluminous black tie, a decadent soft felt hat and several Frenchexpletives of a sinister description. "Silly clothes, aren't they?" hesaid at the sight of my startled eye. "I don't know why I got'm. Theyseemed all right over there."

  He had come down to our Raggett Street place to discuss a benevolentproject of mine for a poster by him, and he scattered remarkablediscourse over the heads (I hope it was over the heads) of our bottlers.

  "What I like about it all, Ponderevo, is its poetry.... That's wherewe get the pull of the animals. No animal would ever run a factorylike this. Think!... One remembers the Beaver, of course. He might verypossibly bottle things, but would he stick a label round 'em and sell'em? The Beaver is a dreamy fool, I'll admit, him and his dams, butafter all there's a sort of protection about 'em, a kind of muddypracticality! They prevent things getting at him. And it's not yourpoetry only. It's the poetry of the customer too. Poet answering topoet--soul to soul. Health, Strength and Beauty--in a bottle--the magicphiltre! Like a fairy tale....

  "Think of the people to whom your bottles of footle go! (I'm calling itfootle, Ponderevo, out of praise," he said in parenthesis.)

  "Think of the little clerks and jaded women and overworked people.People overstrained with wanting to do, people overstrained with wantingto be.... People, in fact, overstrained.... The real trouble of life,Ponderevo, isn't that we exist--that's a vulgar error; the real troubleis that we DON'T really exist and we want to. That's what this--inthe highest sense--just stands for! The hunger to be--for once--reallyalive--to the finger tips!...

  "Nobody wants to do and be the things people are--nobody. YOU don't wantto preside over this--this bottling; I don't want to wear these beastlyclothes and be led about by you; nobody wants to keep on sticking labelson silly bottles at so many farthings a gross. That isn't existing!That's--sus--substratum. None of us want to be what we are, or to dowhat we do. Except as a sort of basis. What do we want? You know. Iknow. Nobody confesses. What we all want to be is something perpetuallyyoung and beautiful--young Joves--young Joves, Ponderevo"--his voicebecame loud, harsh and declamatory--"pursuing coy half-willing nymphsthrough everlasting forests."...

  There was a just-perceptible listening hang in the work about us.

  "Come downstairs," I interrupted, "we can talk better there."

  "I can talk better here," he answered.

  He was just going on, but fortunately the implacable face of Mrs.Hampton Diggs appeared down the aisle of bottling machines.

  "All right," he said, "I'll come."

  In the little sanctum below, my uncle was taking a digestive pause afterhis lunch and by no means alert. His presence sent Ewart back to thetheme of modern commerce, over the excellent cigar my uncle gave him. Hebehaved with the elaborate deference due to a business magnate from anunknown man.

  "What I was pointing out to your nephew, sir," said Ewart, putting bothelbows on the table, "was the poetry of commerce. He doesn't, you know,seem to see it at all."

  My uncle nodded brightly. "Whad I tell 'im," he said round his cigar.

  "We are artists. You and I, sir, can talk, if you will permit me, as oneartist to another. It's advertisement has--done it. Advertisement hasrevolutionised trade and industry; it is going to revolutionise theworld. The old merchant used to tote about commodities; the new onecreates values. Doesn't need to tote. He takes something that isn'tworth anything--or something that isn't particularly worth anything--andhe makes it worth something. He takes mustard that is just like anybodyelse's mustard, and he goes about saying, shouting, singing, chalkingon walls, writing inside people's books, putting it everywhere, 'Smith'sMustard is the Best.' And behold it is the best!"

  "True," said my uncle, chubbily and with a dreamy sense of mysticism;"true!"

  "It's just like an artist; he takes a lump of white marble on the vergeof a lime-kiln, he chips it about, he makes--he makes a monument tohimself--and others--a monument the world will not willingly let die.Talking of mustard, sir, I was at Clapham Junction the other day, andall the banks are overgrown with horse radish that's got loose froma garden somewhere. You know what horseradish is--grows likewildfire--spreads--spreads. I stood at the end of the platform lookingat the stuff and thinking about it. 'Like fame,' I thought, 'rank andwild where it isn't wanted. Why don't the really good things in lifegrow like horseradish?' I thought. My mind went off in a peculiar wayit does from that to the idea that mustard costs a penny a tin--I boughtsome the other day for a ham I had. It came into my head that it wouldbe ripping good business to use horseradish to adulterate mustard. I hada sort of idea that I could plunge into business on that, get rich andcome back to my own proper monumental art again. And then I said, 'Butwhy adulterate? I don't like the idea of adulteratio
n.'"

  "Shabby," said my uncle, nodding his head. "Bound to get found out!"

  "And totally unnecessary, too! Why not do up a mixture--three-quarterspounded horseradish and a quarter mustard--give it a fancy name--andsell it at twice the mustard price. See? I very nearly started thebusiness straight away, only something happened. My train came along."

  "Jolly good ideer," said my uncle. He looked at me. "That really is anideer, George," he said.

  "Take shavin's, again! You know that poem of Longfellow's, sir, thatsounds exactly like the first declension. What is it?--'Marr's a maker,men say!'"

  My uncle nodded and gurgled some quotation that died away.

  "Jolly good poem, George," he said in an aside to me.

  "Well, it's about a carpenter and a poetic Victorian child, you know,and some shavin's. The child made no end out of the shavin's. Somight you. Powder 'em. They might be anything. Soak 'em injipper,--Xylo-tobacco! Powder'em and get a little tar and turpentinoussmell in,--wood-packing for hot baths--a Certain Cure for the scourgeof Influenza! There's all these patent grain foods,--what Americans callcereals. I believe I'm right, sir, in saying they're sawdust."

  "No!" said my uncle, removing his cigar; "as far as I can find out it'sreally grain,--spoilt grain.... I've been going into that."

  "Well, there you are!" said Ewart. "Say it's spoilt grain. It carriedout my case just as well. Your modern commerce is no more buying andselling than sculpture. It's mercy--it's salvation. It's rescue work! Ittakes all sorts of fallen commodities by the hand and raises them. Canaisn't in it. You turn water--into Tono-Bungay."

  "Tono-Bungay's all right," said my uncle, suddenly grave. "We aren'ttalking of Tono-Bungay."

  "Your nephew, sir, is hard; he wants everything to go to a sort ofpredestinated end; he's a Calvinist of Commerce. Offer him a dustbinfull of stuff; he calls it refuse--passes by on the other side. Now YOU,sir you'd make cinders respect themselves."

  My uncle regarded him dubiously for a moment. But there was a touch ofappreciation in his eye.

  "Might make 'em into a sort of sanitary brick," he reflected over hiscigar end.

  "Or a friable biscuit. Why NOT? You might advertise: 'Why are Birds soBright? Because they digest their food perfectly! Why do they digesttheir food so perfectly? Because they have a gizzard! Why hasn't mana gizzard? Because he can buy Ponderevo's Asphalt Triturating, FriableBiscuit--Which is Better.'"

  He delivered the last words in a shout, with his hairy hand flourishedin the air....

  "Damn clever fellow," said my uncle, after he had one. "I know a manwhen I see one. He'd do. But drunk, I should say. But that only makessome chap brighter. If he WANTS to do that poster, he can. Zzzz. Thatideer of his about the horseradish. There's something in that, George.I'm going to think over that...."

  I may say at once that my poster project came to nothing in the end,though Ewart devoted an interesting week to the matter. He let hisunfortunate disposition to irony run away with him. He produced apicture of two beavers with a subtle likeness, he said, to myself and myuncle--the likeness to my uncle certainly wasn't half bad--and theywere bottling rows and rows of Tono-Bungay, with the legend "Moderncommerce." It certainly wouldn't have sold a case, though he urged it onme one cheerful evening on the ground that it would "arouse curiosity."In addition he produced a quite shocking study of my uncle, excessivelyand needlessly nude, but, so far as I was able to judge, an admirablelikeness, engaged in feats of strength of a Gargantuan type before anaudience of deboshed and shattered ladies. The legend, "Health, Beauty,Strength," below, gave a needed point to his parody. This he hung up inthe studio over the oil shop, with a flap of brown paper; by way of acurtain over it to accentuate its libellous offence.

  CHAPTER THE FOURTH

  MARION I

  As I look back on those days in which we built up the great Tono-Bungayproperty out of human hope and credit for bottles and rent and printing,I see my life as it were arranged in two parallel columns of unequalwidth, a wider, more diffused, eventful and various one whichcontinually broadens out, the business side of my life, and a narrow,darker and darkling one shot ever and again with a gleam of happiness,my home-life with Marion. For, of course, I married Marion.

  I didn't, as a matter of fact, marry her until a year after Tono-Bungaywas thoroughly afloat, and then only after conflicts and discussionsof a quite strenuous sort. By that time I was twenty-four. It seemsthe next thing to childhood now. We were both in certain directionsunusually ignorant and simple; we were temperamentally antagonistic, andwe hadn't--I don't think we were capable of--an idea in common. She wasyoung and extraordinarily conventional--she seemed never to have anidea of her own but always the idea of her class--and I was young andsceptical, enterprising and passionate; the two links that held ustogether were the intense appeal her physical beauty had for me, and herappreciation of her importance in my thoughts. There can be no doubt ofmy passion for her. In her I had discovered woman desired. The nights Ihave lain awake on account of her, writhing, biting my wrists in a feverof longing! ...

  I have told how I got myself a silk hat and black coat to please heron Sunday--to the derision of some of my fellow-students who charged tomeet me, and how we became engaged. But that was only the beginningof our difference. To her that meant the beginning of a not unpleasantlittle secrecy, an occasional use of verbal endearments, perhaps evenkisses. It was something to go on indefinitely, interfering in no waywith her gossiping spells of work at Smithie's. To me it was a pledgeto come together into the utmost intimacy of soul and body so soon as wecould contrive it....

  I don't know if it will strike the reader that I am setting out todiscuss the queer, unwise love relationship and my bungle of a marriagewith excessive solemnity. But to me it seems to reach out to vastlywider issues than our little personal affair. I've thought over my life.In these last few years I've tried to get at least a little wisdom outof it. And in particular I've thought over this part of my life. I'menormously impressed by the ignorant, unguided way in which we twoentangled ourselves with each other. It seems to me the queerest thingin all this network of misunderstandings and misstatements and faultyand ramshackle conventions which makes up our social order as theindividual meets it, that we should have come together so accidentallyand so blindly. Because we were no more than samples of the common fate.Love is not only the cardinal fact in the individual life, but the mostimportant concern of the community; after all, the way in which theyoung people of this generation pair off determines the fate of thenation; all the other affairs of the State are subsidiary to that.And we leave it to flushed and blundering youth to stumble on its ownsignificance, with nothing to guide in but shocked looks and sentimentaltwaddle and base whisperings and cant-smeared examples.

