Tono-Bungay

Tono-Bungay Page 8

by H. G. Wells

  CHAPTER THE FIRST

  THE STICK OF THE ROCKET

  I

  That evening I talked with my uncle in the Hardingham for the last time.The atmosphere of the place had altered quite shockingly. Instead of thecrowd of importunate courtiers there were just half a dozen uninvitingmen, journalists waiting for an interview. Ropper the big commissionairewas still there, but now indeed he was defending my uncle from somethingmore than time-wasting intrusions. I found the little man alone in theinner office pretending to work, but really brooding. He was lookingyellow and deflated.

  "Lord!" he said at the sight of me. "You're lean, George. It makes thatscar of yours show up."

  We regarded each other gravely for a time.

  "Quap," I said, "is at the bottom of the Atlantic. There's somebills--We've got to pay the men."

  "Seen the papers?"

  "Read 'em all in the train."

  "At bay," he said. "I been at bay for a week.... Yelping round me....And me facing the music. I'm feelin' a bit tired."

  He blew and wiped his glasses.

  "My stomack isn't what it was," he explained. "One finds it--thesetimes. How did it all happen, George? Your Marconigram--it took me inthe wind a bit."

  I told him concisely. He nodded to the paragraphs of my narrative and atthe end he poured something from a medicine bottle into a sticky littlewineglass and drank it. I became aware of the presence of drugs, ofthree or four small bottles before him among his disorder of papers, ofa faint elusively familiar odour in the room.

  "Yes," he said, wiping his lips and recorking the bottle. "You've doneyour best, George. The luck's been against us."

  He reflected, bottle in hand. "Sometimes the luck goes with you andsometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it doesn't. And then where are you?Grass in the oven! Fight or no fight."

  He asked a few questions and then his thoughts came back to his ownurgent affairs. I tried to get some comprehensive account of thesituation from him, but he would not give it.

  "Oh, I wish I'd had you. I wish I'd had you, George. I've had a lot onmy hands. You're clear headed at times."

  "What has happened?"

  "Oh! Boom!--infernal things."

  "Yes, but--how? I'm just off the sea, remember."

  "It'd worry me too much to tell you now. It's tied up in a skein."

  He muttered something to himself and mused darkly, and roused himself tosay--

  "Besides--you'd better keep out of it. It's getting tight. Get 'emtalking. Go down to Crest Hill and fly. That's YOUR affair."

  For a time his manner set free queer anxieties in my brain again.

  I will confess that that Mordet Island nightmare of mine returned,and as I looked at him his hand went out for the drug again. "Stomach,George," he said.

  "I been fightin' on that. Every man fights on some thing--gives waysomewheres--head, heart, liver--something. Zzzz. Gives way somewhere.Napoleon did at last. All through the Waterloo campaign, his stomach--itwasn't a stomach! Worse than mine, no end."

  The mood of depression passed as the drug worked within him. His eyesbrightened. He began to talk big. He began to dress up the situation formy eyes, to recover what he had admitted to me. He put it as a retreatfrom Russia. There were still the chances of Leipzig.

  "It's a battle, George--a big fight. We're fighting for millions.I've still chances. There's still a card or so. I can't tell all myplans--like speaking on the stroke."

  "You might," I began.

  "I can't, George. It's like asking to look at some embryo. You got towait. I know. In a sort of way, I know. But to tell it--No! You beenaway so long. And everything's got complicated."

  My perception of disastrous entanglements deepened with the rise of hisspirits. It was evident that I could only help to tie him up in whatevernet was weaving round his mind by forcing questions and explanationsupon him. My thoughts flew off at another angle. "How's Aunt Susan?"said I.

  I had to repeat the question. His busy whispering lips stopped for amoment, and he answered in the note of one who repeats a formula.

  "She'd like to be in the battle with me. She'd like to be here inLondon. But there's corners I got to turn alone." His eye rested for amoment on the little bottle beside him. "And things have happened.

  "You might go down now and talk to her," he said, in a directer voice."I shall be down to-morrow night, I think."

  He looked up as though he hoped that would end our talk.

  "For the week-end?" I asked.

  "For the week-end. Thank God for week-ends, George!"

  II

  My return home to Lady Grove was a very different thing from what I hadanticipated when I had got out to sea with my load of quap and fanciedthe Perfect-Filament was safe within my grasp. As I walked through theevening light along the downs, the summer stillness seemed like thestillness of something newly dead. There were no lurking workmen anymore, no cyclists on the high road.

  Cessation was manifest everywhere. There had been, I learnt from myaunt, a touching and quite voluntary demonstration when the Crest Hillwork had come to an end and the men had drawn their last pay; they hadcheered my uncle and hooted the contractors and Lord Boom.

  I cannot now recall the manner in which my aunt and I greeted oneanother. I must have been very tired there, but whatever impression wasmade has gone out of my memory. But I recall very clearly how we sat atthe little round table near the big window that gave on the terrace, anddined and talked. I remember her talking of my uncle.

  She asked after him, and whether he seemed well. "I wish I could help,"she said. "But I've never helped him much, never. His way of doingthings was never mine. And since--since--. Since he began to get sorich, he's kept things from me. In the old days--it was different....

  "There he is--I don't know what he's doing. He won't have me nearhim....

  "More's kept from me than anyone. The very servants won't let me know.They try and stop the worst of the papers--Boom's things--from comingupstairs.... I suppose they've got him in a corner, George. Poor oldTeddy! Poor old Adam and Eve we are! Ficial Receivers with flamingswords to drive us out of our garden! I'd hoped we'd never have anotherTrek. Well--anyway, it won't be Crest Hill.... But it's hard on Teddy.He must be in such a mess up there. Poor old chap. I suppose wecan't help him. I suppose we'd only worry him. Have some more soupGeorge--while there is some?..."

  The next day was one of those days of strong perception that stand outclear in one's memory when the common course of days is blurred. I canrecall now the awakening in the large familiar room that was always keptfor me, and how I lay staring at its chintz-covered chairs, its spacedfine furniture, its glimpse of the cedars without, and thought that allthis had to end.

  I have never been greedy for money, I have never wanted to be rich,but I felt now an immense sense of impending deprivation. I read thenewspapers after breakfast--I and my aunt together--and then I walkedup to see what Cothope had done in the matter of Lord Roberts B. Neverbefore had I appreciated so acutely the ample brightness of the LadyGrove gardens, the dignity and wide peace of all about me. It was oneof those warm mornings in late May that have won all the glory of summerwithout losing the gay delicacy of spring. The shrubbery was bright withlaburnum and lilac, the beds swarmed with daffodils and narcissi andwith lilies of the valley in the shade.

  I went along the well-kept paths among the rhododendra and through theprivate gate into the woods where the bluebells and common orchid werein profusion. Never before had I tasted so completely the fine senseof privilege and ownership. And all this has to end, I told myself, allthis has to end.

  Neither my uncle nor I had made any provision for disaster; all we hadwas in the game, and I had little doubt now of the completeness of ourruin. For the first time in my life since he had sent me thatwonderful telegram of his I had to consider that common anxiety ofmankind,--Employment. I had to come off my magic carpet and walk oncemore in the world.

  And suddenly I found myself at the cross drives where I had se
enBeatrice for the first time after so many years. It is strange, but sofar as I can recollect I had not thought of her once since I had landedat Plymouth. No doubt she had filled the background of my mind, but I donot remember one definite, clear thought. I had been intent on my uncleand the financial collapse.

  It came like a blow in the face now; all that, too, had to end!

  Suddenly I was filled with the thought of her and a great longing forher. What would she do when she realised our immense disaster? Whatwould she do? How would she take it? It filled me with astonishment torealise how little I could tell....

  Should I perhaps presently happen upon her?

  I went on through the plantations and out upon the downs, and thence Isaw Cothope with a new glider of his own design soaring down wind tomy old familiar "grounding" place. To judge by its long rhythm it was avery good glider. "Like Cothope's cheek," thought I, "to go on with theresearch. I wonder if he's keeping notes.... But all this will have tostop."

  He was sincerely glad to see me. "It's been a rum go," he said.

  He had been there without wages for a month, a man forgotten in the rushof events.

  "I just stuck on and did what I could with the stuff. I got a bit ofmoney of my own--and I said to myself, 'Well, here you are with the gearand no one to look after you. You won't get such a chance again, my boy,not in all your born days. Why not make what you can with it? '"

  "How's Lord Roberts B?"

  Cothope lifted his eyebrows. "I've had to refrain," he said. "But he'slooking very handsome."

  "Gods!" I said, "I'd like to get him up just once before we smash. Youread the papers? You know we're going to smash?"

  "Oh! I read the papers. It's scandalous, sir, such work as ours shoulddepend on things like that. You and I ought to be under the State, sir,if you'll excuse me."

  "Nothing to excuse," I said. "I've always been a Socialist--of asort--in theory. Let's go and have a look at him. How is he? Deflated?"

  "Just about quarter full. That last oil glaze of yours holds the gassomething beautiful. He's not lost a cubic metre a week."...

  Cothope returned to Socialism as we went toward the sheds.

  "Glad to think you're a Socialist, sir," he said, "it's the onlycivilised state. I been a Socialist some years--off the Clarion. It's arotten scramble, this world. It takes the things we make and invent andit plays the silly fool with 'em. We scientific people, we'll have totake things over and stop all this financing and advertisement and that.It's too silly. It's a noosance. Look at us!"

  Lord Roberts B, even in his partially deflated condition in his shed,was a fine thing to stare up at. I stood side by side with Cothoperegarding him, and it was borne in upon me more acutely than ever thatall this had to end. I had a feeling just like the feeling of a boy whowants to do wrong, that I would use up the stuff while I had it beforethe creditors descended. I had a queer fancy, too, I remember, that if Icould get into the air it would advertise my return to Beatrice.

  "We'll fill her," I said concisely.

  "It's all ready," said Cothope, and added as an afterthought, "unlessthey cut off the gas."...

  I worked and interested myself with Cothope all the morning and for atime forgot my other troubles. But the thought of Beatrice flooded meslowly and steadily. It became an unintelligent sick longing to see her.I felt that I could not wait for the filling of Lord Roberts B, that Imust hunt her up and see her soon. I got everything forward and lunchedwith Cothope, and then with the feeblest excuses left him in order toprowl down through the woods towards Bedley Corner. I became a prey towretched hesitations and diffidence. Ought I to go near her now? I askedmyself, reviewing all the social abasements of my early years. Atlast, about five, I called at the Dower House. I was greeted by theirCharlotte--with a forbidding eye and a cold astonishment.

