Tono-Bungay

“They’ll have had the International Tea Company and all sorts of people cutting them up,” I said. “And that dog’s been on the pavement this six years – can’t sleep even there, poor dear, because of the motor-horns and its shattered nerves.”

“Movin’ everywhere,” said my uncle. “I expect you’re right… It’s a big time we’re in, George. It’s a big Progressive On-coming Imperial Time. This Palestine business – the daring of it… It’s, it’s a Process, George. And we got our hands on it. Here we sit – with our hands on it, George. Entrusted.

“It seems quiet to – night. But if we could see and hear.” He waved his cigar towards Leatherhead and London.

“There they are, millions, George. Jes’ think of what they’ve been up to to-day – those ten millions – each one doing his own particular job. You can’t grasp it. It’s like old Whitman says – what is it he says? Well, anyway it’s like old Whitman. Fine chap, Whitman! Fine old chap! Queer, you can’t quote him. … And these millions aren’t anything. There’s the millions over seas, hundreds of millions, Chinese, M’rocco, Africa generally, ‘Merica… Well, here we are, with power, with leisure, picked out – because we’ve been energetic, because we’ve seized opportunities, because we’ve made things hum when other people have waited for them to hum. See? Here we are – with our hands on it. Big people. Big growing people. In a sort of way, – Forces.”

He paused. “It’s wonderful, George,” he said.

“Anglo-Saxon energy,” I said softly to the night.

“That’s it, George – energy. It’s put things in our grip – threads, wires, stretching out and out, George, from that little office of ours, out to West Africa, out to Egypt, out to Inja, out east, west, north and south. Running the world practically. Running it faster and faster. Creative. There’s that Palestine canal affair. Marvellous idee! Suppose we take that up, suppose we let ourselves in for it, us and the others, and run that water sluice from the Mediterranean into the Dead Sea Valley – think of the difference it will make! All the desert blooming like a rose, Jericho lost for ever, all the Holy Places under water… Very likely destroy Christianity.”…

He mused for a space. “Cuttin’ canals,” murmured my uncle. “Making tunnels… New countries… New centres… Zzzz… Finance… Not only Palestine.

“I wonder where we shall get before we done, George? We got a lot of big things going. We got the investing public sound and sure. I don’t see why in the end we shouldn’t be very big. There’s difficulties but I’m equal to them. We’re still a bit soft in our bones, but they’ll harden all right… I suppose, after all, I’m worth something like a million, George, cleared up and settled. If I got out of things now. It’s a great time, George, a wonderful time!”…

I glanced through the twilight at his convexity and I must confess it struck me that on the whole he wasn’t particularly good value.

“We got our hands on things, George, us big people. We got to hang together, George run the show. Join up with the old order like that mill-wheel of Kipling’s. (Finest thing he ever wrote, George; I jes’ been reading it again. Made me buy Lady Grove.) Well, we got to run the country, George. It’s ours. Make it a Scientific Organised Business Enterprise. Put idees into it. ‘Lectrify it. Run the Press. Run all sorts of developments. All sorts of developments. I been talking to Lord Boom. I been talking to all sorts of people. Great things. Progress. The world on business lines. Only jes’ beginning.”…

He fell into a deep meditation.

He Zzzzed for a time and ceased.

“YES,” he said at last in the tone of a man who has at last emerged with ultimate solutions to the profoundest problems.

“What?” I said after a seemly pause.

My uncle hung fire for a moment and it seemed to me the fate of nations trembled in the balance. Then he spoke as one who speaks from the very bottom of his heart – and I think it was the very bottom of his heart.

“I’d jes’ like to drop into the Eastry Arms, jes’ when all those beggars in the parlour are sittin’ down to whist, Ruck and Marbel and all, and give ‘em ten minutes of my mind, George. Straight from the shoulder. Jes’ exactly what I think of them. It’s a little thing, but I’d like to do it jes’ once before I die.”…

He rested on that for some time Zzzz-ing.

Then he broke out at a new place in a tone of detached criticism.

“There’s Boom,” he reflected.

“It’s a wonderful system this old British system, George. It’s staid and stable and yet it has a place for new men. We come up and take our places. It’s almost expected. We take a hand. That’s where our Democracy differs from America. Over there a man succeeds; all he gets is money. Here there’s a system open to every one – practically… Chaps like Boom – come from nowhere.”

