Tono-Bungay

When I think of that despoiled hillside, that colossal litter of bricks and mortar, and crude roads and paths, the scaffolding and sheds, the general quality of unforeseeing outrage upon the peace of nature, I am reminded of a chat I had with the vicar one bleak day after he had witnessed a glide. He talked to me of aeronautics as I stood in jersey and shorts beside my machine, fresh from alighting, and his cadaverous face failed to conceal a peculiar desolation that possessed him.

“Almost you convince me,” he said, coming up to me, “against my will… A marvellous invention! But it will take you a long time, sir, before you can emulate that perfect mechanism – the wing of a bird.”

He looked at my sheds.

“You’ve changed the look of this valley, too,” he said.

“Temporary defilements,” I remarked, guessing what was in his mind.

“Of course. Things come and go. Things come and go. But – H’m. I’ve just been up over the hill to look at Mr. Edward Ponderevo’s new house. That – that is something more permanent. A magnificent place! – in many ways. Imposing. I’ve never somehow brought myself to go that way before. Things are greatly advanced… We find – the great number of strangers introduced into the villages about here by these operations, working-men chiefly, a little embarrassing. It put us out. They bring a new spirit into the place; betting – ideas – all sorts of queer notions. Our publicans like it, of course. And they come and sleep in one’s outhouses – and make the place a little unsafe at nights. The other morning I couldn’t sleep – a slight dyspepsia – and I looked out of the window. I was amazed to see people going by on bicycles. A silent procession. I counted ninety-seven – in the dawn. All going up to the new road for Crest Hill. Remarkable I thought it. And so I’ve been up to see what they were doing.”

“They would have been more than remarkable thirty years ago,” I said.

“Yes, indeed. Things change. We think nothing of it now at all – comparatively. And that big house – ”

He raised his eyebrows. “Really stupendous! Stupendous.

“All the hillside – the old turf – cut to ribbons!”

His eye searched my face. “We’ve grown so accustomed to look up to Lady Grove,” he said, and smiled in search of sympathy. “It shifts our centre of gravity.”

“Things will readjust themselves,” I lied.

He snatched at the phrase. “Of course,” he said.

“They’ll readjust themselves – settle down again. Must. In the old way. It’s bound to come right again – a comforting thought. Yes. After all, Lady Grove itself had to be built once upon a time – was – to begin with – artificial.”

His eye returned to my aeroplane. He sought to dismiss his graver preoccupations. “I should think twice,” he remarked, “before I trusted myself to that concern… But I suppose one grows accustomed to the motion.”

He bade me good morning and went his way, bowed and thoughtful…

He had kept the truth from his mind a long time, but that morning it had forced its way to him with an aspect that brooked no denial that this time it was not just changes that were coming in his world, but that all his world lay open and defenceless, conquered and surrendered, doomed so far as he could see, root and branch, scale and form alike, to change.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

SOARINGI

For nearly all the time that my uncle was incubating and hatching Crest Hill I was busy in a little transverse valley between that great beginning and Lady Grove with more and more costly and ambitious experiments in aerial navigation. This work was indeed the main substance of my life through all the great time of the Tono-Bungay symphony.

I have told already how I came to devote myself to this system of inquiries, how in a sort of disgust with the common adventure of life I took up the dropped ends of my college studies, taking them up again with a man’s resolution instead of a boy’s ambition. From the first I did well at this work. It – was, I think, largely a case of special aptitude, of a peculiar irrelevant vein of faculty running through my mind. It is one of those things men seem to have by chance, that has little or nothing to do with their general merit, and which it is ridiculous to be either conceited or modest about. I did get through a very big mass of work in those years, working for a time with a concentrated fierceness that left little of such energy or capacity as I possess unused. I worked out a series of problems connected with the stability of bodies pitching in the air and the internal movements of the wind, and I also revolutionised one leading part at last of the theory of explosive engines. These things are to be found in the Philosophical Transactions, the Mathematical Journal, and less frequently in one or two other such publications, and they needn’t detain us here. Indeed, I doubt if I could write about them here. One acquires a sort of shorthand for one’s notes and mind in relation to such special work. I have never taught; nor lectured, that is to say, I have never had to express my thoughts about mechanical things in ordinary everyday language, and I doubt very much if I could do so now without extreme tedium.