  Both Beatrice and Lady Osprey were out.

  There came into my head some prowling dream of meeting her. I went alongthe lane towards Woking, the lane down which we had walked five monthsago in the wind and rain.

  I mooned for a time in our former footsteps, then swore and turned backacross the fields, and then conceived a distaste for Cothope and wentDownward. At last I found myself looking down on the huge abandonedmasses of the Crest Hill house.

  That gave my mind a twist into a new channel. My uncle came uppermostagain. What a strange, melancholy emptiness of intention that strickenenterprise seemed in the even evening sunlight, what vulgar magnificenceand crudity and utter absurdity! It was as idiotic as the pyramids. Isat down on the stile, staring at it as though I had never seen thatforest of scaffold poles, that waste of walls and bricks and plaster andshaped stones, that wilderness of broken soil and wheeling tracks anddumps before. It struck me suddenly as the compactest image and sampleof all that passes for Progress, of all the advertisement-inflatedspending, the aimless building up and pulling down, the enterprise andpromise of my age. This was our fruit, this was what he had done, I andmy uncle, in the fashion of our time. We were its leaders and exponents,we were the thing it most flourishingly produced. For this futility inits end, for an epoch of such futility, the solemn scroll of history hadunfolded....

  "Great God!" I cried, "but is this Life?"

  For this the armies drilled, for this the Law was administered and theprisons did their duty, for this the millions toiled and perished insuffering, in order that a few of us should build palaces we neverfinished, make billiard-rooms under ponds, run imbecile walls roundirrational estates, scorch about the world in motor-cars, deviseflying-machines, play golf and a dozen such foolish games of ball, crowdinto chattering dinner parties, gamble and make our lives one vast,dismal spectacle of witless waste! So it struck me then, and for a timeI could think of no other interpretation. This was Life! It came to melike a revelation, a revelation at once incredible and indisputable ofthe abysmal folly of our being.

  III

  I was roused from such thoughts by the sound of footsteps behind me.

  I turned half hopeful--so foolish is a lover's imagination, and stoppedamazed. It was my uncle. His face was white--white as I had seen it inmy dream.

  "Hullo!" I said, and stared. "Why aren't you in London?"

  "It's all up," he said....

  "Adjudicated?"

  "No!"

  I stared at him for a moment, and then got off the stile.

  We stood swaying and then came forward with a weak motion of his armslike a man who cannot see distinctly, and caught at and leant upon thestile. For a moment we were absolutely still. He made a clumsy gesturetowards the great futility below and choked. I discovered that his facewas wet with tears, that his wet glasses blinded him. He put up hislittle fat hand and clawed them off clumsily, felt inefficiently for hispocket-handkerchief, and then, to my horror, as he clung to me, hebegan to weep aloud, this little, old worldworn swindler. It wasn't justsobbing or shedding tears, it was crying as a child cries. It was oh!terrible!

  "It's cruel," he blubbered at last. "They asked me questions. They KEP'asking me questions, George."

  He sought for utterance, and spluttered.

  "The Bloody bullies!" he shouted. "The Bloody Bullies."

  He ceased to weep. He became suddenly rapid and explanatory.

  "It's not a fair game, George. They tire you out. And I'm not well. Mystomach's all wrong. And I been and got a cold. I always been li'ble tocold, and this one's on my chest. And then they tell you to speak up.They bait you--and bait you, and bait you. It's torture. The strainof it. You can't remember what you said. You're bound to contradictyourself. It's like Russia, George.... It isn't fair play.... Prominentman. I've been next at dinners with that chap, Neal; I've told himstories--and he's bitter! Sets out to ruin me. Don't ask a civilquestion--bellows." He broke down again. "I've been bellowed at, I beenbullied, I been treated like a dog. Dirty cads they are! Dirty cads!I'd rather be a Three-Card Sharper than a barrister; I'd rather sellcat's-meat in the streets.

  "They sprung things on me this morning, things I d
idn't expect. Theyrushed me! I'd got it all in my hands and then I was jumped. By Neal!Neal I've given city tips to! Neal! I've helped Neal....

  "I couldn't swallow a mouthful--not in the lunch hour. I couldn't faceit. It's true, George--I couldn't face it. I said I'd get a bit of airand slipped out and down to the Embankment, and there I took a boat toRichmond. Some idee. I took a rowing boat when I got there and I rowedabout on the river for a bit. A lot of chaps and girls there was on thebank laughed at my shirt-sleeves and top hat. Dessay they thought it wasa pleasure trip. Fat lot of pleasure! I rowed round for a bit and camein. Then I came on here. Windsor way. And there they are in London doingwhat they like with me.... I don't care!"

  "But" I said, looking down at him, perplexed.

  "It's abscondin'. They'll have a warrant."

  "I don't understand," I said.

  "It's all up, George--all up and over.

  "And I thought I'd live in that place, George and die a lord! It's agreat place, reely, an imperial--if anyone has the sense to buy it andfinish it. That terrace--"

  I stood thinking him over.

  "Look here!" I said. "What's that about--a warrant? Are you sure they'llget a warrant? I'm sorry uncle; but what have you done?"

  "Haven't I told you?"

  "Yes, but they won't do very much to you for that. They'll only bringyou up for the rest of your examination."

  He remained silent for a time. At last he spoke--speaking withdifficulty.

  "It's worse than that. I've done something. They're bound to get it out.Practically they HAVE got it out."

  "What?"

  "Writin' things down--I done something."

  For the first time in his life, I believe, he felt and looked ashamed.It filled me with remorse to see him suffer so.

  "We've all done things," I said. "It's part of the game the world makesus play. If they want to arrest you--and you've got no cards in yourhand--! They mustn't arrest you."

  "No. That's partly why I went to Richmond. But I never thought--"

  His little bloodshot eyes stared at Crest Hill.

  "That chap Wittaker Wright," he said, "he had his stuff ready. Ihaven't. Now you got it, George. That's the sort of hole I'm in."

  IV

  That memory of my uncle at the gate is very clear and full. I am ableto recall even the undertow of my thoughts while he was speaking.I remember my pity and affection for him in his misery growing andstirring within me, my realisation that at any risk I must help him.But then comes indistinctness again. I was beginning to act. I know Ipersuaded him to put himself in my hands, and began at once to plan anddo. I think that when we act most we remember least, that just in themeasure that the impulse of our impressions translates itself intoschemes and movements, it ceases to record itself in memories. I knowI resolved to get him away at once, and to use the Lord Roberts B ineffecting that. It was clear he was soon to be a hunted man, and itseemed to me already unsafe for him to try the ordinary Continentalroutes in his flight. I had to evolve some scheme, and evolve itrapidly, how we might drop most inconspicuously into the world acrossthe water. My resolve to have one flight at least in my airship fittedwith this like hand to glove. It seemed to me we might be able to crossover the water in the night, set our airship adrift, and turn up aspedestrian tourists in Normandy or Brittany, and so get away. That, atany rate, was my ruling idea.

  I sent off Cothope with a dummy note to Woking, because I did not wantto implicate him, and took my uncle to the pavilion. I went down to myaunt, and made a clean breast of the situation. She became admirablycompetent. We went into his dressing-room and ruthlessly broke hislocks. I got a pair of brown boots, a tweed suit and a cap of his,and indeed a plausible walking outfit, and a little game bag for hispedestrian gear; and, in addition, a big motoring overcoat and a supplyof rugs to add to those I had at the pavilion. I also got a flaskof brandy, and she made sandwiches. I don't remember any servantsappearing, and I forget where she got those sandwiches. Meanwhile wetalked. Afterwards I thought with what a sure confidence we talked toeach other.

  "What's he done?" she said.

  "D'you mind knowing?"

  "No conscience left, thank God!"

  "I think--forgery!"

  There was just a little pause. "Can you carry this bundle?" she asked.

  I lifted it.

  "No woman ever has respected the law--ever," she said. "It's toosilly.... The things it lets you do! And then pulls you up--like a madnurse minding a child."

  She carried some rugs for me through the shrubbery in the darkling.

  "They'll think we're going mooning," she said, jerking her head at thehousehold. "I wonder what they make of us--criminals." ... An immensedroning note came as if in answer to that. It startled us both for amoment. "The dears!" she said. "It's the gong for dinner!... But I wishI could help little Teddy, George. It's awful to think of him there withhot eyes, red and dry. And I know--the sight of me makes him feel sore.Things I said, George. If I could have seen, I'd have let him have anomnibusful of Scrymgeours. I cut him up. He'd never thought I meant itbefore.... I'll help all I can, anyhow."

  I turned at something in her voice, and got a moon light gleam of tearsupon her face.

  "Could SHE have helped?" she asked abruptly.

  "SHE?"

  "That woman."

  "My God!" I cried, "HELPED! Those--things don't help!"

  "Tell me again what I ought to do," she said after a silence.

  I went over the plans I had made for communicating, and the things Ithought she might do. I had given her the address of a solicitor shemight put some trust in.

  "But you must act for yourself," I insisted.

  "Roughly," I said, "it's a scramble. You must get what you can for us,and follow as you can."

  She nodded.

  She came right up to the pavilion and hovered for a time shyly, and thenwent away.

  I found my uncle in my sitting-room in an arm-chair, with his feet uponthe fender of the gas stove, which he had lit, and now he was feeblydrunken with my whisky, and very weary in body and spirit, and inclinedto be cowardly.

  "I lef' my drops," he said.

  He changed his clothes slowly and unwillingly. I had to bully him, I hadalmost to shove him to the airship and tuck him up upon its wicker flat.Single-handed I made but a clumsy start; we scraped along the roofof the shed and bent a van of the propeller, and for a time I hungunderneath without his offering a hand to help me to clamber up. If ithadn't been for a sort of anchoring trolley device of Cothope's, a sortof slip anchor running on a rail, we should never have got clear at all.