His voice ceased. I reflected upon the spirit of his words. Suddenly I kicked my feet in the air, rolled on my side and sat up suddenly on my deck chair with my legs down.

“You don’t mean it!” I said.

“Mean what, George?”

“Subscription to the party funds. Reciprocal advantage. Have we got to that?”

“Whad you driving at, George?”

“You know. They’d never do it, man!”

“Do what?” he said feebly; and, “Why shouldn’t they?”

“They’d not even go to a baronetcy. NO!.. And yet, of course, there’s Boom! And Collingshead and Gorver. They’ve done beer, they’ve done snippets! After all Tono-Bungay – it’s not like a turf commission agent or anything like that!.. There have of course been some very gentlemanly commission agents. It isn’t like a fool of a scientific man who can’t make money!”

My uncle grunted; we’d differed on that issue before.

A malignant humour took possession of me. “What would they call you?” I speculated. “The vicar would like Duffield. Too much like Duffer! Difficult thing, a title.” I ran my mind over various possibilities. “Why not take a leaf from a socialist tract I came upon yesterday. Chap says we’re all getting delocalised. Beautiful word – delocalised! Why not be the first delocalised peer? That gives you – Tono-Bungay! There is a Bungay, you know. Lord Tono of Bungay – in bottles everywhere. Eh?”

My uncle astonished me by losing his temper.

“Damn it. George, you don’t seem to see I’m serious! You’re always sneering at Tono-Bungay! As though it was some sort of swindle. It was perfec’ly legitimate trade, perfec’ly legitimate. Good value and a good article… When I come up here and tell you plans and exchange idees – you sneer at me. You do. You don’t see – it’s a big thing. It’s a big thing. You got to get used to new circumstances. You got to face what lies before us. You got to drop that tone.”

IX

My uncle was not altogether swallowed up in business and ambition. He kept in touch with modern thought. For example, he was, I know, greatly swayed by what he called “This Overman idee, Nietzsche – all that stuff.”

He mingled those comforting suggestions of a potent and exceptional human being emancipated from the pettier limitations of integrity with the Napoleonic legend. It gave his imagination a considerable outlet. That Napoleonic legend! The real mischief of Napoleon’s immensely disastrous and accidental career began only when he was dead and the romantic type of mind was free to elaborate his character. I do believe that my uncle would have made a far less egregious smash if there had been no Napoleonic legend to misguide him. He was in many ways better and infinitely kinder than his career. But when in doubt between decent conduct and a base advantage, that cult came in more and more influentially: “think of Napoleon; think what the inflexibly-wilful Napoleon would have done with such scruples as yours;” that was the rule, and the end was invariably a new step in dishonour.

My uncle was in an unsystematic way a collector of Napoleonic relics; the bigger the book about his hero the more readily he bought it; he purchased letters and tinsel and weapons that bore however remotely upon the Man of Destiny, and he even secured in Geneva, though he never brought home, an old coach in which Buonaparte might have ridden; he crowded the quiet walls of Lady Grove with engravings and figures of him, preferring, my aunt remarked, the more convex portraits with the white vest and those statuettes with the hands behind the back which threw forward the figure. The Durgans watched him through it all, sardonically.

And he would stand after breakfast at times in the light of the window at Lady Grove, a little apart, with two fingers of one hand stuck between his waistcoat-buttons and his chin sunken, thinking, – the most preposterous little fat man in the world. It made my aunt feel, she said, “like an old Field Marshal – knocks me into a cocked hat, George!”

Perhaps this Napoleonic bias made him a little less frequent with his cigars than he would otherwise have been, but of that I cannot be sure, and it certainly caused my aunt a considerable amount of vexation after he had read Napoleon and the Fair Sex, because for a time that roused him to a sense of a side of life he had in his commercial preoccupations very largely forgotten. Suggestion plays so great a part in this field. My uncle took the next opportunity and had an “affair”!

