Tono-Bungay

The clergyman was one of those odd types that oscillate between remote country towns in England and the conduct of English Church services on mutual terms in enterprising hotels abroad, a tremulous, obstinate little being with sporadic hairs upon his face, spectacles, a red button nose, and aged black raiment. He was evidently enormously impressed by my uncle’s monetary greatness, and by his own inkling of our identity, and he shone and brimmed over with tact and fussy helpfulness. He was eager to share the watching of the bedside with me, he proffered services with both hands, and as I was now getting into touch with affairs in London again, and trying to disentangle the gigantic details of the smash from the papers I had succeeded in getting from Biarritz, I accepted his offers pretty generously, and began the studies in modern finance that lay before me. I had got so out of touch with the old traditions of religion that I overlooked the manifest possibility of his attacking my poor, sinking vestiges of an uncle with theological solicitudes. My attention was called to that, however, very speedily by a polite but urgent quarrel between himself and the Basque landlady as to the necessity of her hanging a cheap crucifix in the shadow over the bed, where it might catch my uncle’s eye, where, indeed, I found it had caught his eye.

“Good Lord!” I cried; “is THAT still going on!”

That night the little clergyman watched, and in the small hours he raised a false alarm that my uncle was dying, and made an extraordinary fuss. 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 fallen asleep, 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 three flickering candles. I felt I was back in the eighteenth century. There lay my poor uncle amidst indescribably tumbled bedclothes, weary of life beyond measure, weary and rambling, and the little clergyman trying to hold 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 idiotic injection needles modern science puts in the hands of these half-educated young men, keeping my uncle flickeringly alive for no reason whatever. The religieuse hovered sleepily in the background with an overdue and neglected dose. In addition, the landlady had not only got up herself, but roused an aged crone of a mother and a partially imbecile husband, and there was also a fattish, stolid man in grey alpaca, with an air of importance – who he was and how he got there, I don’t know. I rather fancy the doctor explained him to me in French I did not understand. And they were all there, wearily nocturnal, hastily and carelessly dressed, intent upon the life that flickered and sank, making a public and curious show of its going, queer shapes of human beings lit by three uncertain candles, and every soul of them keenly and avidly resolved to be in at the death. The doctor stood, the others were all 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 he hovered about the room.

“I think,” he whispered to me mysteriously, as he gave place to me, “I believe – it is well with him.”

I heard him trying to render the stock phrases of Low Church piety into French for the benefit of the stolid man in grey alpaca. Then he knocked a glass off the table, and scrabbled for the fragments. From the first I doubted the theory of an immediate death. I consulted the doctor in urgent whispers. I turned round to get champagne, and nearly fell over the clergyman’s legs. He was on his knees at the additional chair the Basque landlady had got on my arrival, and he was praying aloud, “Oh, Heavenly Father, have mercy on this thy Child…” I hustled him up and out of the way, and in another minute he was down at another chair praying again, and barring the path of the religieuse, who had found me the corkscrew. Something put into my head that tremendous blasphemy of Carlyle’s about “the last mew of a drowning kitten.” He found a third chair vacant presently; it was as if he was playing a game.

“Good Heavens!” I said, “we must clear these people out,” and with a certain urgency I did.

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

I did not let the little clergyman come near him again, and I was watchful 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 to say, “They wanted too much.” His face puckered like a child’s going to cry. “You can’t get a safe six per cent.,” he said. I had for a moment a wild suspicion that those urgent talks had not been altogether spiritual, but that, I think, was a quite unworthy and unjust suspicion. The little clergyman was as simple and honest as the day. My uncle was simply generalising about his class.

But it may have been these talks that set loose some long dormant string of ideas in my uncle’s brain, ideas the things of this world had long suppressed and hidden altogether. Near the end he suddenly became clearminded and lucid, albeit very weak, and his voice was little, but clear.

“George,” he said.

“I’m here,” I said, “close beside you.”

“George. You have always been responsible for the science. George. You know 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 broken monologue, 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. I raised him a little on his pillows, and listened.