  V

  The incidents of our flight in Lord Roberts B do not arrange themselvesin any consecutive order. To think of that adventure is like dippinghaphazard into an album of views. One is reminded first of this and thenof that. We were both lying down on a horizontal plate of basketwork;for Lord Roberts B had none of the elegant accommodation of a balloon. Ilay forward, and my uncle behind me in such a position that he couldsee hardly anything of our flight. We were protected from rolling oversimply by netting between the steel stays. It was impossible for us tostand up at all; we had either to lie or crawl on all fours overthe basket work. Amidships were lockers made of Watson's Aulitematerial,--and between these it was that I had put my uncle, wrapped inrugs. I wore sealskin motoring boots and gloves, and a motoring fur coatover my tweeds, and I controlled the engine by Bowden wires and leversforward.

  The early part of that night's experience was made up of warmth, ofmoonlit Surrey and Sussex landscape, and of a rapid and successfulflight, ascending and swooping, and then ascending again southward. Icould not watch the clouds because the airship overhung me; I could notsee the stars nor gauge the meteorological happening, but it wasfairly clear to me that a wind shifting between north and northeastwas gathering strength, and after I had satisfied myself by a seriesof entirely successful expansions and contractions of the realair-worthiness of Lord Roberts B, I stopped the engine to save mypetrol, and
let the monster drift, checking its progress by the dimlandscape below. My uncle lay quite still behind me, saying littleand staring in front of him, and I was left to my own thoughts andsensations.

  My thoughts, whatever they were, have long since faded out of memory,and my sensations have merged into one continuous memory of ancountryside lying, as it seemed, under snow, with square patches ofdimness, white phantoms of roads, rents and pools of velvety blackness,and lamp-jewelled houses. I remember a train boring its way like ahastening caterpillar of fire across the landscape, and how distinctly Iheard its clatter. Every town and street was buttoned with street lamps.I came quite close to the South Downs near Lewes, and all the lightswere out in the houses, and the people gone to bed. We left the land alittle to the east of Brighton, and by that time Brighton was well abed.and the brightly lit sea-front deserted. Then I let out the gas chamberto its fullest extent and rose. I like to be high above water.

  I do not clearly know what happened in the night. I think I must havedozed, and probably my uncle slept. I remember that once or twiceI heard him talking in an eager, muffled voice to himself, or to animaginary court. But there can be no doubt the wind changed right roundinto the east, and that we were carried far down the Channel without anysuspicion of the immense leeway we were making. I remember the kind ofstupid perplexity with which I saw the dawn breaking over a grey wasteof water, below, and realised that something was wrong. I was so stupidthat it was only after the sunrise I really noticed the trend of thefoam caps below, and perceived we were in a severe easterly gale. Eventhen, instead of heading southeasterly, I set the engine going, headedsouth, and so continued a course that must needs have either just hitUshant, or carry us over the Bay of Biscay. I thought I was east ofCherbourg, when I was far to the west and stopped my engine in thatbelief, and then set it going again. I did actually sight the coast ofBrittany to the southeast in the late afternoon, and that it was wokeme up to the gravity of our position. I discovered it by accident in thesoutheast, when I was looking for it in the southwest. I turned abouteast and faced the wind for some time, and finding I had no chance inits teeth, went high, where it seemed less violent, and tried to make acourse southeast. It was only then that I realised what a gale I was in.I had been going westward, and perhaps even in gusts north of west, at apace of fifty or sixty miles an hour.

  Then I began what I suppose would be called a Fight against the eastwind. One calls it a Fight, but it was really almost as unlike a fightas plain sewing. The wind tried to drive me westwardly, and I tried toget as much as I could eastwardly, with the wind beating and rocking usirregularly, but by no means unbearably, for about twelve hours. Myhope lay in the wind abating, and our keeping in the air and eastward ofFinisterre until it did, and the chief danger was the exhaustion of ourpetrol. It was a long and anxious and almost meditative time; we werefairly warm, and only slowly getting hungry, and except that my unclegrumbled a little and produced some philosophical reflections, and beganto fuss about having a temperature, we talked very little. I was tiredand sulky, and chiefly worried about the engine. I had to resista tendency to crawl back and look at it. I did not care to riskcontracting our gas chamber for fear of losing gas. Nothing was lesslike a fight. I know that in popular magazines, and so forth, all suchoccasions as this are depicted in terms of hysteria. Captains save theirships engineers complete their bridges, generals conduct their battles,in a state of dancing excitement, foaming recondite technicalities atthe lips. I suppose that sort of thing works up the reader, but so faras it professes to represent reality, I am convinced it is all childishnonsense, schoolboys of fifteen, girls of eighteen, and literary menall their lives, may have these squealing fits, but my own experienceis that most exciting scenes are not exciting, and most of the urgentmoments in life are met by steady-headed men.

  Neither I nor my uncle spent the night in ejaculations, nor in humorousallusions, nor any of these things. We remained lumpish.

  My uncle stuck in his place and grumbled about his stomach, andoccasionally rambled off into expositions of his financial position anddenunciations of Neal--he certainly struck out one or two good phrasesfor Neal--and I crawled about at rare intervals in a vague sort of wayand grunted, and our basketwork creaked continually, and the wind on ourquarter made a sort of ruffled flapping in the wall of the gas chamber.For all our wraps we got frightfully cold as the night wore on.

  I must have dozed, and it was still dark when I realised with astart that we were nearly due south of, and a long way from, aregularly-flashing lighthouse, standing out before the glow of somegreat town, and then that the thing that had awakened me was thecessation of our engine, and that we were driving back to the west.

  Then, indeed, for a time I felt the grim thrill of life. I crawledforward to the cords of the release valves, made my uncle crawl forwardtoo, and let out the gas until we were falling down through the air likea clumsy glider towards the vague greyness that was land.

  Something must have intervened here that I have forgotten.

  I saw the lights of Bordeaux when it was quite dark, a nebulous hazeagainst black; of that I am reasonably sure. But certainly our falltook place in the cold, uncertain light of early dawn. I am, at least,equally sure of that. And Mimizan, near where we dropped, is fifty milesfrom Bordeaux, whose harbour lights I must have seen.

  I remember coming down at last with a curious indifference, and actuallyrousing myself to steer. But the actual coming to earth was excitingenough. I remember our prolonged dragging landfall, and the difficultyI had to get clear, and how a gust of wind caught Lord Roberts B as myuncle stumbled away from the ropes and litter, and dropped me heavily,and threw me on to my knees. Then came the realisation that the monsterwas almost consciously disentangling itself for escape, and then thelight leap of its rebound. The rope slipped out of reach of my hand.I remember running knee-deep in a salt pool in hopeless pursuit of theairship.

  As it dragged and rose seaward, and how only after it had escaped myuttermost effort to recapture it, did I realise that this was quite thebest thing that could have happened. It drove swiftly over the sandydunes, lifting and falling, and was hidden by a clump of windbittentrees. Then it reappeared much further off, and still receding. Itsoared for a time, and sank slowly, and after that I saw it no more. Isuppose it fell into the sea and got wetted with salt water and heavy,and so became deflated and sank.

  It was never found, and there was never a report of anyone seeing itafter it escaped from me.

  VI

  But if I find it hard to tell the story of our long flight through theair overseas, at least that dawn in France stands cold and clear andfull. I see again almost as if I saw once more with my bodily eyesthe ridges of sand rising behind ridges of sand, grey and cold andblack-browed, with an insufficient grass. I feel again the clear, coldchill of dawn, and hear the distant barking of a dog. I find myselfasking again, "What shall we do now?" and trying to scheme with braintired beyond measure.

  At first my uncle occupied my attention. He was shivering a gooddeal, and it was all I could do to resist my desire to get him into acomfortable bed at once. But I wanted to appear plausibly in this partof the world. I felt it would not do to turn up anywhere at dawn andrest, it would be altogether too conspicuous; we must rest until the daywas well advanced, and then appear as road-stained pedestrians seekinga meal. I gave him most of what was left of the biscuits, emptied ourflasks, and advised him to sleep, but at first it was too cold, albeit Iwrapped the big fur rug around him.

  I was struck now by the flushed weariness of his face, and the look ofage the grey stubble on his unshaved chin gave him. He sat crumpled up,shivering and coughing, munching reluctantly, but drinking eagerly, andwhimpering a little, a dreadfully pitiful figure to me. But we had to gothrough with it; there was no way out for us.

  Presently the sun rose over the pines, and the sand grew rapidly warm.My uncle had done eating, and sat with his wrists resting on his knees,the most hopeless looking of lost souls.


  "I'm ill," he said, "I'm damnably ill! I can feel it in my skin!"

  Then--it was horrible to me--he cried, "I ought to be in bed; I ought tobe in bed... instead of flying about," and suddenly he burst into tears.

  I stood up. "Go to sleep, man!" I said, and took the rug from him, andspread it out and rolled him up in it.

  "It's all very well," he protested; "I'm not young enough--"

  "Lift up your head," I interrupted, and put his knapsack under it.

  "They'll catch us here, just as much as in an inn," he grumbled and thenlay still.

  Presently, after a long time, I perceived he was asleep. His breath camewith peculiar wheezings, and every now and again he would cough. I wasvery stiff and tired myself, and perhaps I dozed. I don't remember. Iremember only sitting, as it seemed, nigh interminably, beside him, tooweary even to think in that sandy desolation.

  No one came near us; no creature, not even a dog. I roused myself atlast, feeling that it was vain to seek to seem other than abnormal,and with an effort that was like lifting a sky of lead, we made our waythrough the wearisome sand to a farmhouse. There I feigned even a moreinsufficient French than I possess naturally, and let it appear that wewere pedestrians from Biarritz who had lost our way along the shore andgot benighted.

  This explained us pretty well, I thought, and we got most hearteningcoffee and a cart to a little roadside station. My uncle grew moreand more manifestly ill with every stage of our journey. I got him toBayonne, where he refused at first to eat, and was afterwards very sick,and then took him shivering and collapsed up a little branch line to afrontier place called Luzon Gare.

  We found one homely inn with two small bedrooms, kept by a kindly Basquewoman. I got him to bed, and that night shared his room, and after anhour or so of sleep he woke up in a raging fever and with a wanderingmind, cursing Neal and repeating long, inaccurate lists of figures. Hewas manifestly a case for a doctor, and in the morning we got one in.He was a young man from Montpelier, just beginning to practise, and verymysterious and technical and modern and unhelpful. He spoke of coldand exposure, and la grippe and pneumonia. He gave many explicit anddifficult directions.... I perceived it devolved upon me to organisenursing and a sick-room. I installed a religieuse in the second bedroomof the inn, and took a room for myself in the inn of Port de Luzon, aquarter of a mile away.