My work was, to begin with, very largely theoretical. I was able to attack such early necessities of verification as arose with quite little models, using a turntable to get the motion through the air, and cane, whalebone and silk as building material. But a time came when incalculable factors crept in, factors of human capacity and factors of insufficient experimental knowledge, when one must needs guess and try. Then I had to enlarge the scale of my operations, and soon I had enlarged them very greatly. I set to work almost concurrently on the balance and stability of gliders and upon the steering of inflated bags, the latter a particularly expensive branch of work. I was no doubt moved by something of the same spirit of lavish expenditure that was running away with my uncle in these developments. Presently my establishment above Lady Grove had grown to a painted wood chalet big enough to accommodate six men, and in which I would sometimes live for three weeks together; to a gasometer, to a motor-house, to three big corrugated-roofed sheds and lock-up houses, to a stage from which to start gliders, to a workshop and so forth. A rough road was made. We brought up gas from Cheaping and electricity from Woking, which place I found also afforded a friendly workshop for larger operations than I could manage. I had the luck also to find a man who seemed my heaven-sent second-in-command – Cothope his name was. He was a self-educated-man; he had formerly been a sapper and he was one of the best and handiest working engineers alive. Without him I do not think I could have achieved half what I have done. At times he has been not so much my assistant as my collaborator, and has followed my fortunes to this day. Other men came and went as I needed them.

I do not know how far it is possible to convey to any one who has not experienced it, the peculiar interest, the peculiar satisfaction that lies in a sustained research when one is not hampered by want of money. It is a different thing from any other sort of human effort. You are free from the exasperating conflict with your fellow-creatures altogether – at least so far as the essential work goes; that for me is its peculiar merit. Scientific truth is the remotest of mistresses; she hides in strange places, she is attained by tortuous and laborious roads, but SHE IS ALWAYS THERE! Win to her and she will not fail you; she is yours and mankind’s for ever. She is reality, the one reality I have found in this strange disorder of existence. She will not sulk with you nor misunderstand you nor cheat you of your reward upon some petty doubt. You cannot change her by advertisement or clamour, nor stifle her in vulgarities. Things grow under your hands when you serve her, things that are permanent as nothing else is permanent in the whole life of man. That, I think, is the peculiar satisfaction of science and its enduring reward…

The taking up of experimental work produced a great change in my personal habits. I have told how already once in my life at Wimblehurst I had a period of discipline and continuous effort, and how, when I came to South Kensington, I became demoralised by the immense effect of London, by its innumerable imperative demands upon my attention and curiosity. And I parted with much of my personal pride when I gave up science for the development of Tono-Bungay. But my poverty kept me abstinent and my youthful romanticism kept me chaste until my married life was well under way. Then in all directions I relaxed. I did a large amount of work, but I never troubled to think whether it was my maximum nor whether the moods and indolences that came to me at times were avoidable things. With the coming of plenty I ate abundantly and foolishly, drank freely and followed my impulses more and more carelessly. I felt no reason why I should do anything else. Never at any point did I use myself to the edge of my capacity. The emotional crisis of my divorce did not produce any immediate change in these matters of personal discipline. I found some difficulty at first in concentrating my mind upon scientific work, it was so much more exacting than business, but I got over that difficulty by smoking. I became an inordinate cigar smoker; it gave me moods of profound depression, but I treated these usually by the homeopathic method, – by lighting another cigar. I didn’t realise at all how loose my moral and nervous fibre had become until I reached the practical side of my investigations and was face to face with the necessity of finding out just how it felt to use a glider and just what a man could do with one.