  I have tried to indicate something of my own sexual development in thepreceding chapter. Nobody was ever frank and decent with me in thisrelation; nobody, no book, ever came and said to me thus and thus isthe world made, and so and so is necessary. Everything came obscurely,indefinitely, perplexingly; and all I knew of law or convention in thematter had the form of threatenings and prohibitions. Except through thefurtive, shameful talk of my coevals at Goudhurst and Wimblehurst, Iwas not even warned against quite horrible dangers. My ideas were madepartly of instinct, partly of a romantic imagination, partly woven outof a medley of scraps of suggestion that came to me haphazard. I hadread widely and confusedly "Vathek," Shelley, Tom Paine, Plutarch,Carlyle, Haeckel, William Morris, the Bible, the Freethinker, theClarion, "The Woman Who Did,"--I mention the ingredients that come firstto mind. All sorts of ideas were jumbled up in me and never a lucidexplanation. But it was evident to me that the world regarded Shelley,for example, as a very heroic as well as beautiful person; and thatto defy convention and succumb magnificently to passion was the properthing to do to gain the respect and affection of all decent people.

  And the make-up of Marion's mind in the matter was an equally irrationalaffair. Her training had been one, not simply of silence
s, butsuppressions. An enormous force of suggestion had so shaped her thatthe intense natural fastidiousness of girlhood had developed intoan absolute perversion of instinct. For all that is cardinal in thisessential business of life she had one inseparable epithet--"horrid."Without any such training she would have been a shy lover, but now shewas an impossible one. For the rest she had derived, I suppose, partlyfrom the sort of fiction she got from the Public Library, and partlyfrom the workroom talk at Smithie's. So far as the former origin went,she had an idea of love as a state of worship and service on the part ofthe man and of condescension on the part of the woman. There was nothing"horrid" about it in any fiction she had read. The man gave presents,did services, sought to be in every way delightful. The woman "went out"with him, smiled at him, was kissed by him in decorous secrecy, and ifhe chanced to offend, denied her countenance and presence. Usually shedid something "for his good" to him, made him go to church, made himgive up smoking or gambling, smartened him up. Quite at the end of thestory came a marriage, and after that the interest ceased.

  That was the tenor of Marion's fiction; but I think the work-tableconversation at Smithie's did something to modify that. At Smithie's itwas recognised, I think, that a "fellow" was a possession to be desired;that it was better to be engaged to a fellow than not; that fellows hadto be kept--they might be mislaid, they might even be stolen. There wasa case of stealing at Smithie's, and many tears.

  Smithie I met before we were married, and afterwards she became afrequent visitor to our house at Ealing. She was a thin, bright-eyed,hawk-nosed girl of thirtyodd, with prominent teeth, a high-pitched,eager voice and a disposition to be urgently smart in her dress. Herhats were startling and various, but invariably disconcerting, and shetalked in a rapid, nervous flow that was hilarious rather than witty,and broken by little screams of "Oh, my dear!" and "you never did!" Shewas the first woman I ever met who used scent. Poor old Smithie! What aharmless, kindly soul she really was, and how heartily I detested her!Out of the profits on the Persian robes she supported a sister's familyof three children, she "helped" a worthless brother, and overflowedin help even to her workgirls, but that didn't weigh with me in thoseyouthfully-narrow times. It was one of the intense minor irritations ofmy married life that Smithie's whirlwind chatter seemed to me to havefar more influence with Marion than anything I had to say. Before allthings I coveted her grip upon Marion's inaccessible mind.

  In the workroom at Smithie's, I gathered, they always spoke of medemurely as "A Certain Person." I was rumoured to be dreadfully"clever," and there were doubts--not altogether withoutjustification--of the sweetness of my temper.

  II

  Well, these general explanations will enable the reader to understandthe distressful times we two had together when presently I began to feelon a footing with Marion and to fumble conversationally for the mind andthe wonderful passion I felt, obstinately and stupidity, must be in her.I think she thought me the maddest of sane men; "clever," in fact,which at Smithie's was, I suppose, the next thing to insanity, a wordintimating incomprehensible and incalculable motives.... She could beshocked at anything, she misunderstood everything, and her weapon wasa sulky silence that knitted her brows, spoilt her mouth and robbed herface of beauty. "Well, if we can't agree, I don't see why you shouldgo on talking," she used to say. That would always enrage me beyondmeasure. Or, "I'm afraid I'm not clever enough to understand that."

  Silly little people! I see it all now, but then I was no older thanshe and I couldn't see anything but that Marion, for some inexplicablereason, wouldn't come alive.

  We would contrive semi-surreptitious walks on Sunday, and partspeechless with the anger of indefinable offences. Poor Marion! Thethings I tried to put before her, my fermenting ideas about theology,about Socialism, about aesthetics--the very words appalled her, gave herthe faint chill of approaching impropriety, the terror of a very presentintellectual impossibility. Then by an enormous effort I would suppressmyself for a time and continue a talk that made her happy, aboutSmithie's brother, about the new girl who had come to the workroom,about the house we would presently live in. But there we differeda little. I wanted to be accessible to St. Paul's or Cannon StreetStation, and she had set her mind quite resolutely upon Eating.... Itwasn't by any means quarreling all the time, you understand. She likedme to play the lover "nicely"; she liked the effect of going about--wehad lunches, we went to Earl's Court, to Kew, to theatres and concerts,but not often to concerts, because, though Marion "liked" music,she didn't like "too much of it," to picture shows--and there was anonsensical sort of babytalk I picked up--I forget where now--thatbecame a mighty peacemaker.

  Her worst offence for me was an occasional excursion into the Smithiestyle of dressing, debased West Kensington. For she had no sense at allof her own beauty. She had no comprehension whatever of beauty of thebody, and she could slash her beautiful lines to rags with hat-brims andtrimmings. Thank Heaven! a natural refinement, a natural timidity,and her extremely slender purse kept her from the real Smithieefflorescence! Poor, simple, beautiful, kindly limited Marion! Now thatI am forty-five, I can look back at her with all my old admirationand none of my old bitterness with a new affection and not a scrapof passion, and take her part against the equally stupid,drivingly-energetic, sensuous, intellectual sprawl I used to be. I wasa young beast for her to have married--a hound beast. With her it wasmy business to understand and control--and I exacted fellowship,passion....

  We became engaged, as I have told; we broke it off and joined again. Wewent through a succession of such phases. We had no sort of idea whatwas wrong with us. Presently we were formally engaged. I had a wonderfulinterview with her father, in which he was stupendously graveand H--less, wanted to know about my origins and was tolerant(exasperatingly tolerant) because my mother was a servant, andafterwards her mother took to kissing me, and I bought a ring. Butthe speechless aunt, I gathered, didn't approve--having doubts of myreligiosity. Whenever we were estranged we could keep apart for days;and to begin with, every such separation was a relief. And then I wouldwant her; a restless longing would come upon me. I would think of theflow of her arms, of the soft, gracious bend of her body. I would lieawake or dream of a transfigured Marion of light and fire. It was indeedDame Nature driving me on to womankind in her stupid, inexorable way;but I thought it was the need of Marion that troubled me. So I alwayswent back to Marion at last and made it up and more or less conceded orignored whatever thing had parted us, and more and more I urged her tomarry me....

  In the long run that became a fixed idea. It entangled my will and mypride; I told myself I was not going to be beaten. I hardened to thebusiness. I think, as a matter of fact, my real passion for Marion hadwaned enormously long before we were married, that she had lived it downby sheer irresponsiveness. When I felt sure of my three hundred a yearshe stipulated for delay, twelve months' delay, "to see how things wouldturn out." There were times when she seemed simply an antagonist holdingout irritatingly against something I had to settle. Moreover, I beganto be greatly distracted by the interest and excitement of Tono-Bungay'ssuccess, by the change and movement in things, the going to and fro.I would forget her for days together, and then desire her with anirritating intensity at last, one Saturday afternoon, after a broodingmorning, I determined almost savagely that these delays must end.

  I went off to the little home at Walham Green, and made Marion come withme to Putney Common. Marion wasn't at home when I got there and I hadto fret for a time and talk to her father, who was just back fromhis office, he explained, and enjoying himself in his own way in thegreenhouse.

  "I'm going to ask your daughter to marry me!" I said. "I think we'vebeen waiting long enough."

  "I don't approve of long engagements either," said her father. "ButMarion will have her own way about it, anyhow. Seen this new powderedfertiliser?"

  I went in to talk to Mrs. Ramboat. "She'll want time to get her things,"said Mrs. Ramboat....

  I and Marion sat down together on a little seat und
er some trees at thetop of Putney Hill, and I came to my point abruptly.

  "Look here, Marion," I said, "are you going to marry me or are you not?"

  She smiled at me. "Well," she said, "we're engaged--aren't we?"

  "That can't go on for ever. Will you marry me next week?"

  She looked me in the face. "We can't," she said.

  "You promised to marry me when I had three hundred a year."

  She was silent for a space. "Can't we go on for a time as we are? WeCOULD marry on three hundred a year. But it means a very little house.There's Smithie's brother. They manage on two hundred and fifty, butthat's very little. She says they have a semi-detached house almost onthe road, and hardly a bit of garden. And the wall to next-door is sothin they hear everything. When her baby cries--they rap. And peoplestand against the railings and talk.... Can't we wait? You're doing sowell."

  An extraordinary bitterness possessed me at this invasion of thestupendous beautiful business of love by sordid necessity. I answeredher with immense restraint.

  "If," I said, "we could have a double-fronted, detached house--atEaling, say--with a square patch of lawn in front and a gardenbehind--and--and a tiled bathroom."

  "That would be sixty pounds a year at least."

  "Which means five hundred a year.... Yes, well, you see, I told my uncleI wanted that, and I've got it."

  "Got what?"

  "Five hundred pounds a year."

  "Five hundred pounds!"

  I burst into laughter that had more than a taste of bitterness.

  "Yes," I said, "really! and NOW what do you think?"

  "Yes," she said, a little flushed; "but be sensible! Do you really meanyou've got a Rise, all at once, of two hundred a year?"

  "To marry on--yes."

  She scrutinised me a moment. "You've done this as a surprise!" she said,and laughed at my laughter. She had become radiant, and that made meradiant, too.

  "Yes," I said, "yes," and laughed no longer bitterly.

  She clasped her hands and looked me in the eyes.