  VII

  And now my story converges on what, in that queer corner of refugeout of the world, was destined to be my uncle's deathbed. There is abackground of the Pyrenees, of blue hills and sunlit houses, of the oldcastle of Luzon and a noisy cascading river, and for a foreground thedim, stuffy room whose windows both the religieuse and hostessconspired to shut, with its waxed floor, its four-poster bed, itscharacteristically French chairs and fireplace, its champagne bottlesand dirty basins and used towels and packets of Somatose on the table.And in the sickly air of the confined space in behind the curtainsof the bed lay my little uncle, with an effect of being enthroned andsecluded, or sat up, or writhed and tossed in his last dealings of life.One went and drew back the edge of the curtains if one wanted to speakto him or look at him.

  Usually he was propped up against pillows, because so he breathed moreeasily. He slept hardly at all.

  I have a confused memory of vigils and mornings and afternoons spent bythat bedside, and how the religieuse hovered about me, and how meek andgood and inefficient she was, and how horribly black were her nails.Other figures come and go, and particularly the doctor, a young manplumply rococo, in bicycling dress, with fine waxen features, a littlepointed beard, and the long black frizzy hair and huge tie of a minorpoet. Bright and clear-cut and irrelevant are memories of the Basquehostess of my uncle's inn and of the family of Spanish people whoentertained me and prepared the most amazingly elaborate meals for me,with soup and salad and chicken and remarkable sweets. They were allvery kind and sympathetic people, systematically so. And constantly,without attracting attention, I was trying to get newspapers from home.

  My uncle is central to all these impressions.

  I have tried to make you picture him, time after time, as the young manof the Wimblehurst chemist's shop, as the shabby assistant in TottenhamCourt Road, as the adventurer of the early days of Tono-Bungay, asthe confident, preposterous plutocrat. And now I have to tell of himstrangely changed under the shadow of oncoming death, with his skin laxand yellow and glistening with sweat, his eyes large and glassy, hiscountenance unfamiliar through the growth of a beard, his nose pinchedand thin. Never had he looked so small as now. And he talked to me ina whispering, strained voice of great issues, of why his life had been,and whither he was going. Poor little man! that last phase is, as itwere, disconnected from all the other phases. It was as if he crawledout from the ruins of his career, and looked about him before he died.For he had quite clear-minded states in the intervals of his delirium.

  He knew he was almost certainly dying. In a way that took the burthen ofhis cares off his mind. There was no more Neal to face, no more flightsor evasions, no punishments.

  "It has been a great career, George," he said, "but I shall be glad torest. Glad to rest!... Glad to rest."

  His mind ran rather upon his career, and usually, I am glad to recall,with a note of satisfaction and approval. In his delirious phases hewould most often exaggerate this self-satisfaction, and talk of hissplendours. He would pluck at the sheet and stare before him, andwhisper half-audible fragments of sentences.

  "What is this great place, these cloud-capped towers, these anypinnacles?... Ilion. Sky-pointing.... Ilion House, the residence of oneof our great merchant princes.... Terrace above terrace. Reaching to theheavens.... Kingdoms Caesar never knew.... A great poet, George. Zzzz.Kingdoms Caesar never knew.... Under entirely new management.

  "Greatness....Millions... Universities.... He stands on the terrace--onthe upper terrace--directing--directing--by the globe--directing--thetrade."

  It was hard at times to tell when his sane talk ceased and his deliriumbegan. The secret springs of his life, the vain imaginations wererevealed. I sometimes think that all the life of man sprawls abed,careless and unkempt, until it must needs clothe and wash itselfand come forth seemly in act and speech for the encounter with one'sfellow-men. I suspect that all things unspoken in our souls partakesomewhat of the laxity of delirium and dementia. Certainly from thoseslimy, tormented lips above the bristling grey beard came nothing butdreams and disconnected fancies....

  Sometimes he raved about Neal, threatened Neal. "What has he gotinvested?" he said. "Does he think he can escape me?... If I followedhim up.... Ruin. Ruin.... One would think _I_ had taken his money."

  And sometimes he reverted to our airship flight. "It's too long, George,too long and too cold. I'm too old a man--too old--for this sort ofthing.... You know you're not saving--you're killing me."

  Towards the end it became evident our identity was discovered. I foundthe press, and especially Boom's section of it, had made a sort of hueand cry for us, sent special commissioners to hunt for us, and thoughnone of these emissaries reached us until my uncle was dead, one feltthe forewash of that storm of energy. The thing got into the popularFrench press. People became curious in their manner towards us, and anumber of fresh faces appeared about the weak little struggle that wenton in the closeness behind the curtains of the bed. The young doctorinsisted on consultations, and a motor-car came up from Biarritz,and suddenly odd people with questioning eyes began to poke in withinquiries and help. Though nothing was said, I could feel that we wereno longer regarded as simple middle-class tourists; about me, as I went,I perceived almost as though it trailed visibly, the prestige of Financeand a criminal notoriety. Local personages of a plump and prosperousquality appeared in the inn making inquiries, the Luzon priest becamehelpful, people watched our window, and stared at me as I went to andfro; and then we had a raid from a little English clergyman and hisamiable, capable wife in severely Anglican blacks, who swooped downupon us like virtuous but resolute vultures from the adjacent
village ofSaint Jean de Pollack.

  The clergyman was one of those odd types that oscillate between remotecountry towns in England and the conduct of English Church serviceson mutual terms in enterprising hotels abroad, a tremulous, obstinatelittle being with sporadic hairs upon his face, spectacles, a red buttonnose, and aged black raiment. He was evidently enormously impressed bymy uncle's monetary greatness, and by his own inkling of our identity,and he shone and brimmed over with tact and fussy helpfulness. Hewas eager to share the watching of the bedside with me, he profferedservices with both hands, and as I was now getting into touch withaffairs in London again, and trying to disentangle the gigantic detailsof the smash from the papers I had succeeded in getting from Biarritz,I accepted his offers pretty generously, and began the studies in modernfinance that lay before me. I had got so out of touch with the oldtraditions of religion that I overlooked the manifest possibility ofhis attacking my poor, sinking vestiges of an uncle with theologicalsolicitudes. My attention was called to that, however, very speedily bya polite but urgent quarrel between himself and the Basque landlady asto the necessity of her hanging a cheap crucifix in the shadow over thebed, where it might catch my uncle's eye, where, indeed, I found it hadcaught his eye.

  "Good Lord!" I cried; "is THAT still going on!"

  That night the little clergyman watched, and in the small hours heraised a false alarm that my uncle was dying, and made an extraordinaryfuss. He raised the house. I shall never forget that scene, I think,which began with a tapping at my bedroom door just after I had fallenasleep, and his voice--

  "If you want to see your uncle before he goes, you must come now."

  The stuffy little room was crowded when I reached it, and lit by threeflickering candles. I felt I was back in the eighteenth century. Therelay my poor uncle amidst indescribably tumbled bedclothes, weary of lifebeyond measure, weary and rambling, and the little clergyman trying tohold his hand and his attention, and repeating over and over again:

  "Mr. Ponderevo, Mr. Ponderevo, it is all right. It is all right.

  "Only Believe! 'Believe on me, and ye shall be saved'!"

  Close at hand was the doctor with one of those cruel and idioticinjection needles modern science puts in the hands of thesehalf-educated young men, keeping my uncle flickeringly alive for noreason whatever. The religieuse hovered sleepily in the background withan overdue and neglected dose. In addition, the landlady had not onlygot up herself, but roused an aged crone of a mother and a partiallyimbecile husband, and there was also a fattish, stolid man in greyalpaca, with an air of importance--who he was and how he got there, Idon't know. I rather fancy the doctor explained him to me in French Idid not understand. And they were all there, wearily nocturnal, hastilyand carelessly dressed, intent upon the life that flickered and sank,making a public and curious show of its going, queer shapes of humanbeings lit by three uncertain candles, and every soul of them keenly andavidly resolved to be in at the death. The doctor stood, the others wereall sitting on chairs the landlady had brought in and arranged for them.

  And my uncle spoilt the climax, and did not die.

  I replaced the little clergyman on the chair by the bedside, and hehovered about the room.

  "I think," he whispered to me mysteriously, as he gave place to me, "Ibelieve--it is well with him."

  I heard him trying to render the stock phrases of Low Church piety intoFrench for the benefit of the stolid man in grey alpaca. Then he knockeda glass off the table, and scrabbled for the fragments. From the firstI doubted the theory of an immediate death. I consulted the doctor inurgent whispers. I turned round to get champagne, and nearly fell overthe clergyman's legs. He was on his knees at the additional chair theBasque landlady had got on my arrival, and he was praying aloud, "Oh,Heavenly Father, have mercy on this thy Child...." I hustled him upand out of the way, and in another minute he was down at another chairpraying again, and barring the path of the religieuse, who had found methe corkscrew. Something put into my head that tremendous blasphemy ofCarlyle's about "the last mew of a drowning kitten." He found a thirdchair vacant presently; it was as if he was playing a game.

  "Good Heavens!" I said, "we must clear these people out," and with acertain urgency I did.

  I had a temporary lapse of memory, and forgot all my French. I drovethem out mainly by gesture, and opened the window, to the universalhorror. I intimated the death scene was postponed, and, as a matter offact, my uncle did not die until the next night.

  I did not let the little clergyman come near him again, and I waswatchful for any sign that his mind had been troubled. But he made none.He talked once about "that parson chap."

  "Didn't bother you?" I asked.

  "Wanted something," he said.

  I kept silence, listening keenly to his mutterings. I understood him tosay, "They wanted too much." His face puckered like a child's going tocry. "You can't get a safe six per cent.," he said. I had for a momenta wild suspicion that those urgent talks had not been altogetherspiritual, but that, I think, was a quite unworthy and unjust suspicion.The little clergyman was as simple and honest as the day. My uncle wassimply generalising about his class.

  But it may have been these talks that set loose some long dormant stringof ideas in my uncle's brain, ideas the things of this world had longsuppressed and hidden altogether. Near the end he suddenly becameclearminded and lucid, albeit very weak, and his voice was little, butclear.

  "George," he said.

  "I'm here," I said, "close beside you."

  "George. You have always been responsible for the science. George. Youknow better than I do. Is--Is it proved?"

  "What proved?"

  "Either way?"

  "I don't understand."