I got into this relaxed habit of living in spite of very real tendencies in my nature towards discipline. I’ve never been in love with self-indulgence. That philosophy of the loose lip and the lax paunch is one for which I’ve always had an instinctive distrust. I like bare things, stripped things, plain, austere and continent things, fine lines and cold colours. But in these plethoric times when there is too much coarse stuff for everybody and the struggle for life takes the form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbour’s eye, when there is no urgent demand either for personal courage, sound nerves or stark beauty, we find ourselves by accident. Always before these times the bulk of the people did not over-eat themselves, because they couldn’t, whether they wanted to do so or not, and all but a very few were kept “fit” by unavoidable exercise and personal danger. Now, if only he pitch his standard low enough and keep free from pride, almost any one can achieve a sort of excess. You can go through contemporary life fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and elemental necessities, the sweat of your death-bed. So I think it was with my uncle; so, very nearly, it was with me.

But the glider brought me up smartly. I had to find out how these things went down the air, and the only way to find out is to go down with one. And for a time I wouldn’t face it.

There is something impersonal about a book, I suppose. At any rate I find myself able to write down here just the confession I’ve never been able to make to any one face to face, the frightful trouble it was to me to bring myself to do what I suppose every other coloured boy in the West Indies could do without turning a hair, and that is to fling myself off for my first soar down the wind. The first trial was bound to be the worst; it was an experiment I made with life, and the chance of death or injury was, I supposed, about equal to the chance of success. I believed that with a dawn-like lucidity. I had begun with a glider that I imagined was on the lines of the Wright brothers’ aeroplane, but I could not be sure. It might turn over. I might upset it. It might burrow its nose at the end and smash itself and me. The conditions of the flight necessitated alert attention; it wasn’t a thing to be done by jumping off and shutting one’s eyes or getting angry or drunk to do it. One had to use one’s weight to balance. And when at last I did it it was horrible – for ten seconds. For ten seconds or so, as I swept down the air flattened on my infernal framework and with the wind in my eyes, the rush of the ground beneath me filled me with sick and helpless terror; I felt as though some violent oscillatory current was throbbing in brain and back bone, and I groaned aloud. I set my teeth and groaned. It was a groan wrung out of me in spite of myself. My sensations of terror swooped to a climax. And then, you know, they ended!

Suddenly my terror was over and done with. I was soaring through the air right way up, steadily, and no mischance had happened. I felt intensely alive and my nerves were strung like a bow. I shifted a limb, swerved and shouted between fear and triumph as I recovered from the swerve and heeled the other way and steadied myself.

I thought I was going to hit a rook that was flying athwart me, – it was queer with what projectile silence that jumped upon me out of nothingness, and I yelled helplessly, “Get out of the way!” The bird doubled itself up like a partly inverted V, flapped, went up to the right abruptly and vanished from my circle of interest. Then I saw the shadow of my aeroplane keeping a fixed distance before me and very steady, and the turf as it seemed streaming out behind it. The turf! – it wasn’t after all streaming so impossibly fast.

When I came gliding down to the safe spread of level green I had chosen, I was as cool and ready as a city clerk who drops off an omnibus in motion, and I had learnt much more than soaring. I tilted up her nose at the right moment, levelled again and grounded like a snowflake on a windless day. I lay flat for an instant and then knelt up and got on my feet atremble, but very satisfied with myself. Cothope was running down the hill to me. …

But from that day I went into training, and I kept myself in training for many months. I had delayed my experiments for very nearly six weeks on various excuses because of my dread of this first flight, because of the slackness of body and spirit that had come to me with the business life. The shame of that cowardice spurred me none the less because it was probably altogether my own secret. I felt that Cothope at any rate might suspect. Well, – he shouldn’t suspect again.

It is curious that I remember that shame and self accusation and its consequences far more distinctly than I recall the weeks of vacillation before I soared. For a time I went altogether without alcohol, I stopped smoking altogether and ate very sparingly, and every day I did something that called a little upon my nerves and muscles. I soared as frequently as I could. I substituted a motor-bicycle for the London train and took my chances in the southward traffic, and I even tried what thrills were to be got upon a horse. But they put me on made horses, and I conceived a perhaps unworthy contempt for the certitudes of equestrian exercise in comparison with the adventures of mechanism. Also I walked along the high wall at the back of Lady Grove garden, and at last brought myself to stride the gap where the gate comes. If I didn’t altogether get rid of a certain giddy instinct by such exercises, at least I trained my will until it didn’t matter. And soon I no longer dreaded flight, but was eager to go higher into the air, and I came to esteem soaring upon a glider, that even over the deepest dip in the ground had barely forty feet of fall beneath it, a mere mockery of what flight might be. I began to dream of the keener freshness in the air high above the beechwoods, and it was rather to satisfy that desire than as any legitimate development of my proper work that presently I turned a part of my energies and the bulk of my private income to the problem of the navigable balloon.