  She was so pleased that I forgot absolutely my disgust of a momentbefore. I forgot that she had raised her price two hundred pounds a yearand that I had bought her at that.

  "Come!" I said, standing up; "let's go towards the sunset, dear, andtalk about it all. Do you know--this is a most beautiful world, anamazingly beautiful world, and when the sunset falls upon you itmakes you into shining gold. No, not gold--into golden glass.... Intosomething better that either glass or gold."...

  And for all that evening I wooed her and kept her glad. She made merepeat my assurances over again and still doubted a little.

  We furnished that double-fronted house from attic--it ran to anattic--to cellar, and created a garden.

  "Do you know Pampas Grass?" said Marion. "I love Pampas Grass... ifthere is room."

  "You shall have Pampas Grass," I declared. And there were moments as wewent in imagination about that house together, when my whole being criedout to take her in my arms--now. But I refrained. On that aspect of lifeI touched very lightly in that talk, very lightly because I had hadmy lessons. She promised to marry me within two months' time. Shyly,reluctantly, she named a day, and next afternoon, in heat and wrath,we "broke it off" again for the last time. We split upon procedure.I refused flatly to have a normal wedding with wedding cake, in whitefavours, carriages and the rest of it. It dawned upon me suddenly inconversation with her and her mother, that this was implied. I blurtedout my objection forthwith, and this time it wasn't any ordinarydifference of opinion; it was a "row." I don't remember a quarter of thethings we flung out in that dispute. I remember her mother reiteratingin tones of gentle remonstrance: "But, George dear, you must havea cake--to send home." I think we all reiterated things. I seem toremember a refrain of my own: "A marriage is too sacred a thing, tooprivate a thing, for this display. Her father came in and stood behindme against the wall, and her aunt appeared beside the sideboard andstood with arms, looking from speaker to speaker, a sternly gratifiedprophetess. It didn't occur to me then! How painful it was to Marion forthese people to witness my rebellion.

  "But, George," said her father, "what sort of marriage do you want? Youdon't want to go to one of those there registry offices?"

  "That's exactly what I'd like to do. Marriage is too private a thing--"

  "I shouldn't feel married," said Mrs. Ramboat.

  "Look here, Marion," I said; "we are going to be married at a registryoffice. I don't believe in all these fripperies and superstitions, and Iwon't submit to them. I've agreed to all sorts of things to please you."

  "What's he agreed to?" said her father--unheeded.

  "I can't marry at a registry office," said Marion, sallow-white.

  "Very well," I said. "I'll marry nowhere else."

  "I can't marry at a registry office."

  "Very well," I said, standing up, white and tense and it amazed me, butI was also exultant; "then we won't marry at all."

  She leant forward over the table, staring blankly. But presently herhalf-averted face began to haunt me as she had sat at the table, and herarm and the long droop of her shoulder.

  III

  The next day I did an unexampled thing. I sent a telegram to my uncle,"Bad temper not coming to business," and set off for Highgate and Ewart.He was actually at work--on a bust of Millie, and seemed very glad forany interruption.

  "Ewart, you old Fool," I said, "knock off and come for a day's gossip.I'm rotten. There's a sympathetic sort of lunacy about you. Let's go toStaines and paddle up to Windsor."

  "Girl?" said Ewart, putting down a chisel.

  "Yes."

  That was all I told him of my affair.

  "I've got no money," he remarked, to clear up ambiguity in myinvitation.

  We got a jar of shandy-gaff, some food, and, on Ewart's suggestion,two Japanese sunshades in Staines; we demanded extra cushions at theboathouse and we spent an enormously soothing day in discourse andmeditation, our boat moored in a shady place this side of Windsor.I seem to remember Ewart with a cushion forward, only his heels andsunshade and some black ends of hair showing, a voice and no more,against the shining, smoothly-streaming mirror of the trees and bushes.

  "It's not worth it," was the burthen of the voice. "You'd better getyourself a Millie, Ponderevo, and then you wouldn't feel so upset."

  "No," I said decidedly, "that's not my way."

  A thread of smoke ascended from Ewart for a while, like smoke from analtar.

  "Everything's a muddle, and you think it isn't. Nobody knows wherewe are--because, as a matter of fact we aren't anywhere. Are womenproperty--or are they fellow-creatures? Or a sort of proprietarygoddesses? They're so obviously fellow-creatures. You believe in thegoddess?"

  "No," I said, "that's not my idea."

  "What is your idea?"

  "Well"

  "H'm," said Ewart, in my pause.

  "My idea," I said, "is to meet one person who will belong to me--to whomI shall belong--body and soul. No half-gods! Wait till she comes. If shecomes at all.... We must come to each other young and pure."

  "There's no such thing as a pure person or an impure person.... Mixed tobegin with."

  This was so manifestly true that it silenced me altogether.

  "And if you belong to her and she to you, Ponderevo--which end's thehead?"

  I made no answer except an impatient "oh!"

  For a time we smoked in silence....

  "Did I tell you, Ponderevo, of a wonderful discovery I've made?" Ewartbegan presently.

  "No," I said, "what is it?"

  "There's no Mrs. Grundy."

  "No?"

  "No! Practically not. I've just thought all that business out. She'smerely an instrument, Ponderevo. She's borne the blame. Grundy's a man.Grundy unmasked. Rather lean and out of sorts. Early middle age. Withbunchy black whiskers and a worried eye. Been good so far, and it'sfretting him! Moods! There's Grundy in a state of sexual panic, forexample,--'For God's sake cover i
t up! They get together--they gettogether! It's too exciting! The most dreadful things are happening!'Rushing about--long arms going like a windmill. 'They must be keptapart!' Starts out for an absolute obliteration of everything absoluteseparations. One side of the road for men, and the other for women, anda hoarding--without posters between them. Every boy and girl to be sewedup in a sack and sealed, just the head and hands and feet out untiltwenty-one. Music abolished, calico garments for the lower animals!Sparrows to be suppressed--ab-so-lutely."

  I laughed abruptly.

  "Well, that's Mr. Grundy in one mood--and it puts Mrs. Grundy--She's amuch-maligned person, Ponderevo--a rake at heart--and it puts her in amost painful state of fluster--most painful! She's an amenable creature.When Grundy tells her things are shocking, she's shocked--pink andbreathless. She goes about trying to conceal her profound sense of guiltbehind a haughty expression....

  "Grundy, meanwhile, is in a state of complete whirlabout. Long leanknuckly hands pointing and gesticulating! 'They're still thinking ofthings--thinking of things! It's dreadful. They get it out of books.I can't imagine where they get it! I must watch! There're people overthere whispering! Nobody ought to whisper!--There's something suggestivein the mere act! Then, pictures! In the museum--things too dreadful forwords. Why can't we have pure art--with the anatomy all wrong and pureand nice--and pure fiction pure poetry, instead of all this stuff withallusions--allusions?... Excuse me! There's something up behind thatlocked door! The keyhole! In the interests of public morality--yes, Sir,as a pure good man--I insist--I'LL look--it won't hurt me--I insist onlooking my duty--M'm'm--the keyhole!'"

  He kicked his legs about extravagantly, and I laughed again.

  "That's Grundy in one mood, Ponderevo. It isn't Mrs. Grundy. That's oneof the lies we tell about women. They're too simple. Simple! Woman AREsimple! They take on just what men tell 'em."

  Ewart meditated for a space. "Just exactly as it's put to them," hesaid, and resumed the moods of Mr. Grundy.

  "Then you get old Grundy in another mood. Ever caught him nosing,Ponderevo? Mad with the idea of mysterious, unknown, wicked, deliciousthings. Things that aren't respectable. Wow! Things he mustn't do!...Any one who knows about these things, knows there's just as much mysteryand deliciousness about Grundy's forbidden things as there is abouteating ham. Jolly nice if it's a bright morning and you're well andhungry and having breakfast in the open air. Jolly unattractive ifyou're off colour. But Grundy's covered it all up and hidden it andput mucky shades and covers over it until he's forgotten it. Begins tofester round it in his mind. Has dreadful struggles--with himself aboutimpure thoughts.... Then you set Grundy with hot ears,--curious inundertones. Grundy on the loose, Grundy in a hoarse whisper andwith furtive eyes and convulsive movements--making things indecent.Evolving--in dense vapours--indecency!

  "Grundy sins. Oh, yes, he's a hypocrite. Sneaks round a corner andsins ugly. It's Grundy and his dark corners that make vice, vice! Weartists--we have no vices.

  "And then he's frantic with repentance. And wants to be cruel to fallenwomen and decent harmless sculptors of the simple nude--like me--and soback to his panic again."

  "Mrs. Grundy, I suppose, doesn't know he sins," I remarked.

  "No? I'm not so sure.... But, bless her heart she's a woman.... She'sa woman. Then again you get Grundy with a large greasy smile--likean accident to a butter tub--all over his face, being LiberalMinded--Grundy in his Anti-Puritan moments, 'trying not to see Harm init'--Grundy the friend of innocent pleasure. He makes you sick with theHarm he's trying not to see in it...

  "And that's why everything's wrong, Ponderevo. Grundy, damn him! standsin the light, and we young people can't see. His moods affect us. Wecatch his gusts of panic, his disease of nosing, his greasiness. Wedon't know what we may think, what we may say, he does his sillyutmost to prevent our reading and seeing the one thing, the one sort ofdiscussion we find--quite naturally and properly--supremely interesting.So we don't adolescence; we blunder up to sex. Dare--dare to look--andhe may dirt you for ever! The girls are terror-stricken to silence byhis significant whiskers, by the bleary something in his eyes."

  Suddenly Ewart, with an almost Jack-in-the-box effect, sat up.

  "He's about us everywhere, Ponderevo," he said, very solemnly."Sometimes--sometimes I think he is--in our blood. In MINE."

  He regarded me for my opinion very earnestly, with his pipe in thecorner of his mouth.

  "You're the remotest cousin he ever had," I said.

  I reflected. "Look here, Ewart," I asked, "how would you have thingsdifferent?"

  He wrinkled up his queer face, regarded the wait and made his pipegurgle for a space, thinking deeply.

  "There are complications, I admit. We've grown up under the terror ofGrundy and that innocent but docile and--yes--formidable lady, hiswife. I don't know how far the complications aren't a disease, a sort ofbleaching under the Grundy shadow.... It is possible there are thingsI have still to learn about women.... Man has eaten of the Tree ofKnowledge. His innocence is gone. You can't have your cake and eatit. We're in for knowledge; let's have it plain and straight. I shouldbegin, I think, by abolishing the ideas of decency and indecency...."