  "Death ends all. After so much--Such splendid beginnin's. Somewhere.Something."

  I stared at him amazed. His sunken eyes were very grave.

  "What do you expect?" I said in wonder.

  He would not answer. "Aspirations," he whispered. He fell into a brokenmonologue, regardless of me. "Trailing clouds of glory," he said, and"first-rate poet, first-rate....George was always hard. Always."

  For a long time there was silence.

  Then he made a gesture that he wished to speak.

  "Seems to me, George"

  I bent my head down, and he tried to lift his hand to my shoulder. Iraised him a little on his pillows, and listened.

  "It seems to me, George, always--there must be something in me--thatwon't die."

  He looked at me as though the decision rested with me.

  "I think," he said; "--something."

  Then, for a moment, his mind wandered. "Just a little link," hewhispered almost pleadingly, and lay quite still, but presently he wasuneasy again.

  "Some other world"

  "Perhaps," I said. "Who knows?"

  "Some other world."

  "Not the same scope for enterprise," I said.

  "No."

  He became silent. I sat leaning down to him, and following out my ownthoughts, and presently the religieuse resumed her periodic conflictwith the window fastening. For a time he struggled for breath.... Itseemed such nonsense that he should have to suffer so--poor silly littleman!

  "George," he whispered, and his weak little hand came out. "PERHAPS--"

  He said no more, but I perceived from the expression of his eyes that hethought the question had been put.

  "Yes, I think so;" I said stoutly.

  "Aren't you sure?"

  "Oh--practically sure," said I, and I think he tried to squeeze my hand.And there I sat, holding his hand tight, and trying to think what seedsof immortality could be found in all his being, what sort of ghost therewas in him to wander out into the bleak immensities. Queer fancies cameto me.... He lay still for a long time, save for a brief struggle or sofor breath and ever and again I wiped his mouth and lips.

  I fell into a pit of thought. I did not remark at first the change thatwas creeping over his face. He lay back on his pillow, made afaint zzzi
ng sound that ceased, and presently and quite quietly hedied--greatly comforted by my assurance. I do not know when he died. Hishand relaxed insensibly. Suddenly, with a start, with a shock, I foundthat his mouth had fallen open, and that he was dead....

  VIII

  It was dark night when I left his deathbed and went back to my own inndown the straggling street of Luzon.

  That return to my inn sticks in my memory also as a thing apart, as anexperience apart. Within was a subdued bustle of women, a flitting oflights, and the doing of petty offices to that queer, exhausted thingthat had once been my active and urgent little uncle. For me thoseoffices were irksome and impertinent. I slammed the door, and went outinto the warm, foggy drizzle of the village street lit by blurred specksof light in great voids of darkness, and never a soul abroad. That warmveil of fog produced an effect of vast seclusion. The very houses by theroadside peered through it as if from another world. The stillness ofthe night was marked by an occasional remote baying of dogs; all thesepeople kept dogs because of the near neighbourhood of the frontier.

  Death!

  It was one of those rare seasons of relief, when for a little time onewalks a little outside of and beside life. I felt as I sometimes feelafter the end of a play. I saw the whole business of my uncle's life assomething familiar and completed. It was done, like a play one leaves,like a book one closes. I thought of the push and the promotions, thenoise of London, the crowded, various company of people through whichour lives had gone, the public meetings, the excitements, the dinnersand disputations, and suddenly it appeared to me that none of thesethings existed.

  It came to me like a discovery that none of these things existed.

  Before and after I have thought and called life a phantasmagoria, butnever have I felt its truth as I did that night.... We had parted; wetwo who had kept company so long had parted. But there was, I knew, noend to him or me. He had died a dream death, and ended a dream; his paindream was over. It seemed to me almost as though I had died, too. Whatdid it matter, since it was unreality, all of it, the pain and desire,the beginning and the end? There was no reality except this solitaryroad, this quite solitary road, along which one went rather puzzled,rather tired....

  Part of the fog became a big mastiff that came towards me and stoppedand slunk round me, growling, barked gruffly, and shortly and presentlybecame fog again.

  My mind swayed back to the ancient beliefs and fears of our race.

  My doubts and disbeliefs slipped from me like a loosely fitting garment.I wondered quite simply what dogs bayed about the path of that otherwalker in the darkness, what shapes, what lights, it might be, loomedabout him as he went his way from our last encounter on earth--along thepaths that are real, and the way that endures for ever?

  IX

  Last belated figure in that grouping round my uncle's deathbed is myaunt. When it was beyond all hope that my uncle could live I threw asidewhatever concealment remained to us and telegraphed directly to her.But she came too late to see him living. She saw him calm and still,strangely unlike his habitual garrulous animation, an unfamiliarinflexibility.

  "It isn't like him," she whispered, awed by this alien dignity.

  I remember her chiefly as she talked and wept upon the bridge below theold castle. We had got rid of some amateurish reporters from Biarritz,and had walked together in the hot morning sunshine down through PortLuzon. There, for a time, we stood leaning on the parapet of the bridgeand surveying the distant peeks, the rich blue masses of the Pyrenees.For a long time we said nothing, and then she began talking.

  "Life's a rum Go, George!" she began. "Who would have thought, when Iused to darn your stockings at old Wimblehurst, that this would be theend of the story? It seems far away now--that little shop, his and myfirst home. The glow of the bottles, the big coloured bottles! Do youremember how the light shone on the mahogany drawers? The littlegilt letters! Ol Amjig, and Snap! I can remember it all--bright andshining--like a Dutch picture. Real! And yesterday. And here we are ina dream. You a man--and me an old woman, George. And poor little Teddy,who used to rush about and talk--making that noise he did--Oh!"

  She choked, and the tears flowed unrestrained. She wept, and I was gladto see her weeping.

  She stood leaning over the bridge; her tear-wet handkerchief gripped inher clenched hand.

  "Just an hour in the old shop again--and him talking. Before things gotdone. Before they got hold of him. And fooled him.

  "Men oughtn't to be so tempted with business and things....

  "They didn't hurt him, George?" she asked suddenly.

  For a moment I was puzzled.

  "Here, I mean," she said.

  "No," I lied stoutly, suppressing the memory of that foolish injectionneedle I had caught the young doctor using.

  "I wonder, George, if they'll let him talk in Heaven...."

  She faced me. "Oh! George, dear, my heart aches, and I don't know whatI say and do. Give me your arm to lean on--it's good to have you,dear, and lean upon you.... Yes, I know you care for me. That's why I'mtalking. We've always loved one another, and never said anything aboutit, and you understand, and I understand. But my heart's torn to piecesby this, torn to rags, and things drop out I've kept in it. It's true hewasn't a husband much for me at the last. But he was my child, George,he was my child and all my children, my silly child, and life hasknocked him about for me, and I've never had a say in the matter; nevera say; it's puffed him up and smashed him--like an old bag--under myeyes. I was clever enough to see it, and not clever enough to preventit, and all I could do was to jeer. I've had to make what I could ofit. Like most people. Like most of us.... But it wasn't fair, George.It wasn't fair. Life and Death--great serious things--why couldn't theyleave him alone, and his lies and ways? If WE could see the lightness ofit--

  "Why couldn't they leave him alone?" she repeated in a whisper as wewent towards the inn.

  CHAPTER THE SECOND

  LOVE AMONG THE WRECKAGE

  I

  When I came back I found that my share in the escape and death of myuncle had made me for a time a notorious and even popular character.For two weeks I was kept in London "facing the music," as he would havesaid, and making things easy for my aunt, and I still marvel at theconsideration with which the world treated me. For now it was open andmanifest that I and my uncle were no more than specimens of a modernspecies of brigand, wasting the savings of the public out of the sheerwantonness of enterprise. I think that in a way, his death produceda reaction in my favour and my flight, of which some particulars nowappeared stuck in the popular imagination. It seemed a more daring anddifficult feat than it was, and I couldn't very well write to the papersto sustain my private estimate. There can be little doubt that meninfinitely prefer the appearance of dash and enterprise to simplehonesty. No one believed I was not an arch plotter in his financing. Yetthey favoured me. I even got permission from the trustee to occupymy chalet for a fortnight while I cleared up the mass of papers,calculations, notes of work, drawings and the like, that I left indisorder when I started on that impulsive raid upon the Mordet quapheaps.

  I was there alone. I got work for Cothope with the Ilchesters, for whomI now build these destroyers. They wanted him at once, and he was shortof money, so I let him go and managed very philosophically by myself.

  But I found it hard to fix my attention on aeronautics, I had been awayfrom the work for a full half-year and more, a half-year crowded withintense disconcerting things. For a time my brain refused these fineproblems of balance and adjustment altogether; it wanted to think aboutmy uncle's dropping jaw, my aunt's reluctant tears, about dead negroesand pestilential swamps, about the evident realities of cruelty andpain, about life and death. Moreover, it was weary with the frightfulpile of figures and documents at the Hardingham, a task to which thisraid to Lady Grove was simply an interlude. And there was Beatrice.

  On the second morning, as I sat out upon the veranda recalling memoriesand striving in vain to attend to some too succinct penc
il notes ofCothope's, Beatrice rode up suddenly from behind the pavilion, andpulled rein and became still; Beatrice, a little flushed from riding andsitting on a big black horse.

  I did not instantly rise. I stared at her. "YOU!" I said.

  She looked at me steadily. "Me," she said

  I did not trouble about any civilities. I stood up and asked point blanka question that came into my head.

  "Whose horse is that?" I said.

  She looked me in the eyes. "Carnaby's," she answered.

  "How did you get here--this way?"

  "The wall's down."

  "Down? Already?"

  "A great bit of it between the plantations."

  "And you rode through, and got here by chance?"

  "I saw you yesterday. And I rode over to see you." I had now come closeto her, and stood looking up into her face.

  "I'm a mere vestige," I said.

  She made no answer, but remained regarding me steadfastly with a curiousair of proprietorship.

  "You know I'm the living survivor now of the great smash. I'm rollingand dropping down through all the scaffolding of the social system....It's all a chance whether I roll out free at the bottom, or go down acrack into the darkness out of sight for a year or two."

  "The sun," she remarked irrelevantly, "has burnt you.... I'm gettingdown."

  She swung herself down into my arms, and stood beside me face to face.

  "Where's Cothope?" she asked.

  "Gone."

  Her eyes flitted to the pavilion and back to me. We stood closetogether, extraordinarily intimate, and extraordinarily apart.