II

I had gone far beyond that initial stage; I had had two smashes and a broken rib which my aunt nursed with great energy, and was getting some reputation in the aeronautic world when, suddenly, as though she had never really left it, the Honourable Beatrice Normandy, dark-eyed, and with the old disorderly wave of the hair from her brow, came back into my life. She came riding down a grass path in the thickets below Lady Grove, perched up on a huge black horse, and the old Earl of Carnaby and Archie Garvell, her half-brother, were with her. My uncle had been bothering me about the Crest Hill hot-water pipes, and we were returning by a path transverse to theirs and came out upon them suddenly. Old Carnaby was trespassing on our ground, and so he hailed us in a friendly fashion and pulled up to talk to us.

I didn’t note Beatrice at all at first. I was interested in Lord Carnaby, that remarkable vestige of his own brilliant youth. I had heard of him, but never seen him. For a man of sixty-five who had sinned all the sins, so they said, and laid waste the most magnificent political debut of any man of his generation, he seemed to me to be looking remarkably fit and fresh. He was a lean little man with grey-blue eyes in his brown face, and his cracked voice was the worst thing in his effect.

“Hope you don’t mind us coming this way, Ponderevo,” he cried; and my uncle, who was sometimes a little too general and generous with titles, answered, “Not at all, my lord, not at all! Glad you make use of it!”

“You’re building a great place over the hill,” said Carnaby.

“Thought I’d make a show for once,” said my uncle. “It looks big because it’s spread out for the sun.”

“Air and sunlight,” said the earl. “You can’t have too much of them. But before our time they used to build for shelter and water and the high road.”

Then I discovered that the silent figure behind the earl was Beatrice.

I’d forgotten her sufficiently to think for a moment that she hadn’t changed at all since she had watched me from behind the skirts of Lady Drew. She was looking at me, and her dainty brow under her broad brimmed hat – she was wearing a grey hat and loose unbuttoned coat – was knit with perplexity, trying, I suppose, to remember where she had seen me before. Her shaded eyes met mine with that mute question…

It seemed incredible to me she didn’t remember.

“Well,” said the earl and touched his horse.

Garvell was patting the neck of his horse, which was inclined to fidget, and disregarding me. He nodded over his shoulder and followed. His movement seemed to release a train of memories in her. She glanced suddenly at him and then back at me with a flash of recognition that warmed instantly to a faint smile. She hesitated as if to speak to me, smiled broadly and understandingly and turned to follow the others. All three broke into a canter and she did not look back. I stood for a second or so at the crossing of the lanes, watching her recede, and then became aware that my uncle was already some paces off and talking over his shoulder in the belief that I was close behind. I turned about and strode to overtake him. My mind was full of Beatrice and this surprise. I remembered her simply as a Normandy. I’d clean forgotten that Garvell was the son and she the step-daughter of our neighbour, Lady Osprey. Indeed, I’d probably forgotten at that time that we had Lady Osprey as a neighbour. There was no reason at all for remembering it. It was amazing to find her in this Surrey countryside, when I’d never thought of her as living anywhere in the world but at Bladesover Park, near forty miles and twenty years away. She was so alive – so unchanged! The same quick warm blood was in her cheeks. It seemed only yesterday that we had kissed among the bracken stems…

“Eh?” I said.