  "Grundy would have fits!" I injected.

  "Grundy, Ponderevo, would have cold douches--publicly--if the sight wasnot too painful--three times a day.... But I don't think, mind you,that I should let the sexes run about together. No. The fact behind thesexes--is sex. It's no good humbugging. It trails about--even in thebest mixed company. Tugs at your ankle. The men get showing off andquarrelling--and the women. Or they're bored. I suppose the ancestralmales have competed for the ancestral females ever since they were bothsome sort of grubby little reptile. You aren't going to alter that ina thousand years or so.... Never should you have a mixed company,never--except with only one man or only one woman. How would that be?...

  "Or duets only?...

  "How to manage it? Some rule of etiquette, perhaps."... He becameportentously grave.

  Then his long hand went out in weird gestures.

  "I seem to see--I seem to see--a sort of City of Women, Ponderevo.Yes.... A walled enclosure--good stone-mason's work--a city wall, highas the walls of Rome, going about a garden. Dozens of square miles ofgarden--trees--fountains--arbours--lakes. Lawns on which the women play,avenues in which they gossip, boats.... Women like that sort of thing.Any woman who's been to a good eventful girls' school lives on thememory of it for the rest of her life. It's one of the pathetic thingsabout women--the superiority of school and college--to anything they getafterwards. And this city-garden of women will have beautiful placesfor music, places for beautiful dresses, places for beautiful work.Everything a woman can want. Nurseries. Kindergartens. Schools. And noman--except to do rough work, perhaps--ever comes in. The men live in aworld where they can hunt and engineer, invent and mine and manufacture,sail ships, drink deep and practice the arts, and fight--"

  "Yes," I said, "but--"

  He stilled me with a gesture.

  "I'm coming to that. The homes of the women, Ponderevo, will be set inthe wall of their city; each woman will have her own particular houseand home, furnished after her own heart in her own manner--with a littlebalcony on the outside wall. Built into the wall--and a little balcony.And there she will go and look out, when the mood takes her, and allround the city there will be a broad road and seats and great shadytrees. And men will stroll up and down there when they feel the needof feminine company; when, for instance, they want to talk about theirsouls or their characters or any of the things that only women willstand.... The women will lean over and look at the men and smile andtalk to them as they fancy. And each woman will have this; she will havea little silken ladder she can let down if she chooses--if she wants totalk closer..."

  "The men would still be competing."

  "There perhaps--yes. But they'd have to abide by the women's decisions."

  I raised one or two difficulties, and for a while we played with thisidea.

>   "Ewart," I said, "this is like Doll's Island.

  "Suppose," I reflected, "an unsuccessful man laid siege to a balcony andwouldn't let his rival come near it?"

  "Move him on," said Ewart, "by a special regulation. As one doesorgan-grinders. No difficulty about that. And you could forbid it--makeit against the etiquette. No life is decent without etiquette.... Andpeople obey etiquette sooner than laws..."

  "H'm," I said, and was struck by an idea that is remote in the world ofa young man. "How about children?" I asked; "in the City? Girls are allvery well. But boys, for example--grow up."

  "Ah!" said Ewart. "Yes. I forgot. They mustn't grow up inside.... They'dturn out the boys when they were seven. The father must come with alittle pony and a little gun and manly wear, and take the boy away. Thenone could come afterwards to one's mother's balcony.... It must be fineto have a mother. The father and the son..."

  "This is all very pretty in its way," I said at last, "but it's a dream.Let's come back to reality. What I want to know is, what are you goingto do in Brompton, let us say, or Walham Green NOW?"

  "Oh! damn it!" he remarked, "Walham Green! What a chap you are,Ponderevo!" and he made an abrupt end to his discourse. He wouldn't evenreply to my tentatives for a time.

  "While I was talking just now," he remarked presently,

  "I had a quite different idea."

  "What?"

  "For a masterpiece. A series. Like the busts of the Caesars. Onlynot heads, you know. We don't see the people who do things to usnowadays..."

  "How will you do it, then?"

  "Hands--a series of hands! The hands of the Twentieth Century. I'll doit. Some day some one will discover it--go there--see what I have done,and what is meant by it."

  "See it where?"

  "On the tombs. Why not? The Unknown Master of the Highgate Slope! Allthe little, soft feminine hands, the nervous ugly males, the hands ofthe flops, and the hands of the snatchers! And Grundy's loose, lean,knuckly affair--Grundy the terror!--the little wrinkles and the thumb!Only it ought to hold all the others together--in a slightly disturbingsqueeze....Like Rodin's great Hand--you know the thing!"

  IV

  I forget how many days intervened between that last breaking off of ourengagement and Marion's surrender. But I recall now the sharpness of myemotion, the concentrated spirit of tears and laughter in my throat asI read the words of her unexpected letter--"I have thought overeverything, and I was selfish...." I rushed off to Walham Green thatevening to give back all she had given me, to beat her altogetherat giving. She was extraordinarily gentle and generous that time, Iremember, and when at last I left her, she kissed me very sweetly.

  So we were married.

  We were married with all the customary incongruity. I gave--perhapsafter a while not altogether ungrudgingly--and what I gave, Marion took,with a manifest satisfaction. After all, I was being sensible. So thatwe had three livery carriages to the church (one of the pairs of horsesmatched) and coachmen--with improvised flavour and very shabby silkhats--bearing white favours on their whips, and my uncle intervened withsplendour and insisted upon having a wedding breakfast sent in froma caterer's in Hammersmith. The table had a great display ofchrysanthemums, and there was orange blossom in the significant placeand a wonderful cake. We also circulated upwards of a score of wedgesof that accompanied by silver-printed cards in which Marion's name ofRamboat was stricken out by an arrow in favour of Ponderevo. We had alittle rally of Marion's relations, and several friends and friends'friends from Smithie's appeared in the church and drifted vestry-ward.I produced my aunt and uncle a select group of two. The effect in thatshabby little house was one of exhilarating congestion. The side-board,in which lived the table-cloth and the "Apartments" card, was used fora display of the presents, eked out by the unused balance of thesilver-printed cards.

  Marion wore the white raiment of a bride, white silk and satin, that didnot suit her, that made her seem large and strange to me; she obtrudedbows and unfamiliar contours. She went through all this strange ritualof an English wedding with a sacramental gravity that I was altogethertoo young and egotistical to comprehend. It was all extraordinarilycentral and important to her; it was no more than an offensive,complicated, and disconcerting intrusion of a world I was alreadybeginning to criticise very bitterly, to me. What was all this fuss for?The mere indecent advertisement that I had been passionately in lovewith Marion! I think, however, that Marion was only very remotely awareof my smouldering exasperation at having in the end behaved "nicely." Ihad played--up to the extent of dressing my part; I had an admirablycut frock--coat, a new silk hat, trousers as light as I could endurethem--lighter, in fact--a white waistcoat, night tie, light gloves.Marion, seeing me despondent had the unusual enterprise to whisper tome that I looked lovely; I knew too well I didn't look myself. I lookedlike a special coloured supplement to Men's Wear, or The Tailorand Cutter, Full Dress For Ceremonial Occasions. I had even thedisconcerting sensations of an unfamiliar collar. I felt lost--ina strange body, and when I glanced down myself for reassurance, thestraight white abdomen, the alien legs confirmed that impression.

  My uncle was my best man, and looked like a banker--a little banker--inflower. He wore a white rose in his buttonhole. He wasn't, I think,particularly talkative. At least I recall very little from him.

  "George" he said once or twice, "this is a great occasion for you--avery great occasion." He spoke a little doubtfully.

  You see I had told him nothing about Marion until about a week beforethe wedding; both he and my aunt had been taken altogether by surprise.They couldn't, as people say, "make it out." My aunt was intenselyinterested, much more than my uncle; it was then, I think, for thefirst time that I really saw that she cared for me. She got me alone,I remember, after I had made my announcement. "Now, George," shesaid, "tell me everything about her. Why didn't you tell--ME atleast--before?"

  I was surprised to find how difficult it was to tell her about Marion. Iperplexed her.

  "Then is she beautiful?" she asked at last.

  "I don't know what you'll think of her," I parried. "I think--"

  "Yes?"

  "I think she might be the most beautiful person in the world."

  "And isn't she? To you?"

  "Of course," I said, nodding my head. "Yes. She IS..."

  And while I don't remember anything my uncle said or did at thewedding, I do remember very distinctly certain little things, scrutiny,solicitude, a curious rare flash of intimacy in my aunt's eyes. Itdawned on me that I wasn't hiding anything from her at all. She wasdressed very smartly, wearing a big-plumed hat that made her neck seemlonger and slenderer than ever, and when she walked up the aisle withthat rolling stride of hers and her eye all on Marion, perplexed intoself-forgetfulness, it wasn't somehow funny. She was, I do believe,giving my marriage more thought than I had done, she was concernedbeyond measure at my black rage and Marion's blindness, she was lookingwith eyes that knew what loving is--for love.

  In the vestry she turned away as we signed, and I verily believe she wascrying, though to this day I can't say why she should have cried, andshe was near crying too when she squeezed my hand at parting--and shenever said a word or looked at me, but just squeezed my hand....

  If I had not been so grim in spirit, I think I should have found muchof my wedding amusing. I remember a lot of ridiculous detail that stilldeclines to be funny in my memory. The officiating clergyman had acold, and turned his "n's" to "d's," and he made the most mechanicalcompliment conceivable about the bride's age when the register wassigned. Every bride he had ever married had had it, one knew. And twomiddle-aged spinsters, cousins of Marion's and dressmakers at Barking,stand out. They wore marvellously bright and gay blouses and dim oldskirts, and had an immense respect for Mr. Ramboat. They threw rice;they brought a whole bag with them and gave handfuls away to unknownlittle boys at the church door and so created a Lilliputian riot; andone had meant to throw a slipper. It was a very warm old silk slipper,I know, because she dropped i
t out of a pocket in the aisle--there wasa sort of jumble in the aisle--and I picked it up for her. I don't thinkshe actually threw it, for as we drove away from the church I saw herin a dreadful, and, it seemed to me, hopeless, struggle with her pocket;and afterwards my eye caught the missile of good fortune lying, it orits fellow, most obviously mislaid, behind the umbrella-stand in thehall....