  "I've never seen this cottage of yours," she said, "and I want to."

  She flung the bridle of her horse round the veranda post, and I helpedher tie it.

  "Did you get what you went for to Africa?" she asked.

  "No," I said, "I lost my ship."

  "And that lost everything?"

  "Everything."

  She walked before me into the living-room of the chalet, and I saw thatshe gripped her riding-whip very tightly in her hand. She looked abouther for a moment,--and then at me.

  "It's comfortable," she remarked.

  Our eyes met in a conversation very different from the one upon ourlips. A sombre glow surrounded us, drew us together; an unwonted shynesskept us apart. She roused herself, after an instant's pause, to examinemy furniture.

  "You have chintz curtains. I thought men were too feckless to havecurtains without a woman. But, of course, your aunt did that! And acouch and a brass fender, and--is that a pianola? That is your desk.I thought men's desks were always untidy, and covered with dust andtobacco ash."

  She flitted to my colour prints and my little case of books. Then shewent to the pianola. I watched her intently.

  "Does this thing play?" she said.

  "What?" I asked.

  "Does this thing play?"

  I roused myself from my preoccupation.

  "Like a musical gorilla with fingers all of one length. And a sort ofsoul.... It's all the world of music to me."

  "What do you play?"

  "Beethoven, when I want to clear up my head while I'm working. Heis--how one would always like to work. Sometimes Chopin and thoseothers, but Beethoven. Beethoven mainly. Yes."

  Silence again between us. She spoke with an effort.

  "Play me something." She turned from me and explored the rack ofmusic rolls, became interested and took a piece, the first part of theKreutzer Sonata, hesitated. "No," she said, "that!"

  She gave me Brahms' Second Concerto, Op. 58, and curled up on the sofawatching me as I set myself slowly to play....

  "I say," he said when I had done, "that's fine. I didn't know thosethings could play like that. I'm all astir..."

  She came and stood over me, looking at me. "I'm going to have aconcert," she said abruptly, and laughed uneasily and hovered at thepigeon-holes. "Now--now what shall I have?" She chose more of Brahms.Then we came to the Kreutzer Sonata. It is queer how Tolstoy has loadedthat with suggestions, debauched it, made it a scandalous and intimatesymbol. When I had played the first part of that, she came up to thepianola and hesitated over me. I sat stiffly--waiting.

  Suddenly she seized my downcast head and kissed my hair. She caught atmy face between her hands and kissed my lips. I put my arms about herand we kissed together. I sprang to my feet and clasped her.

  "Beatrice!" I said. "Beatrice!"

  "My dear," she whispered, nearly breathless, with her arms about me."Oh! my dear!"

  II

  Love, like everything else in this immense process of socialdisorganisation in which we live, is a thing adrift, a fruitless thingbroken away from its connexions. I tell of this love affair here becauseof its irrelevance, because it is so remarkable that it should meannothing, and be nothing except itself. It glows in my memory like somebright casual flower starting up amidst the debris of a catastrophe.For nearly a fortnight we two met and made love together. Once more thismighty passion, that our aimless civilisation has fettered and maimedand sterilised and debased, gripped me and filled me with passionatedelights and solemn joys--that were all, you know, futile andpurposeless. Once more I had the persuasion "This matters. Nothingelse matters so much as this." We were both infinitely grave in suchhappiness as we had. I do not remember any laughter at all between us.

  Twelve days it lasted from that encounter in my chalet until ourparting.

  Except at the end, they were days of supreme summer, and there was awaxing moon. We met recklessly day by day. We were so intent upon eachother at first so intent upon expressing ourselves to each other, andgetting at each other, that we troubled very little about the appearanceof our relationship. We met almost openly.... We talked of ten thousandthings, and of ourselves. We loved. We made love. There is no proseof mine that can tell of hours transfigured. The facts are nothing.Everything we touched, the meanest things, became glorious. How can Irender bare tenderness and delight and mutual possession? I sit here atmy desk thinking of untellable things.

  I have come to know so much of love that I know now what love might be.We loved, scarred and stained; we parted--basely and inevitably, but atleast I met love.

  I remember as we sat in a Canadian canoe, in a reedy, bush-maskedshallow we had discovered operating out of that pine-shaded Wokingcanal, how she fell talking of the things that happened to her beforeshe met me again....

  She told me things, and they so joined and welded together other thingsthat lay disconnected in my memory, that it seemed to me I had alwaysknown what she told me. And yet indeed I had not known nor suspected it,save perhaps for a luminous, transitory suspicion ever and again.

  She made me see how life had shaped her. She told me of her girlhoodafter I had known her. "We were poor and pretending and managing. Wehacked about on visits and things. I ought to have married. The chancesI had weren't particularly good chances. I didn't like 'em."

  She paused. "Then Carnaby came along."

  I remained quite still. She spoke now with downcast eyes, and one fingerjust touching the water.

  "One gets bored, bored beyond redemption. One does about to these hugeexpensive houses I suppose--the scale's immense. One makes one'sself useful to the other women, and agreeable to the men. One has todress.... One has food and exercise and leisure, It's the leisure, andthe space, and the blank opportunity it seems a sin not to fill. Carnabyisn't like the other men. He's bigger.... They go about making love.Everybody's making love. I did.... And I don't do things by halves."

  She stopped.

  "You knew?"--she asked, looking up, quite steadily. I nodded.

  "Since when?"

  "Those last days.... It hasn't seemed to matter really. I was a littlesurprised."

  She looked at me quietly. "Cothope knew," she said. "By instinct. Icould feel it."

  "I suppose," I began, "once, this would have mattered immensely. Now--"

  "Nothing matters," she said, completing me. "I felt I had to tell you. Iwanted you
to understand why I didn't marry you--with both hands. I haveloved you"--she paused--"have loved you ever since the day I kissed youin the bracken. Only--I forgot."

  And suddenly she dropped her face upon her hands, and sobbedpassionately--

  "I forgot--I forgot," she cried, and became still....

  I dabbled my paddle in the water. "Look here!" I said; "forget again!Here am I--a ruined man. Marry me."

  She shook her head without looking up.

  We were still for a long time. "Marry me!" I whispered.

  She looked up, twined back a whisp of hair, and answereddispassionately--

  "I wish I could. Anyhow, we have had this time. It has been a finetime--has it been--for you also? I haven't nudged you all I had to give.It's a poor gift--except for what it means and might have been. But weare near the end of it now."

  "Why?" I asked. "Marry me! Why should we two--"

  "You think," she said, "I could take courage and come to you and be youreveryday wife--while you work and are poor?"

  "Why not?" said I.

  She looked at me gravely, with extended finger. "Do you really thinkthat--of me? Haven't you seen me--all?"

  I hesitated.

  "Never once have I really meant marrying you," she insisted. "Neveronce. I fell in love with you from the first. But when you seemed asuccessful man, I told myself I wouldn't. I was love-sick for you,and you were so stupid, I came near it then. But I knew I wasn't goodenough. What could I have been to you? A woman with bad habits and badassociations, a woman smirched. And what could I do for you or be toyou? If I wasn't good enough to be a rich man's wife, I'm certainly notgood enough to be a poor one's. Forgive me for talking sense to you now,but I wanted to tell you this somehow."

  She stopped at my gesture. I sat up, and the canoe rocked with mymovement.

  "I don't care," I said. "I want to marry you and make you my wife!"

  "No," she said, "don't spoil things. That is impossible!"

  "Impossible!"

  "Think! I can't do my own hair! Do you mean you will get me a maid?"

  "Good God!" I cried, disconcerted beyond measure, "won't you learn to doyour own hair for me? Do you mean to say you can love a man--"

  She flung out her hands at me. "Don't spoil it," she cried. "I havegiven you all I have, I have given you all I can. If I could do it, ifI was good enough to do it, I would. But I am a woman spoilt andruined, dear, and you are a ruined man. When we are making love we'relovers--but think of the gulf between us in habits and ways of thought,in will and training, when we are not making love. Think of it--anddon't think of it! Don't think of it yet. We have snatched some hours.We still may have some hours!"

  She suddenly knelt forward toward me, with a glowing darkness in hereyes. "Who cares if it upsets?" she cried. "If you say another word Iwill kiss you. And go to the bottom clutching you.

  "I'm not afraid of that. I'm not a bit afraid of that. I'll die with you.Choose a death, and I'll die with you--readily. Do listen to me! I loveyou. I shall always love you. It's because I love you that I won't godown to become a dirty familiar thing with you amidst the grime. I'vegiven all I can. I've had all I can.... Tell me," and she crept nearer,"have I been like the dusk to you, like the warm dusk? Is there magicstill? Listen to the ripple of water from your paddle. Look at the warmevening light in the sky. Who cares if the canoe upsets? Come nearer tome. Oh, my love! come near! So."

  She drew me to her and our lips met.

  III

  I asked her to marry me once again.

  It was our last morning together, and we had met very early, aboutsunrise, knowing that we were to part. No sun shone that day. The skywas overcast, the morning chilly and lit by a clear, cold, spiritlesslight. A heavy dampness in the air verged close on rain. When I think ofthat morning, it has always the quality of greying ashes wet with rain.

  Beatrice too had changed. The spring had gone out of her movement; itcame to me, for the first time, that some day she might grow old. Shehad become one flesh with the rest of common humanity; the softnesshad gone from her voice and manner, the dusky magic of her presence hadgone. I saw these things with perfect clearness, and they made me sorryfor them and for her. But they altered my love not a whit, abated itnothing. And when we had talked awkwardly for half a dozen sentences, Icame dully to my point.

  "And now," I cried, "will you marry me?"

  "No," she said, "I shall keep to my life here."

  I asked her to marry me in a year's time. She shook her head.

  "This world is a soft world," I said, "in spite of my present disasters.I know now how to do things. If I had you to work for--in a year I couldbe a prosperous man."

  "No," she said, "I will put it brutally, I shall go back to Carnaby."

  "But--!" I did not feel angry. I had no sort of jealousy, no woundedpride, no sense of injury. I had only a sense of grey desolation, ofhopeless cross-purposes.

  "Look here," she said. "I have been awake all night and every night. Ihave been thinking of this--every moment when we have not been together.I'm not answering you on an impulse. I love you. I love you. I'll saythat over ten thousand times. But here we are--"

  "The rest of life together," I said.