It was not a very impassioned affair, and the exact particulars never of course reached me. It is quite by chance I know anything of it at all. One evening I was surprised to come upon my uncle in a mixture of Bohemia and smart people at an At Home in the flat of Robbert, the R.A. who painted my aunt, and he was standing a little apart in a recess, talking or rather being talked to in undertones by a plump, blond little woman in pale blue, a Helen Scrymgeour who wrote novels and was organising a weekly magazine. I elbowed a large lady who was saying something about them, but I didn’t need to hear the thing she said to perceive the relationship of the two. It hit me like a placard on a hoarding. I was amazed the whole gathering did not see it. Perhaps they did. She was wearing a remarkably fine diamond necklace, much too fine for journalism, and regarding him with that quality of questionable proprietorship, of leashed but straining intimacy, that seems inseparable from this sort of affair. It is so much more palpable than matrimony. If anything was wanted to complete my conviction it was my uncles’s eyes when presently he became aware of mine, a certain embarrassment and a certain pride and defiance. And the next day he made an opportunity to praise the lady’s intelligence to me concisely, lest I should miss the point of it all.

After that I heard some gossip – from a friend of the lady’s. I was much too curious to do anything but listen. I had never in all my life imagined my uncle in an amorous attitude. It would appear that she called him her “God in the Car” – after the hero in a novel of Anthony Hope’s. It was essential to the convention of their relations that he should go relentlessly whenever business called, and it was generally arranged that it did call. To him women were an incident, it was understood between them; Ambition was the master-passion. A great world called him and the noble hunger for Power. I have never been able to discover just how honest Mrs. Scrymgeour was in all this, but it is quite possible the immense glamour of his financial largeness prevailed with her and that she did bring a really romantic feeling to their encounters. There must have been some extraordinary moments…

I was a good deal exercised and distressed about my aunt when I realised what was afoot. I thought it would prove a terrible humiliation to her. I suspected her of keeping up a brave front with the loss of my uncle’s affections fretting at her heart, but there I simply underestimated her. She didn’t hear for some time and when she did hear she was extremely angry and energetic. The sentimental situation didn’t trouble her for a moment. She decided that my uncle “wanted smacking.” She accentuated herself with an unexpected new hat, went and gave him an inconceivable talking-to at the Hardingham, and then came round to “blow-up” me for not telling her what was going on before…

I tried to bring her to a proper sense of the accepted values in this affair, but my aunt’s originality of outlook was never so invincible. “Men don’t tell on one another in affairs of passion,” I protested, and such-like worldly excuses.

“Women!” she said in high indignation, “and men! It isn’t women and men – it’s him and me, George! Why don’t you talk sense?

“Old passion’s all very well, George, in its way, and I’m the last person to be jealous. But this is old nonsense… I’m not going to let him show off what a silly old lobster he is to other women… I’ll mark every scrap of his underclothes with red letters, ‘Ponderevo-Private’ – every scrap.

“Going about making love indeed, – in abdominal belts! – at his time of life!”

I cannot imagine what passed between her and my uncle. But I have no doubt that for once her customary badinage was laid aside. How they talked then I do not know, for I who knew them so well had never heard that much of intimacy between them. At any rate it was a concerned and preoccupied “God in the Car” I had to deal with in the next few days, unusually Zzzz-y and given to slight impatient gestures that had nothing to do with the current conversation. And it was evident that in all directions he was finding things unusually difficult to explain.

All the intimate moments in this affair were hidden from me, but in the end my aunt triumphed. He did not so much throw as jerk over Mrs. Scrymgeour, and she did not so much make a novel of it as upset a huge pailful of attenuated and adulterated female soul upon this occasion. My aunt did not appear in that, even remotely. So that it is doubtful if the lady knew the real causes of her abandonment. The Napoleonic hero was practically unmarried, and he threw over his lady as Napoleon threw over Josephine for a great alliance.

It was a triumph for my aunt, but it had its price. For some time it was evident things were strained between them. He gave up the lady, but he resented having to do so, deeply. She had meant more to his imagination than one could have supposed. He wouldn’t for a long time “come round.” He became touchy and impatient and secretive towards my aunt, and she, I noted, after an amazing check or so, stopped that stream of kindly abuse that had flowed for so long and had been so great a refreshment in their lives. They were both the poorer for its cessation, both less happy. She devoted herself more and more to Lady Grove and the humours and complications of its management. The servants took to her – as they say – she god-mothered three Susans during her rule, the coachman’s, the gardener’s, and the Up Hill gamekeeper’s. She got together a library of old household books that were in the vein of the place. She revived the still-room, and became a great artist in jellies and elder and cowslip wine.