“I say he’s good stuff,” said my uncle. “You can say what you like against the aristocracy, George; Lord Carnaby’s rattling good stuff. There’s a sort of Savoir Faire, something – it’s an old-fashioned phrase, George, but a good one there’s a Bong-Tong… It’s like the Oxford turf, George, you can’t grow it in a year. I wonder how they do it. It’s living always on a Scale, George. It’s being there from the beginning.”…

“She might,” I said to myself, “be a picture by Romney come alive!”

“They tell all these stories about him,” said my uncle, “but what do they all amount to?”

“Gods!” I said to myself; “but why have I forgotten for so long? Those queer little brows of hers, the touch of mischief in her eyes – the way she breaks into a smile!”

“I don’t blame him,” said my uncle. “Mostly it’s imagination. That and leisure, George. When I was a young man I was kept pretty busy. So were you. Even then – !”

What puzzled me more particularly was the queer trick of my memory that had never recalled anything vital of Beatrice whatever when I met Garvell again that had, indeed, recalled nothing except a boyish antagonism and our fight. Now when my senses were full of her, it seemed incredible that I could ever have forgotten…

III

“Oh, Crikey!” said my aunt, reading a letter behind her coffee-machine. “HERE’S a young woman, George!”

We were breakfasting together in the big window bay at Lady Grove that looks upon the iris beds; my uncle was in London.

I sounded an interrogative note and decapitated an egg.

“Who’s Beatrice Normandy?” asked my aunt. “I’ve not heard of her before.”

“She the young woman?”

“Yes. Says she knows you. I’m no hand at old etiquette, George, but her line is a bit unusual. Practically she says she’s going to make her mother – ”

“Eh? Step-mother, isn’t it?”

“You seem to know a lot about her. She says ‘mother’ – Lady Osprey. They’re to call on me, anyhow, next Wednesday week at four, and there’s got to be you for tea.”

“Eh?”

“You – for tea.

“H’m. She had rather – force of character. When I knew her before.”

I became aware of my aunt’s head sticking out obliquely from behind the coffee-machine and regarding me with wide blue curiosity. I met her gaze for a moment, flinched, coloured, and laughed.

“I’ve known her longer than I’ve known you,” I said, and explained at length.

My aunt kept her eye on me over and round the coffee-machine as I did so. She was greatly interested, and asked several elucidatory questions.

“Why didn’t you tell me the day you saw her? You’ve had her on your mind for a week,” she said.

“It IS odd I didn’t tell you,” I admitted.

“You thought I’d get a Down on her,” said my aunt conclusively. “That’s what you thought” and opened the rest of her letters.

The two ladies came in a pony-carriage with conspicuous punctuality, and I had the unusual experience of seeing my aunt entertaining callers. We had tea upon the terrace under the cedar, but old Lady Osprey, being an embittered Protestant, had never before seen the inside of the house, and we made a sort of tour of inspection that reminded me of my first visit to the place. In spite of my preoccupation with Beatrice, I stored a queer little memory of the contrast between the two other women; my aunt, tall, slender and awkward, in a simple blue homekeeping dress, an omnivorous reader and a very authentic wit, and the lady of pedigree, short and plump, dressed with Victorian fussiness, living at the intellectual level of palmistry and genteel fiction, pink in the face and generally flustered by a sense of my aunt’s social strangeness and disposed under the circumstances to behave rather like an imitation of the more queenly moments of her own cook. The one seemed made of whalebone, the other of dough. My aunt was nervous, partly through the intrinsic difficulty of handling the lady and partly because of her passionate desire to watch Beatrice and me, and her nervousness took a common form with her, a wider clumsiness of gesture and an exacerbation of her habitual oddity of phrase which did much to deepen the pink perplexity of the lady of title. For instance, I heard my aunt admit that one of the Stuart Durgan ladies did look a bit “balmy on the crumpet”; she described the knights of the age of chivalry as “korvorting about on the off-chance of a dragon”; she explained she was “always old mucking about the garden,” and instead of offering me a Garibaldi biscuit, she asked me with that faint lisp of hers, to “have some squashed flies, George.” I felt convinced Lady Osprey would describe her as “a most eccentric person” on the very first opportunity; – “a most eccentric person.” One could see her, as people say, “shaping” for that.