  "It wouldn't be together. Now we are together. Now we have beentogether. We are full of memories I do not feel I can ever forget asingle one."

  "Nor I."

  "And I want to close it and leave it at that. You see, dear, what elseis there to do?"

  She turned her white face to me. "All I know of love, all I have everdreamt or learnt of love I have packed into these days for you. Youthink we might live together and go on loving. No! For you I will haveno vain repetitions. You have had the best and all of me. Would you haveus, after this, meet again in London or Paris or somewhere, scuffle tosome wretched dressmaker's, meet in a cabinet particulier?"

  "No," I said. "I want you to marry me. I want you to play the game oflife with me as an honest woman should. Come and live with me. Be mywife and squaw. Bear me children."

  I looked at her white, drawn face, and it seemed to me I might carry heryet. I spluttered for words.

  "My God! Beatrice!" I cried; "but this is cowardice and folly! Are youafraid of life? You of all people! What does it matter what has been orwhat we were? Here we are with the world before us! Start clean and newwith me. We'll fight it through! I'm not such a simple lover that I'llnot tell you plainly when you go wrong, and fight our difference outwith you. It's the one thing I want, the one thing I need--to have you,and more of you and more! This love-making--it's love-making. It's justa part of us, an incident--"

  She shook her head and stopped me abruptly. "It's all," she said.

  "All!" I protested.

  "I'm wiser than you. Wiser beyond words." She turned her eyes to me andthey shone with tears.

  "I wouldn't have you say anything--but what you're saying," she said."But it's nonsense, dear. You know it's nonsense as you say it."

  I tried to keep up the heroic note, but she would not listen to it.

  "It's no good," she cried almost petulantly. "This little world has madeus what we are. Don't you see--don't you see what I am? I can make love.I can make love and be loved, prettily. Dear, don't blame me. I havegiven you all I have. If I had anything more--I have gone through itall over and over again--thought it out. This morning my head aches, myeyes ache.

  "The light has gone out of me and I am a sick and tired woman. But I'mtalking wisdom--bitter wisdom. I couldn't be any sort of helper to you,any sort of wife, any sort of mother. I'm spoilt.

  "I'm spoilt by this rich idle way of living, until every habit is wrong,every taste wrong. The world is wrong. People can be ruined by wealthjust as much as by poverty. Do you think I wouldn't face life with youif I could, if I wasn't absolutely certain I should be down and draggingin the first half-mile of the journey? Here I am--damned! Damned! ButI won't damn you. You know what I am! You know. You are too clear andsimple not to know the truth. You try to romance and hector
, but youknow the truth. I am a little cad--sold and done. I'm--. My dear, youthink I've been misbehaving, but all these days I've been on my bestbehaviour.... You don't understand, because you're a man.

  "A woman, when she's spoilt, is SPOILT. She's dirty in grain. She'sdone."

  She walked on weeping.

  "You're a fool to want me," she said. "You're a fool to want me--formy sake just as much as yours. We've done all we can. It's justromancing--"

  She dashed the tears from her eyes and turned upon me. "Don't youunderstand?" she challenged. "Don't you know?"

  We faced one another in silence for a moment.

  "Yes," I said, "I know."

  For a long time we spoke never a word, but walked on together, slowlyand sorrowfully, reluctant to turn about towards our parting. When atlast we did, she broke silence again.

  "I've had you," she said.

  "Heaven and hell," I said, "can't alter that."

  "I've wanted--" she went on. "I've talked to you in the nights and madeup speeches. Now when I want to make them I'm tongue-tied. But to meit's just as if the moments we have had lasted for ever. Moods andstates come and go. To-day my light is out..."

  To this day I cannot determine whether she said or whether I imaginedshe said "chloral." Perhaps a half-conscious diagnosis flashed it onmy brain. Perhaps I am the victim of some perverse imaginative freakof memory, some hinted possibility that scratched and seared. There theword stands in my memory, as if it were written in fire.

  We came to the door of Lady Osprey's garden at last, and it wasbeginning to drizzle.

  She held out her hands and I took them.

  "Yours," she said, in a weary unimpassioned voice; "all that I had--suchas it was. Will you forget?"

  "Never," I answered.

  "Never a touch or a word of it?"

  "No."

  "You will," she said.

  We looked at one another in silence, and her face full of fatigue andmisery.

  What could I do? What was there to do?

  "I wish--" I said, and stopped.

  "Good-bye."

  IV

  That should have been the last I saw of her, but, indeed, I was destinedto see her once again. Two days after I was at Lady Grove, I forgetaltogether upon what errand, and as I walked back to the stationbelieving her to be gone away she came upon me, and she was riding withCarnaby, just as I had seen them first. The encounter jumped upon usunprepared. She rode by, her eyes dark in her white face, and scarcelynoticed me. She winced and grew stiff at the sight of me and bowed herhead. But Carnaby, because he thought I was a broken and discomfitedman, saluted me with an easy friendliness, and shouted some genialcommonplace to me.

  They passed out of sight and left me by the roadside....

  And then, indeed, I tasted the ultimate bitterness of life. For thefirst time I felt utter futility, and was wrung by emotion that begot noaction, by shame and pity beyond words. I had parted from her dully andI had seen my uncle break and die with dry eyes and a steady mind, butthis chance sight of my lost Beatrice brought me to tears. My face waswrung, and tears came pouring down my cheeks. All the magic she had forme had changed to wild sorrow. "Oh God!" I cried, "this is too much,"and turned my face after her and made appealing gestures to the beechtrees and cursed at fate. I wanted to do preposterous things, to pursueher, to save her, to turn life back so that she might begin again.I wonder what would have happened had I overtaken them in pursuit,breathless with running, uttering incoherent words, weeping,expostulatory. I came near to doing that.

  There was nothing in earth or heaven to respect my curses or weeping. Inthe midst of it a man who had been trimming the opposite hedge appearedand stared at me.

  Abruptly, ridiculously, I dissembled before him and went on and caughtmy train....

  But the pain I felt then I have felt a hundred times; it is with me asI write. It haunts this book, I see, that is what haunts this book, fromend to end.

  CHAPTER THE THIRD

  NIGHT AND THE OPEN SEA

  I

  I have tried throughout all this story to tell things as they happenedto me. In the beginning--the sheets are still here on the table, grimyand dogs-eared and old-looking--I said I wanted to tell MYSELF and theworld in which I found myself, and I have done my best. But whether Ihave succeeded I cannot imagine. All this writing is grey now and deadand trite and unmeaning to me; some of it I know by heart. I am the lastperson to judge it.

  As I turn over the big pile of manuscript before me certain thingsbecome clearer to me, and particularly the immense inconsequences of myexperiences. It is, I see now that I have it all before me, a story ofactivity and urgency and sterility. I have called it Tono-Bungay, but Ihad far better have called it Waste. I have told of childless Marion, ofmy childless aunt, of Beatrice wasted and wasteful and futile. What hopeis there for a people whose women become fruitless? I think of all theenergy I have given to vain things. I think of my industrious schemingwith my uncle, of Crest Hill's vast cessation, of his resonant strenuouscareer. Ten thousand men have envied him and wished to live as he lived.It is all one spectacle of forces running to waste, of people who useand do not replace, the story of a country hectic with a wasting aimlessfever of trade and money-making and pleasure-seeking. And now I builddestroyers!

  Other people may see this country in other terms; this is how I haveseen it. In some early chapter in this heap I compared all our presentcolour and abundance to October foliage before the frosts nip down theleaves. That I still feel was a good image. Perhaps I see wrongly. Itmay be I see decay all about me because I am, in a sense, decay. Toothers it may be a scene of achievement and construction radiant withhope. I, too, have a sort of hope, but it is a remote hope, a hope thatfinds no promise in this Empire or in any of the great things of ourtime.

  How they will look in history I do not know, how time and chance willprove them I cannot guess; that is how they have mirrored themselves onone contemporary mind.

  II

  Concurrently with writing the last chapter of this book I have been muchengaged by the affairs of a new destroyer we have completed. It has beenan oddly complementary alternation of occupations. Three weeks or so agothis novel had to be put aside in order that I might give all my timeday and night to the fitting and finishing of the engines. Last ThursdayX 2, for so we call her, was done and I took her down the Thames andwent out nearly to Texel for a trial of speed.

  It is curious how at times one's impressions will all fuse and runtogether into a sort of unity and become continuous with things thathave hitherto been utterly alien and remote. That rush down the riverbecame mysteriously connected with this book.

  As I passed down the Thames I seemed in a new and parallel manner to bepassing all England in review. I saw it then as I had wanted my readersto see it. The thought came to me slowly as I picked my way through thePool; it stood out clear as I went dreaming into the night out upon thewide North Sea.

  It wasn't so much thinking at the time as a sort of photographic thoughtthat came and grew clear. X2 went ripping through the dirty oily wateras scissors rip through canvas, and the front of my mind was all intentwith getting her through under the bridges and in and out among thesteam-boats and barges and rowing-boats and piers. I lived with myhands and eyes hard ahead. I thought nothing then of any appearances butobstacles, but for all that the back of my mind took the photographicmemory of it complete and vivid....

  "This," it came to me, "is England. That is what I wanted to give in mybook. This!"

  We started in the late afternoon. We throbbed out of our yard aboveHammersmith Bridge, fussed about for a moment, and headed down stream.We came at an easy rush down Craven Reach, past Fulham and Hurlingham,past the long stretches of muddy meadow And muddy suburb to Batterseaand Chelsea, round the cape of tidy frontage that is Grosvenor Road andunder Vauxhall Bridge, and Westminster opened before us. We cleareda string of coal barges and there on the left in the October sunshinestood the Parliament houses, and the flag was fly
ing and Parliament wassitting.

  I saw it at the time unseeingly; afterwards it came into my mind as thecentre of the whole broad panoramic effect of that afternoon. The stiffsquare lace of Victorian Gothic with its Dutch clock of a tower cameupon me suddenly and stared and whirled past in a slow half pirouetteand became still, I know, behind me as if watching me recede. "Aren'tyou going to respect me, then?" it seemed to say.