  The whole business was much more absurd, more incoherent, more humanthan I had anticipated, but I was far too young and serious to let thelatter quality atone for its shortcomings. I am so remote from thisphase of my youth that I can look back at it all as dispassionately asone looks at a picture--at some wonderful, perfect sort of picturethat is inexhaustible; but at the time these things filled me withunspeakable resentment. Now I go round it all, look into its details,generalise about its aspects. I'm interested, for example, to square itwith my Bladesover theory of the British social scheme. Under stress oftradition we were all of us trying in the fermenting chaos of London tocarry out the marriage ceremonies of a Bladesover tenant or one of thechubby middling sort of people in some dependent country town. Therea marriage is a public function with a public significance. There thechurch is to a large extent the gathering-place of the community, andyour going to be married a thing of importance to every one you pass onthe road. It is a change of status that quite legitimately intereststhe whole neighbourhood. But in London there are no neighbours, nobodyknows, nobody cares. An absolute stranger in an office took my notice,and our banns were proclaimed to ears that had never previously heardour names. The clergyman, even, who married us had never seen us before,and didn't in any degree intimate that he wanted to see us again.

  Neighbours in London! The Ramboats did not know the names of the peopleon either side of them. As I waited for Marion before we started offupon our honeymoon flight, Mr. Ramboat, I remember, came and stoodbeside me and stared out of the window.

  "There was a funeral over there yesterday," he said, by way of makingconversation, and moved his head at the house opposite. "Quite a smartaffair it was with a glass 'earse...."

  And our little procession of three carriages with white-favour-adornedhorses and drivers, went through all the huge, noisy, indifferenttraffic like a lost china image in the coal-chute of an ironclad. Nobodymade way for us, nobody cared for us; the driver of an omnibus jeered;for a long time we crawled behind an unamiable dust-cart. The irrelevantclatter and tumult gave a queer flavour of indecency to this publiccoming together of lovers. We seemed to have obtruded ourselvesshamelessly. The crowd that gathered outside the church would havegathered in the same spirit and with greater alacrity for a streetaccident....

  At Charing Cross--we were going to Hastings--the experienced eye of theguard detected the significance of our unusual costume and he secured usa compartment.

  "Well," said I, as the train moved out of the station, "That's allover!" And I turned to Marion--a little unfamiliar still, in herunfamiliar clothes--and smiled.

  She regarded me gravely, timidly.

  "You're not cross?" she asked.

  "Cross! Why?"

  "At having it all proper."

  "My dear Marion!" said I, and by way of answer took and kissed herwhite-gloved, leather-scented hand....

  I don't remember much else about the journey, an hour or so it was ofundistinguished time--for we were both confused and a little fatiguedand Marion had a slight headache and did not want caresses. I fell intoa reverie about my aunt, and realised as if it were a new discovery,that I cared for her very greatly. I was acutely sorry I had not toldher earlier of my marriage.

  But you will not want to hear the history of my honeymoon. I have toldall that was needed to serve my present purpose. Thus and thus it wasthe Will in things had its way with me. Driven by forces I did notunderstand, diverted altogether from the science, the curiosities andwork to which I had once given myself, I fought my way through a tangleof traditions, customs, obstacles and absurdities, enraged myself,limited myself, gave myself to occupations I saw with the clearestvision were dishonourable and vain, and at last achieved the end ofpurblind Nature, the relentless immediacy of her desire, and held, farshort of happiness, Marion weeping and reluctant in my arms.

  V

  Who can tell the story of the slow estrangement of two married people,the weakening of first this bond and then that of that complex contact?Least of all can one of the two participants. Even now, with aninterval of fifteen years to clear it up for me, I still find a mass ofimpressions of Marion as confused, as discordant, as unsystematic andself-contradictory as life. I think of this thing and love her, of thatand hate her--of a hundred aspects in which I can now see her with anunimpassioned sympathy. As I sit here trying to render some vision ofthis infinitely confused process, I recall moments of hard and fierceestrangement, moments of clouded intimacy, the passage of transition allforgotten. We talked a little language together whence were "friends,"and I was "Mutney" and she was "Ming," and we kept up such an outwardshow that till the very end Smithie thought our household the mostamiable in the world.

  I cannot tell to the full how Marion thwarted me and failed in that lifeof intimate emotions which is the kernel of love. That life of intimateemotions is made up of little things. A beautiful face differs from anugly one by a difference of surfaces and proportions that are sometimesalmost infinitesimally small. I find myself setting down little thingsand little things; none of them do more than demonstrate those essentialtemperamental discords I have already sought to make clear. Some readerswill understand--to others I shall seem no more than an unfeeling brutewho couldn't make allowances.... It's easy to make allowances now; butto be young and ardent and to make allowances, to see one's married lifeopen before one, the life that seemed in its dawn a glory, a garden ofroses, a place of deep sweet mysteries and heart throbs and wonderfulsilences, and to see it a vista of tolerations and baby-talk; acompromise, the least effectual thing in all one's life.

  Every love romance I read seemed to mock our dull intercourse, everypoem, every beautiful picture reflected upon the uneventful successionof grey hours we had together. I think our real difference was one ofaesthetic sensibility.

  I do still recall as the worst and most disastrous aspect of all thattime, her absolute disregard of her own beauty. It's the pettiest thingto record, I know, but she could wear curl-papers in my presence. It washer idea, too, to "wear out" her old clothes and her failures at homewhen "no one was likely to see her"--"no one" being myself. She allowedme to accumulate a store of ungracious and slovenly memories....

  All our conceptions of life differed. I remember how we differed aboutfurniture. We spent three or four days in Tottenham Court Road, and shechose the things she fancied with an inexorable resolution,--sweepingaside my suggestions with--"Oh, YOU want such queer things." She pursuedsome limited, clearly seen and experienced ideal--that excluded allother possibilities. Over every mantel was a mirror that was draped, oursideboard was wonderfully good and splendid with beveled glass, we hadlamps on long metal stalks and cozy corners and plants in grog-tubs.Smithie approved it all. There wasn't a place where one could sit andread in the whole house. My books went upon shelves in the dining-roomrecess. And we had a piano though Marion's playing was at an elementarylevel.

  You know, it was the cruelest luck for Marion that I, with myrestlessness, my scepticism, my constantly developing ideas, hadinsisted on marriage with her. She had no faculty of growth or change;she had taken her mould, she had set in the limited ideas of herpeculiar class. She preserved her conception of what was right indrawing-room chairs and in marriage ceremonial and in every relation oflife with a simple and luminous honesty and conviction, with an immenseunimaginative inflexibility--as a tailor-bird builds its nest or abeaver makes its dam.

  Let me hasten over this history of disappointments and separation. Imight tell of waxings and waning of love between us, but the whole waswaning. Sometimes she would do things for me, make me a tie or a pairof slippers, and fill me with none the less gr
atitude because the thingswere absurd. She ran our home and our one servant with a hard, brightefficiency. She was inordinately proud of house and garden. Always, byher lights, she did her duty by me.

  Presently the rapid development of Tono-Bungay began to take me into theprovinces, and I would be away sometimes for a week together. This shedid not like; it left her "dull," she said, but after a time she beganto go to Smithie's again and to develop an independence of me. AtSmithie's she was now a woman with a position; she had money tospend. She would take Smithie to theatres and out to lunch and talkinterminably of the business, and Smithie became a sort of permanentweekender with us. Also Marion got a spaniel and began to dabble withthe minor arts, with poker-work and a Kodak and hyacinths in glasses.She called once on a neighbour. Her parents left Walham Green--herfather severed his connection with the gas-works--and came to live in asmall house I took for them near us, and they were much with us.

  Odd the littleness of the things that exasperate when the fountains oflife are embittered! My father-in-law was perpetually catching me inmoody moments and urging me to take to gardening. He irritated me beyondmeasure.

  "You think too much," he would say. "If you was to let in a bit witha spade, you might soon 'ave that garden of yours a Vision of Flowers.That's better than thinking, George."

  Or in a torrent of exasperation, "I CARN'T think, George, why you don'tget a bit of glass 'ere. This sunny corner you c'd do wonders with a bitof glass."

  And in the summer time he never came in without performing a sort ofconjuring trick in the hall, and taking cucumbers and tomatoes fromunexpected points of his person. "All out o' MY little bit," he'd sayin exemplary tones. He left a trail of vegetable produce in the mostunusual places, on mantel boards, sideboards, the tops of pictures.Heavens! how the sudden unexpected tomato could annoy me!...

  It did much to widen our estrangement that Marion and my aunt failed tomake friends, became, by a sort of instinct, antagonistic.

  My aunt, to begin with, called rather frequently, for she was reallyanxious to know Marion. At first she would arrive like a whirlwind andpervade the house with an atmosphere of hello! She dressed already withthat cheerfully extravagant abandon that signalised her accession tofortune, and dressed her best for these visits.

  She wanted to play the mother to me, I fancy, to tell Marion occultsecrets about the way I wore out my boots and how I never could think toput on thicker things in cold weather. But Marion received her withthat defensive suspiciousness of the shy person, thinking only of thepossible criticism of herself; and my aunt, perceiving this, becamenervous and slangy...

  "She says such queer things," said Marion once, discussing her. "But Isuppose it's witty."

  "Yes," I said; "it IS witty."

  "If I said things like she does--"

  The queer things my aunt said were nothing to the queer things shedidn't say. I remember her in our drawing-room one day, and how shecocked her eye--it's the only expression--at the India-rubber plant in aDoulton-ware pot which Marion had placed on the corner of the piano.

  She was on the very verge of speech. Then suddenly she caught myexpression, and shrank up like a cat that has been discovered looking atthe milk.

  Then a wicked impulse took her.

  "Didn't say an old word, George," she insisted, looking me full in theeye.

  I smiled. "You're a dear," I said, "not to," as Marion came loweringinto the room to welcome her. But I felt extraordinarily like atraitor--to the India-rubber plant, I suppose--for all that nothing hadbeen said...

  "Your aunt makes Game of people," was Marion's verdict, and,open-mindedly: "I suppose it's all right... for her."

  Several times we went to the house in Beckenham for lunch, and once ortwice to dinner. My aunt did her peculiar best to be friends, but Marionwas implacable. She was also, I know, intensely uncomfortable, and sheadopted as her social method, an exhausting silence, replying compactlyand without giving openings to anything that was said to her.

  The gaps between my aunt's visits grew wider and wider.

  My married existence became at last like a narrow deep groove in thebroad expanse of interests in which I was living. I went about theworld; I met a great number of varied personalities; I read endlessbooks in trains as I went to and fro. I developed social relationshipsat my uncle's house that Marion did not share. The seeds of new ideaspoured in upon me and grew in me. Those early and middle years of one'sthird decade are, I suppose, for a man the years of greatest mentalgrowth. They are restless years and full of vague enterprise.