X

And while I neglected the development of my uncle’s finances – and my own, in my scientific work and my absorbing conflict with the difficulties of flying, – his schemes grew more and more expansive and hazardous, and his spending wilder and laxer. I believe that a haunting sense of the intensifying unsoundness of his position accounts largely for his increasing irritability and his increasing secretiveness with my aunt and myself during these crowning years. He dreaded, I think, having to explain, he feared our jests might pierce unwittingly to the truth. Even in the privacy of his mind he would not face the truth. He was accumulating unrealisable securities in his safes until they hung a potential avalanche over the economic world. But his buying became a fever, and his restless desire to keep it up with himself that he was making a triumphant progress to limitless wealth gnawed deeper and deeper. A curious feature of this time with him was his buying over and over again of similar things. His ideas seemed to run in series. Within a twelve-month he bought five new motor-cars, each more swift and powerful than its predecessor, and only the repeated prompt resignation of his chief chauffeur at each moment of danger, prevented his driving them himself. He used them more and more. He developed a passion for locomotion for its own sake.

Then he began to chafe at Lady Grove, fretted by a chance jest he had overheard at a dinner. “This house, George,” he said. “It’s a misfit. There’s no elbow-room in it; it’s choked with old memories. And I can’t stand all these damned Durgans!

“That chap in the corner, George. No! the other corner! The man in a cherry-coloured coat. He watched you! He’d look silly if I stuck a poker through his Gizzard!”

“He’d look,” I reflected, “much as he does now. As though he was amused.”

He replaced his glasses, which had fallen at his emotion, and glared at his antagonists. “What are they? What are they all, the lot of ‘em? Dead as Mutton! They just stuck in the mud. They didn’t even rise to the Reformation. The old out-of-date Reformation! Move with the times! – they moved against the times.

“Just a Family of Failure, – they never even tried!

“They’re jes’, George, exactly what I’m not. Exactly. It isn’t suitable… All this living in the Past.

“And I want a bigger place too, George. I want air and sunlight and room to move about and more service. A house where you can get a Move on things! Zzzz. Why! it’s like a discord – it jars – even to have the telephone… There’s nothing, nothing except the terrace, that’s worth a Rap. It’s all dark and old and dried up and full of old-fashioned things – musty old idees – fitter for a silver-fish than a modern man… I don’t know how I got here.”

He broke out into a new grievance. “That damned vicar,” he complained, “thinks I ought to think myself lucky to get this place! Every time I meet him I can see him think it… One of these days, George I’ll show him what a Mod’un house is like!”

And he did.

I remember the day when he declared, as Americans say, for Crest Hill. He had come up to see my new gas plant, for I was then only just beginning to experiment with auxiliary collapsible balloons, and all the time the shine of his glasses was wandering away to the open down beyond. “Let’s go back to Lady Grove over the hill,” he said. “Something I want to show you. Something fine!”

It was an empty sunlit place that summer evening, sky and earth warm with sundown, and a pe-wit or so just accentuating the pleasant stillness that ends a long clear day. A beautiful peace, it was, to wreck for ever. And there was my uncle, the modern man of power, in his grey top-hat and his grey suit and his black-ribboned glasses, short, thin-legged, large-stomached, pointing and gesticulating, threatening this calm.

He began with a wave of his arm. “That’s the place, George,” he said. “See?”

“Eh!” I cried – for I had been thinking of remote things.

“I got it.”

“Got what?”

“For a house! – a Twentieth Century house! That’s the place for it!”

One of his characteristic phrases was begotten in him.

“Four-square to the winds of heaven, George!” he said. “Eh? Four-square to the winds of heaven!”

“You’ll get the winds up here,” I said.

“A mammoth house it ought to be, George – to suit these hills.”

“Quite,” I said.

“Great galleries and things – running out there and there – See? I been thinking of it, George! Looking out all this way – across the Weald. With its back to Lady Grove.”

“And the morning sun in its eye.”

“Like an eagle, George, – like an eagle!”