  Not I! There in that great pile of Victorian architecture the landlordsand the lawyers, the bishops, the railway men and the magnates ofcommerce go to and fro--in their incurable tradition of commercialisedBladesovery, of meretricious gentry and nobility sold for riches. I havebeen near enough to know. The Irish and the Labour-men run about amongtheir feet, making a fuss, effecting little, they've got no better plansthat I can see. Respect it indeed! There's a certain paraphernalia ofdignity, but whom does it deceive? The King comes down in a gilt coachto open the show and wears long robes and a crown; and there's a displayof stout and slender legs in white stockings and stout and slender legsin black stockings and artful old gentlemen in ermine. I was remindedof one congested afternoon I had spent with my aunt amidst a cluster ofagitated women's hats in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords andhow I saw the King going to open Parliament, and the Duke of Devonshirelooking like a gorgeous pedlar and terribly bored with the cap ofmaintenance on a tray before him hung by slings from his shoulder. Awonderful spectacle!

  It is quaint, no doubt, this England--it is even dignified inplaces--and full of mellow associations. That does not alter the qualityof the realities these robes conceal. The realities are greedy trade,base profit--seeking, bold advertisement; and kingship and chivalry,spite of this wearing of treasured robes, are as dead among it allas that crusader my uncle championed against the nettles outside theDuffield church.

  I have thought much of that bright afternoon's panorama.

  To run down the Thames so is to run one's hand over the pages in thebook of England from end to end. One begins in Craven Reach and it is asif one were in the heart of old England. Behind us are Kew and HamptonCourt with their memories of Kings and Cardinals, and one runs at firstbetween Fulham's episcopal garden parties and Hurlingham's playgroundfor the sporting instinct of our race. The whole effect is English.There is space, there are old trees and all the best qualities ofthe home-land in that upper reach. Putney, too, looks Anglican on adwindling scale. And then for a stretch the newer developments slopover, one misses Bladesover and there come first squalid stretches ofmean homes right and left and then the dingy industrialism of thesouth side, and on the north bank the polite long front of nice houses,artistic, literary, administrative people's residences, that stretchesfrom Cheyne Walk nearly to Westminster and hides a wilderness of slums.What a long slow crescendo that is, mile after mile, with the housescrowding closelier, the multiplying succession of church towers, thearchitectural moments, the successive bridges, until you come out intothe second movement of the piece with Lambeth's old palace under yourquarter and the houses of Parliament on your bow! Westminster Bridgeis ahead of you then, and through it you flash, and in a moment theround-faced clock tower cranes up to peer at you again and NewScotland Yard squares at you, a fat beef-eater of a policeman disguisedmiraculously as a Bastille.

  For a stretch you have the essential London; you have Charing Crossrailway station, heart of the world, and the Embankment on the northside with its new hotels overshadowing its Georgian and Victorianarchitecture, and mud and great warehouses and factories, chimneys, shottowers, advertisements on the south. The northward skyline grows moreintricate and pleasing, and more and more does one thank God for Wren.Somerset House is as picturesque as the civil war, one is reminded againof the original England, one feels in the fretted sky the quality ofRestoration Lace.

  And then comes Astor's strong box and the lawyers' Inns.

  (I had a passing memory of myself there, how once I had trudged alongthe Embankment westward, weighing my uncle's offer of three hundredpounds a year....)

  Through that central essential London reach I drove, and X2 boredher nose under the foam regardless of it all like a black hound goingthrough reeds--on what trail even I who made her cannot tell.

  And in this reach, too, one first meets the seagulls and is reminded ofthe sea. Blackfriars one takes--just under these two bridges and justbetween them is the finest bridge moment in the world--and behold,soaring up, hanging in the sky over a rude tumult of warehouses, over ajostling competition of traders, irrelevantly beautiful and altogetherremote, Saint Paul's! "Of course!" one says, "Saint Paul's!" It is thevery figure of whatever fineness the old Anglican culture achieved,detached, a more dignified and chastened Saint Peter's, colder, greyer,but still ornate; it has never been over thrown, never disavowed, onlythe tall warehouses and all the roar of traffic have forgotten it,every one has forgotten it; the steamships, the barges, go heedlessly byregardless of it, intricacies of telephone wires and poles cut blacklyinto its thin mysteries, and presently, when in a moment the trafficpermits you and you look round for it, it has dissolved like a cloudinto the grey blues of the London sky.

  And then the traditional and ostensible England falls from youaltogether. The third movement begins, the last great movement in theLondon symphony, in which the trim scheme of the old order is altogetherdwarfed and swallowed up. Comes London Bridge, and the great warehousestower up about you, waving stupendous cranes, the gulls circle andscream in your ears, large ships lie among their lighters, and one isin the port of the world. Again and again in this book I have writtenof England as a feudal scheme overtaken by fatty degeneration andstupendous accidents of hypertrophy.

  For the last time I must strike that note as the memory of the dearneat little sunlit ancient Tower of London lying away in a gap among thewarehouses comes back to me, that little accumulation of buildings soprovincially pleasant and dignified, overshadowed by the vulgarest,most typical exploit of modern England, the sham Gothic casings to theironwork of the Tower Bridge. That Tower Bridge is the very balance andconfirmation of Westminster's dull pinnacles and tower. That sham Gothicbridge; in the very gates of our mother of change, the Sea!

  But after that one is in a world of accident and nature. For the thirdpart of the panorama of London is beyond all law, order, and precedence;it is the seaport and the sea. One goes down the widening reachesthrough a monstrous variety of shipping, great steamers, greatsailing-ships, trailing the flags of all the world, a monstrousconfusion of lighters, witches' conferences of brown-sailed barges,wallowing tugs, a tumultuous crowding and jostling of cranes and spars,and wharves and stores, and assertive inscriptions. Huge vistas of dockopen right and left of one, and here and there beyond and amidst it allare church towers, little patches of indescribably old-fashioned andworn-out houses, riverside pubs and the like, vestiges of townships thatwere long since torn to fragments and submerged in these new growths.And amidst it all no plan appears, no intention, no comprehensivedesire. That is the very key of it all. Each day one feels that thepressure of commerce and traffic grew, grew insensibly monstrous, andfirst this man made a wharf and that erected a crane, and then thiscompany set to work and then that, and so they jostled together to makethis unassimilable enormity of traffic. Through it we dodged and droveeager for the high seas.

  I remember how I laughed aloud at the glimpse of the name of a LondonCounty Council steamboat that ran across me. Caxton it was called, andanother was Pepys, and another was Shakespeare. They seemed so wildlyout of place, splashing about in that confusion. One wanted to take themout and wipe them and put them back in some English gentleman's library.Everything was alive about them, flash ing, splashing, and passing,ships moving, tugs panting, hawsers taut, barges going down with mentoiling at the sweeps, the water all a-swirl with the wash of shipping,scaling into millions of little wavelets, curling and frothing under thewhip of the unceasing wind. Past it all we drove. And at Greenwich tothe south, you know, there stands a fine stone frontage where all thevictories are recorded
in a Painted Hall, and beside it is the "Ship"where once upon a time those gentlemen of Westminster used to havean annual dinner--before the port of London got too much for themaltogether. The old facade of the Hospital was just warming to thesunset as we went by, and after that, right and left, the river opened,the sense of the sea increased and prevailed, reach after reach fromNorthfleet to the Nore.

  And out you come at last with the sun behind you into the easternsea. You speed up and tear the oily water louder and faster, siroo,siroo-swish-siroo, and the hills of Kent--over which I once fled fromthe Christian teachings of Nicodemus Frapp--fall away on the right handand Essex on the left. They fall away and vanish into blue haze, andthe tall slow ships behind the tugs, scarce moving ships and wallowingsturdy tugs, are all wrought of wet gold as one goes frothing by. Theystand out, bound on strange missions of life and death, to the killingof men in unfamiliar lands. And now behind us is blue mystery and thephantom flash of unseen lights, and presently even these are gone, andI and my destroyer tear out to the unknown across a great grey space.We tear into the great spaces of the future and the turbines fall totalking in unfamiliar tongues. Out to the open we go, to windy freedomand trackless ways. Light after light goes down. England and theKingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions,glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass--pass. The riverpasses--London passes, England passes...

  III

  This is the note I have tried to emphasise, the note that sounds clearin my mind when I think of anything beyond the purely personal aspectsof my story.

  It is a note of crumbling and confusion, of change and seemingly aimlessswelling, of a bubbling up and medley of futile loves and sorrows.But through the confusion sounds another note. Through the confusionsomething drives, something that is at once human achievement and themost inhuman of all existing things. Something comes out of it....How can I express the values of a thing at once so essential and soimmaterial. It is something that calls upon such men as I with anirresistible appeal.

  I have figured it in my last section by the symbol of my destroyer,stark and swift, irrelevant to most human interests. Sometimes I callthis reality Science, sometimes I call it Truth. But it is something wedraw by pain and effort ont of the heart of life, that we disentangleand make clear. Other men serve it, I know, in art, in literature, insocial invention, and see it in a thousand different figures, under ahundred names. I see it always as austerity, as beauty. This thing wemake clear is the heart of life. It is the one enduring thing. Men andnations, epochs and civilisation pass each making its contribution I donot know what it is, this something, except that it is supreme. It is,a something, a quality, an element, one may find now in colours, now innorms, now in sounds, now in thoughts. It emerges from life with eachyear one lives and feels, and generation by generation and age by age,but the how and why of it are all beyond the compass of my mind....

  Yet the full sense of it was with me all that night as I drove, lonelyabove the rush and murmur of my engines, out upon the weltering circleof the sea.

  Far out to the northeast there came the flicker of a squadron ofwarships waving white swords of light about the sky. I kept themhull-down, and presently they were mere summer lightning over the wateryedge of the globe.... I fell into thought that was nearly formless, intodoubts and dreams that have no words, and it seemed good to me to driveahead and on and or through the windy starlight, over the long blackwaves.

  IV

  It was morning and day before I returned with the four sick and starvingjournalists who had got permission to come with me, up the shiningriver, and past the old grey Tower....

  I recall the back views of those journalists very distinctly, going witha certain damp weariness of movement, along a side street away from theriver. They were good men and bore me no malice, and they served me upto the public in turgid degenerate Kiplingese, as a modest button on thecomplacent stomach of the Empire. Though as a matter of fact, X2 isn'tintended for the empire, or indeed for the hands of any European power.We offered it to our own people first, but they would have nothing todo with me, and I have long since ceased to trouble much about suchquestions. I have come to see myself from the outside, my country fromthe outside--without illusions. We make and pass.

  We are all things that make and pass striving upon a hidden mission, outto the open sea.

 

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