  Each time I returned to Ealing, life there seemed more alien, narrow,and unattractive--and Marion less beautiful and more limited anddifficult--until at last she was robbed of every particle of her magic.She gave me always a cooler welcome, I think, until she seemed entirelyapathetic. I never asked myself then what heartaches she might hide orwhat her discontents might be.

  I would come home hoping nothing, expecting nothing.

  This was my fated life, and I had chosen it. I became more sensitive tothe defects I had once disregarded altogether; I began to associate hersallow complexion with her temperamental insufficiency, and the heavierlines of her mouth and nostril with her moods of discontent. Wedrifted apart; wider and wider the gap opened. I tired of baby-talk andstereotyped little fondlings; I tired of the latest intelligence fromthose wonderful workrooms, and showed it all too plainly; we hardlyspoke when we were alone together. The mere unreciprocated physicalresidue of my passion remained--an exasperation between us.

  No children came to save us. Marion had acquired at Smithie's a disgustand dread of maternity. All that was the fruition and quintessence ofthe "horrid" elements in life, a disgusting thing, a last indignity thatovertook unwary women. I doubt indeed a little if children would havesaved us; we should have differed so fatally about their upbringing.

  Altogether, I remember my life with Marion as a long distress, now hard,now tender. It was in those days that I first became critical of my lifeand burdened with a sense of error and maladjustment. I would lieawake in the night, asking myself the purpose of things, reviewing myunsatisfying, ungainly home-life, my days spent in rascal enterpriseand rubbish-selling, contrasting all I was being and doing with myadolescent ambitions, my Wimblehurst dreams. My circumstances had anair of finality, and I asked myself in vain why I had forced myself intothem.

  VI

  The end of our intolerable situation came suddenly and unexpectedly, butin a way that I suppose was almost inevitable.

  My alienated affections wandered, and I was unfaithful to Marion.

  I won't pretend to extenuate the quality of my conduct. I was a youngand fairly vigorous male; all my appetite for love had been rousedand whetted and none of it had been satisfied by my love affair and mymarriage. I had pursued an elusive gleam of beauty to the disregard ofall else, and it had failed me. It had faded when I had hoped it wouldgrow brighter. I despaired of life and was embittered. And thingshappened as I am telling. I don't draw any moral at all in the matter,and as for social remedies, I leave them to the social reformer. I'vegot to a time of life when the only theories that interest me aregeneralisations about realities.

  To go to our inner office in Raggett Street I had to walk through a roomin which the typists worked. They were the correspondence typists; ourbooks and invoicing had long since overflowed into the premises we hadhad the luck to secure on either side of us. I was, I must confess,always in a faintly cloudily-emotional way aware of that collection offor the most part round-shouldered femininity, but presently one ofthe girls detached herself from the others and got a real hold uponmy attention. I appreciated her at first as a straight little back,a neater back than any of the others; as a softly rounded neck with asmiling necklace of sham pearls; as chestnut hair very neatly done--andas a side-long glance; presently as a quickly turned face that lookedfor me.

  My eye would seek her as I went through on business things--I dictatedsome letters to her and so discovered she had pretty, s
oft-looking handswith pink nails. Once or twice, meeting casually, we looked one anotherfor the flash of a second in the eyes.

  That was all. But it was enough in the mysterious free-masonry of sex tosay essential things. We had a secret between us.

  One day I came into Raggett Street at lunch time and she was alone,sitting at her desk. She glanced up as I entered, and then became verystill, with a downcast face and her hands clenched on the table. Iwalked right by her to the door of the inner office, stopped, came backand stood over her.

  We neither of us spoke for quite a perceptible time. I was tremblingviolently.

  "Is that one of the new typewriters?" I asked at last for the sake ofspeaking.

  She looked up at me without a word, with her face flushed and her eyesalight, and I bent down and kissed her lips. She leant back to putan arm about me, drew my face to her and kissed me again and again. Ilifted her and held her in my arms. She gave a little smothered cry tofeel herself so held.

  Never before had I known the quality of passionate kisses.

  Somebody became audible in the shop outside.

  We started back from one another with flushed faces and bright andburning eyes.

  "We can't talk here," I whispered with a confident intimacy. "Where doyou go at five?"

  "Along the Embankment to Charing Cross," she answered as intimately."None of the others go that way..."

  "About half-past five?"

  "Yes, half-past five..."

  The door from the shop opened, and she sat down very quickly.

  "I'm glad," I said in a commonplace voice, "that these new typewritersare all right."

  I went into the inner office and routed out the paysheet in order tofind her name--Effie Rink. And did no work at all that afternoon. Ifretted about that dingy little den like a beast in a cage.

  When presently I went out, Effie was working with an extraordinaryappearance of calm--and there was no look for me at all....

  We met and had our talk that evening, a talk in whispers when there wasnone to overhear; we came to an understanding. It was strangely unlikeany dream of romance I had ever entertained.

  VII

  I came back after a week's absence to my home again--a changed man.I had lived out my first rush of passion for Effie, had come to acontemplation of my position. I had gauged Effie's place in the schemeof things, and parted from her for a time. She was back in her place atRaggett Street after a temporary indisposition. I did not feel in anyway penitent or ashamed, I know, as I opened the little cast-iron gatethat kept Marion's front grader and Pampas Grass from the wandering dog.Indeed, if anything, I felt as if I had vindicated some right that hadbeen in question. I came back to Marion with no sense of wrong-doing atall with, indeed, a new friendliness towards her. I don't know how itmay be proper to feel on such occasions; that is how I felt.

  I followed her in our drawing-room, standing beside the tall lamp-standthat half filled the bay as though she had just turned from watching forme at the window. There was something in her pale face that arrested me.She looked as if she had not been sleeping. She did not come forward togreet me.

  "You've come home," she said.

  "As I wrote to you."

  She stood very still, a dusky figure against the bright window.

  "Where have you been?" she asked.

  "East Coast," I said easily.

  She paused for a moment. "I KNOW," she said.

  I stared at her. It was the most amazing moment in any life....

  "By Jove!" I said at last, "I believe you do!"

  "And then you come home to me!"

  I walked to the hearthrug and stood quite still there regarding this newsituation.

  "I didn't dream," she began. "How could you do such a thing?"

  It seemed a long interval before either of us spoke another word.

  "Who knows about it?" I asked at last.

  "Smithie's brother. They were at Cromer."

  "Confound Cromer! Yes!"

  "How could you bring yourself"

  I felt a spasm of petulant annoyance at this unexpected catastrophe.

  "I should like to wring Smithie's brother's neck," I said....

  Marion spoke in dry, broken fragments of sentences. "You... I'd alwaysthought that anyhow you couldn't deceive me... I suppose all men arehorrid--about this."

  "It doesn't strike me as horrid. It seems to me the most necessaryconsequence--and natural thing in the world."

  I became aware of some one moving about in the passage, and went andshut the door of the room, then I walked back to the hearthrug andturned.

  "It's rough on you," I said. "But I didn't mean you to know. You'venever cared for me. I've had the devil of a time. Why should you mind?"

  She sat down in a draped armchair. "I HAVE cared for you," she said.

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  "I suppose," she said, "SHE cares for you?"

  I had no answer.

  "Where is she now?"

  "Oh! does it matter to you?... Look here, Marion! This--this I didn'tanticipate. I didn't mean this thing to smash down on you like this.But, you know, something had to happen. I'm sorry--sorry to the bottomof my heart that things have come to this between us. But indeed, I'mtaken by surprise. I don't know where I am--I don't know how we gothere. Things took me by surprise. I found myself alone with her one day.I kissed her. I went on. It seemed stupid to go back. And besides--whyshould I have gone back? Why should I? From first to last, I've hardlythought of it as touching you.... Damn!"

  She scrutinised my face, and pulled at the ball-fringe of the littletable beside her.

  "To think of it," she said. "I don't believe I can ever touch youagain."

  We kept a long silence. I was only beginning to realise in the mostsuperficial way the immense catastrophe that had happened between us.Enormous issues had rushed upon us. I felt unprepared and altogetherinadequate. I was unreasonably angry. There came a rush of stupidexpressions to my mind that my rising sense of the supreme importanceof the moment saved me from saying. The gap of silence widened untilit threatened to become the vast memorable margin of some one among athousand trivial possibilities of speech that would vex our relationsfor ever.

  Our little general servant tapped at the door--Marion always liked theservant to tap--and appeared.

  "Tea, M'm," she said--and vanished, leaving the door open.

  "I will go upstairs," said I, and stopped. "I will go upstairs" Irepeated, "and put my bag in the spare room."

  We remained motionless and silent for a few seconds.

  "Mother is having tea with us to-day," Marion remarked at last, anddropped the worried end of ball-fringe and stood up slowly....

  And so, with this immense discussion of our changed relations hangingover us, we presently had tea with the unsuspecting Mrs. Ramboat andthe spaniel. Mrs. Ramboat was too well trained in her position to remarkupon our somber preoccupation. She kept a thin trickle of talk going,and told us, I remember, that Mr. Ramboat was "troubled" about hiscannas.

  "They don't come up and they won't come up. He's been round and had anexplanation with the man who sold him the bulbs--and he's very heatedand upset."

  The spaniel was a great bore, begging and doing small tricks first atone and then at the other of us. Neither of us used his name. You seewe had called him Miggles, and made a sort of trio in the baby-talk ofMutney and Miggles and Ming.

  VIII

  Then presently we resumed our monstrous, momentous dialogue. I can't nowmake out how long that dialogue went on. It spread itself, I know,in heavy fragments over either three days or four. I remember myselfgrouped with Marion, talking sitting on our bed in her room, talkingstanding in our dining-room, saving this thing or that. Twice we wentfor long walks. And we had a long evening alone together, with jadednerves and hearts that fluctuated between a hard and dreary recognitionof facts and, on my part at least, a strange unwonted tenderness;because in some extraordinary way this crisis had destroyed our mutualapathy and mad
e us feel one another again.

  It was a dialogue that had discrepant parts that fell into lumps oftalk that failed to join on to their predecessors, that began again ata different level, higher or lower, that assumed new aspects in theintervals and assimilated new considerations. We discussed the fact thatwe two were no longer lovers; never before had we faced that. It seemsa strange thing to write, but as I look back, I see clearly that thoseseveral days were the time when Marion and I were closest together,looked for the first and last time faithfully and steadfastly into eachother's soul. For those days only, there were no pretences, I made noconcessions to her nor she to me; we concealed nothing, exaggeratednothing. We had done with pretending. We had it out plainly and soberlywith each other. Mood followed mood and got its stark expression.