So he broached to me what speedily became the leading occupation of his culminating years, Crest Hill. But all the world has heard of that extravagant place which grew and changed its plans as it grew, and bubbled like a salted snail, and burgeoned and bulged and evermore grew. I know not what delirium of pinnacles and terraces and arcades and corridors glittered at last upon the uplands of his mind; the place, for all that its expansion was terminated abruptly by our collapse, is wonderful enough as it stands, – that empty instinctive building of a childless man. His chief architect was a young man named Westminster, whose work he had picked out in the architecture room of the Royal Academy on account of a certain grandiose courage in it, but with him he associated from time to time a number of fellow professionals, stonemasons, sanitary engineers, painters, sculptors, scribes, metal workers, wood carvers, furniture designers, ceramic specialists, landscape gardeners, and the man who designs the arrangement and ventilation of the various new houses in the London Zoological Gardens. In addition he had his own ideas. The thing occupied his mind at all times, but it held it completely from Friday night to Monday morning. He would come down to Lady Grove on Friday night in a crowded motor-car that almost dripped architects. He didn’t, however, confine himself to architects; every one was liable to an invitation to week-end and view Crest Hill, and many an eager promoter, unaware of how Napoleonically and completely my uncle had departmentalised his mind, tried to creep up to him by way of tiles and ventilators and new electric fittings. Always on Sunday mornings, unless the weather was vile, he would, so soon as breakfast and his secretaries were disposed of, visit the site with a considerable retinue, and alter and develop plans, making modifications, Zzzz-ing, giving immense new orders verbally – an unsatisfactory way, as Westminster and the contractors ultimately found.

There he stands in my memory, the symbol of this age for me, the man of luck and advertisement, the current master of the world. There he stands upon the great outward sweep of the terrace before the huge main entrance, a little figure, ridiculously disproportionate to that forty-foot arch, with the granite ball behind him – the astronomical ball, brass coopered, that represented the world, with a little adjustable tube of lenses on a gun-metal arm that focussed the sun upon just that point of the earth on which it chanced to be shining vertically. There he stands, Napoleonically grouped with his retinue men in tweeds and golfing-suits, a little solicitor, whose name I forget, in grey trousers and a black jacket, and Westminster in Jaeger underclothing, a floriferous tie, and peculiar brown cloth of his own.

The downland breeze flutters my uncle’s coat-tails, disarranges his stiff hair, and insists on the evidence of undisciplined appetites in face and form, as he points out this or that feature in the prospect to his attentive collaborator.

Below are hundreds of feet of wheeling-planks, ditches, excavations, heaps of earth, piles of garden stone from the Wealden ridges. On either hand the walls of his irrelevant unmeaning palace rise at one time he had working in that place – disturbing the economic balance of the whole countryside by their presence – upwards of three thousand men…

So he poses for my picture amidst the raw beginnings that were never to be completed. He did the strangest things about that place, things more and more detached from any conception of financial scale, things more and more apart from sober humanity. He seemed to think himself, at last, released from any such limitations. He moved a quite considerable hill, and nearly sixty mature trees were moved with it to open his prospect eastward, moved it about two hundred feet to the south. At another time he caught a suggestion from some city restaurant and made a billiard-room roofed with plate glass beneath the waters of his ornamental lake. He furnished one wing while its roof still awaited completion. He had a swimming bath thirty feet square next to his bedroom upstairs, and to crown it all he commenced a great wall to hold all his dominions together, free from the invasion of common men. It was a ten-foot wall, glass surmounted, and had it been completed as he intended it, it would have had a total length of nearly eleven miles. Some of it towards the last was so dishonestly built that it collapsed within a year upon its foundations, but some miles of it still stand. I never think of it now but what I think of the hundreds of eager little investors who followed his “star,” whose hopes and lives, whose wives’ security and children’s prospects are all mixed up beyond redemption with that flaking mortar…

It is curious how many of these modern financiers of chance and bluff have ended their careers by building. It was not merely my uncle. Sooner or later they all seem to bring their luck to the test of realisation, try to make their fluid opulence coagulate out as bricks and mortar, bring moonshine into relations with a weekly wages-sheet. Then the whole fabric of confidence and imagination totters – and down they come…