  Of course there was quarreling between us, bitter quarreling, and wesaid things to one another--long pent-up things that bruised and crushedand cut. But over it all in my memory now is an effect of deliberateconfrontation, and the figure of Marion stands up, pale, melancholy,tear-stained, injured, implacable and dignified.

  "You love her?" she asked once, and jerked that doubt into my mind.

  I struggled with tangled ideas and emotions. "I don't know what loveis. It's all sorts of things--it's made of a dozen strands twisted in athousand ways."

  "But you want her? You want her now--when you think of her?"

  "Yes," I reflected. "I want her--right enough."

  "And me? Where do I come in?"

  "I suppose you come in here."

  "Well, but what are you going to do?"

  "Do!" I said with the exasperation of the situation growing upon me."What do you want me to do?"

  As I look back upon all that time--across a gulf of fifteen activeyears--I find I see it with an understanding judgment. I see it as ifit were the business of some one else--indeed of two otherpeople--intimately known yet judged without passion. I see now that thisshock, this sudden immense disillusionment, did in real fact bring outa mind and soul in Marion; that for the first time she emergedfrom habits, timidities, imitations, phrases and a certain narrowwill-impulse, and became a personality.

  Her ruling motive at first was, I think, an indignant and outragedpride. This situation must end. She asked me categorically to give upEffie, and I, full of fresh and glowing memories, absolutely refused.

  "It's too late, Marion," I said. "It can't be done like that."

  "Then we can't very well go on living together," she said. "Can we?"

  "Very well," I deliberated "if you must have it so."

  "Well, can we?"

  "Can you stay in this house? I mean--if I go away?"

  "I don't know.... I don't think I could."

  "Then--what do you want?"

  Slowly we worked our way from point to point, until at last the word"divorce" was before us.

  "If we can't live together we ought to be free," said Marion.

  "I don't know anything of divorce," I said--"if you mean that. I don'tknow how it is done. I shall have to ask somebody--or look it up....Perhaps, after all, it is the thing to do. We may as well face it."

  We began to talk ourselves into a realisation of what our divergentfutures might be. I came back on the evening of that day with myquestions answered by a solicitor.

  "We can't as a matter of fact," I said, "get divorced as things are.Apparently, so far as the law goes you've got to stand this sort ofthing. It's silly but that is the law. However, it's easy to arrange adivorce. In addition to adultery there must be desertion or cruelty.To establish cruelty I should have to strike you, or something of thatsort, before witnesses. That's impossible--but it's simple to desert youlegally. I have to go away from you; that's all. I can go on sending youmoney--and you bring a suit, what is it?--for Restitution of ConjugalRights. The Court orders me to return. I disobey. Then you can go on todivorce me. You get a Decree Nisi, and once more the Court tries to makeme come back. If we don't make it up within six months and if you don'tbehave scandalously the Decree is made absolute. That's the end of thefuss. That's how one gets unmarried. It's easier, you see, to marry thanunmarry."

  "And then--how do I live? What becomes of me?"

  "You'll have an income. They call it alimony. From a third to a half ofmy present income--more if you like--I don't mind--three hundred a year,say. You've got your old people to keep and you'll need all that."

  "And then--then you'll be free?"

  "Both of us."

  "And all this life you've hated"

  I looked up at her wrung and bitter face. "I haven't hated it," I lied,my voice near breaking with the pain of it all. "Have you?"

  IX

  The perplexing thing about life is the irresolvable complexity ofreality, of things and relations alike. Nothing is simple. Every wrongdone has a certain justice in it, and every good deed has dregs of evil.As for us, young still, and still without self-knowledge, resoundeda hundred discordant notes in the harsh angle of that shock. We werefuriously angry with each other, tender with each other, callouslyselfish, generously self-sacrificing.

  I remember Marion saying innumerable detached things that didn't hangtogether one with another, that contradicted one another, that were,nevertheless, all in their places profoundly true and sincere. I seethem now as so many vain experiments in her effort to apprehend thecrumpled confusions of our complex moral landslide. Some I foundirritating beyond measure. I answered her--sometimes quite abominably.

  "Of course," she would say again and again, "my life has been afailure."

  "I've besieged you for three years," I would retort "asking it not tobe. You've done as you pleased. If I've turned away at last--"

  Or again she would revive all the stresses before our marriage.

  "How you must hate me! I made you wait. Well now--I suppose you haveyour revenge."

  "REVENGE!" I echoed.

  Then she would try over the aspects of our new separated lives.

  "I ought to earn my own living," she would insist.

  "I want to be quite independent. I've always hated London. Perhaps Ishall try a poultry farm and bees. You won't mind at first my being aburden. Afterwards--"

  "We've settled all that," I said.

  "I suppose you will hate me anyhow..."

  There were times when she seemed to regard our separation withabsolute complacency, when she would plan all sorts of freedoms andcharacteristic interests.

  "I shall go out a lot with Smithie," she said.

  And once she said an ugly thing that I did indeed hate her for that Icannot even now quite forgive her.

  "Your aunt will rejoice at all this. She never cared for me..."

  Into my memory of these pains and stresses comes the figure of Smithie,full-charged with emotion, so breathless in the presence of the horridvillain of the piece that she could make no articulate sounds. Shehad long tearful confidences with Marion, I know, sympathetic closeclingings. There were moments when only absolute speechlessnessprevented her giving me a stupendous "talking-to"--I could see it inher eye. The wrong things she would have said! And I recall, too,Mrs. Ramboat's slow awakening to something in, the air, the growingexpression of solicitude in her eye, only her well-trained fear ofMarion keeping her from speech.

  And at last through all this welter, like a thing fated and altogetherbeyond our control, parting came to Marion and me.

  I hardened my heart, or I could not have gone. For at the last it cameto Marion that she was parting from me for ever. That overbore all otherthings, had turned our last hour to anguish. She forgot for a timethe prospect of moving into a new house, she forgot the outrage on herproprietorship and pride. For the first time in her life she reallyshowed strong emotions in regard to me, for the first time, perhaps,they really came to her. She began to weep slow, reluctant tears. I cameinto her room, and found her asprawl on the bed, weeping.

  "I didn't know," she cried. "Oh! I didn't understand!"

  "I've been a fool. All my life is a wreck!

&nbs
p; "I shall be alone!...MUTNEY! Mutney, don't leave me! Oh! Mutney! Ididn't understand."

  I had to harden my heart indeed, for it seemed to me at moments in thoselast hours together that at last, too late, the longed-for thing hadhappened and Marion had come alive. A new-born hunger for me lit hereyes.

  "Don't leave me!" she said, "don't leave me!" She clung to me; shekissed me with tear-salt lips.

  I was promised now and pledged, and I hardened my heart against thisimpossible dawn. Yet it seems to me that there were moments when itneeded but a cry, but one word to have united us again for all ourlives. Could we have united again? Would that passage have enlightenedus for ever or should we have fallen back in a week or so into the oldestrangement, the old temperamental opposition?

  Of that there is now no telling. Our own resolve carried us on ourpredestined way. We behaved more and more like separating lovers,parting inexorably, but all the preparations we had set going worked onlike a machine, and we made no attempt to stop them. My trunks and boxeswent to the station. I packed my bag with Marion standing before me. Wewere like children who had hurt each other horribly in sheer stupidity,who didn't know now how to remedy it. We belonged to each otherimmensely--immensely. The cab came to the little iron gate.

  "Good-bye!" I said.

  "Good-bye."

  For a moment we held one another in each other's arms andkissed--incredibly without malice. We heard our little servant in thepassage going to open the door. For the last time we pressed ourselvesto one another. We were not lovers nor enemies, but two human souls in afrank community of pain. I tore myself from her.

  "Go away," I said to the servant, seeing that Marion had followed medown.

  I felt her standing behind me as I spoke to the cab man.

  I got into the cab, resolutely not looking back, and then as it startedjumped up, craned out and looked at the door.

  It was wide open, but she had disappeared....

  I wonder--I suppose she ran upstairs.

  X

  So I parted from Marion at an extremity of perturbation and regret, andwent, as I had promised and arranged, to Effie, who was waiting for mein apartments near Orpington. I remember her upon the station platform,a bright, flitting figure looking along the train for me, and our walkover the fields in the twilight. I had expected an immense sense ofrelief where at last the stresses of separation were over, but nowI found I was beyond measure wretched and perplexed, full of theprofoundest persuasion of irreparable error. The dusk and somber Marionwere so alike, her sorrow seemed to be all about me. I had to holdmyself to my own plans, to remember that I must keep faith with Effie,with Effie who had made no terms, exacted no guarantees, but flungherself into my hands.

  We went across the evening fields in silence, towards a sky of deepeninggold and purple, and Effie was close beside me always, very close,glancing up ever and again at my face.

  Certainly she knew I grieved for Marion, that ours was now no joyfulreunion. But she showed no resentment and no jealousy. Extraordinarily,she did not compete against Marion. Never once in all our time togetherdid she say an adverse word of Marion....

  She set herself presently to dispel the shadow that brooded over me withthe same instinctive skill that some women will show with the troubleof a child. She made herself my glad and pretty slave and handmaid; sheforced me at last to rejoice in her. Yet at the back of it all Marionremained, stupid and tearful and infinitely distressful, so that I wasalmost intolerably unhappy for her--for her and the dead body of mymarried love.

  It is all, as I tell it now, unaccountable to me. I go back into theseremote parts, these rarely visited uplands and lonely tares of memory,and it seems to me still a strange country. I had thought I might begoing to some sensuous paradise with Effie, but desire which fills theuniverse before its satisfaction, vanishes utterly like the going ofdaylight--with achievement. All the facts and forms of life remaindarkling and cold. It was an upland of melancholy questionings, a regionfrom which I saw all the world at new angles and in new aspects; I hadoutflanked passion and romance.

  I had come into a condition of vast perplexities. For the first time inmy life, at least so it seems to me now in this retrospect, I looked atmy existence as a whole.

  Since this was nothing, what was I doing? What was I for?

  I was going to and fro about Tono-Bungay--the business I had taken upto secure Marion and which held me now in spite of our intimateseparation--and snatching odd week-ends and nights for Orpington, andall the while I struggled with these obstinate interrogations. I usedto fall into musing in the trains, I became even a little inaccurate andforgetful about business things. I have the clearest memory of myselfsitting thoughtful in the evening sunlight on a grassy hillside thatlooked toward Seven Oaks and commanded a wide sweep of country, and thatI was thinking out my destiny. I could almost write my thought down now,I believe, as they came to me that afternoon. Effie, restless littlecockney that she was, rustled and struggled in a hedgerow below,gathering flowers, discovering flowers she had never seen before. Ihad. I remember, a letter from Marion in my pocket. I had even made sometentatives for return, for a reconciliation; Heaven knows now how Ihad put it! but her cold, ill-written letter repelled me. I perceivedI could never face that old inconclusive dullness of life again, thatstagnant disappointment. That, anyhow, wasn't possible. But what waspossible? I could see no way of honour or fine living before me at all.

  "What am I to do with life?" that was the question that besieged me.

  I wondered if all the world was even as I, urged to this by one motiveand to that by another, creatures of chance and impulse and unmeaningtraditions. Had I indeed to abide by what I had said and done andchosen? Was there nothing for me in honour but to provide for Effie, goback penitent to Marion and keep to my trade in rubbish--or find somefresh one--and so work out the residue of my days? I didn't accept thatfor a moment. But what else was I to do? I wondered if my case wasthe case of many men, whether in former ages, too, men had been soguideless, so uncharted, so haphazard in their journey into life. In theMiddle Ages, in the old Catholic days, one went to a priest, and he saidwith all the finality of natural law, this you are and this you must do.I wondered whether even in the Middle Ages I should have accepted thatruling without question.

  I remember too very distinctly how Effie came and sat beside me on alittle box: that was before the casement window of our room.

  "Gloomkins," said she.

  I smiled and remained head on hand, looking out of the window forgetfulof her.

  "Did you love your wife so well?" she whispered softly.

  "Oh!" I cried, recalled again; "I don't know. I don't understand thesethings. Life is a thing that hurts, my dear! It hurts without logic orreason. I've blundered! I didn't understand. Anyhow--there is no need togo hurting you, is there?"

  And I turned about and drew her to me, and kissed her ear....

  Yes, I had a very bad time--I still recall. I suffered, I suppose, froma sort of ennui of the imagination. I found myself without an object tohold my will together. I sought. I read restlessly and discursively.I tried Ewart and got no help from him. As I regard it all now in thisretrospect, it seems to me as if in those days of disgust and abandonedaims I discovered myself for the first time. Before that I had seen onlythe world and things in it, had sought them self-forgetful of all butmy impulse. Now I found myself GROUPED with a system of appetites andsatisfactions, with much work to do--and no desire, it seemed, left inme.

  There were moments when I thought of suicide. At times my life appearedbefore me in bleak, relentless light, a series of ignorances, crudeblunderings, degradation and cruelty. I had what the old theologianscall a "conviction of sin." I sought salvation--not perhaps in theformula a Methodist preacher would recognise but salvation nevertheless.

  Men find their salvation nowadays in many ways. Names and forms don't, Ithink, matter very much; the real need is something that we can holdand that holds one. I have known a man find that determining
factor ina dry-plate factory, and another in writing a history of the Manor. Solong as it holds one, it does not matter. Many men and women nowadaystake up some concrete aspect of Socialism or social reform. ButSocialism for me has always been a little bit too human, too set aboutwith personalities and foolishness. It isn't my line. I don't likethings so human. I don't think I'm blind to the fun, the surprises, thejolly little coarsenesses and insufficiency of life, to the "humour ofit," as people say, and to adventure, but that isn't the root of thematter with me. There's no humour in my blood. I'm in earnest in warpand woof. I stumble and flounder, but I know that over all these merryimmediate things, there are other things that are great and serene, veryhigh, beautiful things--the reality. I haven't got it, but it's therenevertheless. I'm a spiritual guttersnipe in love with unimaginablegoddesses. I've never seen the goddesses nor ever shall--but it takesall the fun out of the mud--and at times I fear it takes all thekindliness, too.

  But I'm talking of things I can't expect the reader to understand,because I don't half understand them myself. There is something linksthings for me, a sunset or so, a mood or so, the high air, somethingthere was in Marion's form and colour, something I find and lose inMantegna's pictures, something in the lines of these boats I make. (Youshould see X2, my last and best!)

  I can't explain myself, I perceive. Perhaps it all comes to this, thatI am a hard and morally limited cad with a mind beyond my merits.Naturally I resist that as a complete solution. Anyhow, I had a sense ofinexorable need, of distress and insufficiency that was unendurable, andfor a time this aeronautical engineering allayed it....

  In the end of this particular crisis of which I tell so badly, Iidealised Science. I decided that in power and knowledge lay thesalvation of my life, the secret that would fill my need; that to thesethings I would give myself.

  I emerged at last like a man who has been diving in darkness, clutchingat a new resolve for which he had groped desperately and long.

  I came into the inner office suddenly one day--it must have been justbefore the time of Marion's suit for restitution--and sat down before myuncle.

  "Look here," I said, "I'm sick of this."

  "HulLO!" he answered, and put some papers aside.

  "What's up, George?"

  "Things are wrong."

  "As how?"

  "My life," I said, "it's a mess, an infinite mess."

  "She's been a stupid girl, George," he said; "I partly understand. Butyou're quit of her now, practically, and there's just as good fish inthe sea--"

  "Oh! it's not that!" I cried. "That's only the part that shows. I'msick--I'm sick of all this damned rascality."

  "Eh? Eh?" said my uncle. "WHAT--rascality?"

  "Oh, YOU know. I want some STUFF, man. I want something to hold on to. Ishall go amok if I don't get it. I'm a different sort of beast fromyou. You float in all this bunkum. _I_ feel like a man floundering in auniverse of soapsuds, up and downs, east and west. I can't stand it. Imust get my foot on something solid or--I don't know what."

  I laughed at the consternation in his face.

  "I mean it," I said. "I've been thinking it over. I've made up my mind.It's no good arguing. I shall go in for work--real work. No! this isn'twork; it's only laborious cheating. But I've got an idea! It's an oldidea--I thought of years ago, but it came back to me. Look here! Whyshould I fence about with you? I believe the time has come for flying tobe possible. Real flying!"

  "Flying!"

  I stuck to that, and it helped me through the worst time in my life.My uncle, after some half-hearted resistance and a talk with my aunt,behaved like the father of a spoilt son. He fixed up an arrangement thatgave me capital to play with, released me from too constant a solicitudefor the newer business developments--this was in what I may call thelater Moggs period of our enterprises--and I went to work at once withgrim intensity.

  But I will tell of my soaring and flying machines in the proper place.I've been leaving the story of my uncle altogether too long. Iwanted merely to tell how it was I took to this work. I took to theseexperiments after I had sought something that Marion in some indefinableway had seemed to promise. I toiled and forgot myself for a time, anddid many things. Science too has been something of an irresponsivemistress since, though I've served her better than I served Marion. Butat the time Science, with her order, her inhuman distance, yet steelycertainties, saved me from despair.

  Well, I have still to fly; but incidentally I have invented the lightestengines in the world.

  I am trying to tell of all the things that happened to me. It's hardenough simply to get it put down in the remotest degree right. But thisis a novel, not a treatise. Don't imagine that I am coming presentlyto any sort of solution of my difficulties. Here among my drawings andhammerings NOW, I still question unanswering problems. All my life hasbeen at bottom, SEEKING, disbelieving always, dissatisfied always withthe thing seen and the thing believed, seeking something in toil, inforce, in danger, something whose name and nature I do not clearlyunderstand, something beautiful, worshipful, enduring, mine profoundlyand fundamentally, and the utter redemption of myself; I don't know--allI can tell is that it is something I have ever failed to find.

  XI

  But before I finish this chapter and book altogether and go on withthe great adventure of my uncle's career. I may perhaps tell what elseremains to tell of Marion and Effie, and then for a time set my privatelife behind me.

  For a time Marion and I corresponded with some regularity, writingfriendly but rather uninforming letters about small business things. Theclumsy process of divorce completed itself.

  She left the house at Ealing and went into the country with her aunt andparents, taking a small farm near Lewes in Sussex. She put up glass, sheput in heat for her father, happy man! and spoke of figs and peaches.The thing seemed to promise well throughout a spring and summer, but theSussex winter after London was too much for the Ramboats. They got verymuddy and dull; Mr. Ramboat killed a cow by improper feeding, and thatdisheartened them all. A twelvemonth saw the enterprise in difficulties.I had to help her out of this, and then they returned to London and shewent into partnership with Smithie at Streatham, and ran a business thatwas intimated on the firm's stationery as "Robes." The parents and auntwere stowed away in a cottage somewhere. After that the letters becameinfrequent. But in one I remember a postscript that had a little stab ofour old intimacy: "Poor old Miggles is dead."

  Nearly eight years slipped by. I grew up. I grew in experience, incapacity, until I was fully a man, but with many new interests, livingon a larger scale in a wider world than I could have dreamt of in myMarion days. Her letters become rare and insignificant. At last came agap of silence that made me curious. For eighteen months or more I hadnothing from Marion save her quarterly receipts through the bank. Then Idamned at Smithie, and wrote a card to Marion.

  "Dear Marion," I said, "how goes it?"

  She astonished me tremendously by telling me she had married again--"aMr. Wachorn, a leading agent in the paper-pattern trade." But she stillwrote on the Ponderevo and Smith (Robes) notepaper, from the Ponderevoand Smith address.

  And that, except for a little difference of opinion about thecontinuance of alimony which gave me some passages of anger, and the useof my name by the firm, which also annoyed me, is the end of Marion'shistory for me, and she vanishes out of this story. I do not know whereshe is or what she is doing. I do not know whether she is alive or dead.It seems to me utterly grotesque that two people who have stood so closeto one another as she and I should be so separated, but so it is betweenus.

  Effie, too, I have parted from, though I still see her at times. Betweenus there was never any intention of marriage nor intimacy of soul. Shehad a sudden, fierce, hot-blooded passion for me and I for her, butI was not her first lover nor her last. She was in another world fromMarion. She had a queer, delightful nature; I've no memory ofever seeing her sullen or malicious. She was--indeed she wasmagnificently--eupeptic. That, I think, was the central secret of
heragreeableness, and, moreover, that she was infinitely kind-hearted. Ihelped her at last into an opening she coveted, and she amazed me by asudden display of business capacity. She has now a typewriting bureauin Riffle's Inn, and she runs it with a brisk vigour and considerablesuccess, albeit a certain plumpness has overtaken her. And she stillloves her kind. She married a year or so ago a boy half her age--awretch of a poet, a wretched poet, and given to drugs, a thing with lankfair hair always getting into his blue eyes, and limp legs. She did it,she said, because he needed nursing....

  But enough of this disaster of my marriage and of my early love affairs;I have told all that is needed for my picture to explain how I came totake up aeroplane experiments and engineering science; let me get backto my essential story, to Tono-Bungay and my uncle's promotions and tothe vision of the world these things have given me.

 

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