“It seems to me, George, always – there must be something in me – that won’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,” he whispered almost pleadingly, and lay quite still, but presently he was uneasy 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 own thoughts, and presently the religieuse resumed her periodic conflict with the window fastening. For a time he struggled for breath… It seemed such nonsense that he should have to suffer so – poor silly little man!

“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 he thought 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 seeds of immortality could be found in all his being, what sort of ghost there was in him to wander out into the bleak immensities. Queer fancies came to me… He lay still for a long time, save for a brief struggle or so for 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 that was creeping over his face. He lay back on his pillow, made a faint zzzing sound that ceased, and presently and quite quietly he died – greatly comforted by my assurance. I do not know when he died. His hand relaxed insensibly. Suddenly, with a start, with a shock, I found that 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 inn down the straggling street of Luzon.

That return to my inn sticks in my memory also as a thing apart, as an experience apart. Within was a subdued bustle of women, a flitting of lights, and the doing of petty offices to that queer, exhausted thing that had once been my active and urgent little uncle. For me those offices were irksome and impertinent. I slammed the door, and went out into the warm, foggy drizzle of the village street lit by blurred specks of light in great voids of darkness, and never a soul abroad. That warm veil of fog produced an effect of vast seclusion. The very houses by the roadside peered through it as if from another world. The stillness of the night was marked by an occasional remote baying of dogs; all these people 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 one walks a little outside of and beside life. I felt as I sometimes feel after the end of a play. I saw the whole business of my uncle’s life as something familiar and completed. It was done, like a play one leaves, like a book one closes. I thought of the push and the promotions, the noise of London, the crowded, various company of people through which our lives had gone, the public meetings, the excitements, the dinners and disputations, and suddenly it appeared to me that none of these things 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, but never have I felt its truth as I did that night… We had parted; we two who had kept company so long had parted. But there was, I knew, no end to him or me. He had died a dream death, and ended a dream; his pain dream was over. It seemed to me almost as though I had died, too. What did it matter, since it was unreality, all of it, the pain and desire, the beginning and the end? There was no reality except this solitary road, 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 stopped and slunk round me, growling, barked gruffly, and shortly and presently became 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 other walker in the darkness, what shapes, what lights, it might be, loomed about him as he went his way from our last encounter on earth – along the paths that are real, and the way that endures for ever?

IX

Last belated figure in that grouping round my uncle’s deathbed is my aunt. When it was beyond all hope that my uncle could live I threw aside whatever 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 unfamiliar inflexibility.

“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 the old castle. We had got rid of some amateurish reporters from Biarritz, and had walked together in the hot morning sunshine down through Port Luzon. There, for a time, we stood leaning on the parapet of the bridge and 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 I used to darn your stockings at old Wimblehurst, that this would be the end of the story? It seems far away now – that little shop, his and my first home. The glow of the bottles, the big coloured bottles! Do you remember how the light shone on the mahogany drawers? The little gilt letters! Ol Amjig, and Snap! I can remember it all – bright and shining – like a Dutch picture. Real! And yesterday. And here we are in a 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 glad to see her weeping.

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

“Just an hour in the old shop again – and him talking. Before things got done. 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 injection needle 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 what I 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’m talking. We’ve always loved one another, and never said anything about it, and you understand, and I understand. But my heart’s torn to pieces by this, torn to rags, and things drop out I’ve kept in it. It’s true he wasn’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 has knocked him about for me, and I’ve never had a say in the matter; never a say; it’s puffed him up and smashed him – like an old bag – under my eyes. I was clever enough to see it, and not clever enough to prevent it, and all I could do was to jeer. I’ve had to make what I could of it. 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 they leave him alone, and his lies and ways? If WE could see the lightness of it —

“Why couldn’t they leave him alone?” she repeated in a whisper as we went towards the inn.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

LOVE AMONG THE WRECKAGEI

When I came back I found that my share in the escape and death of my uncle 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 have said, and making things easy for my aunt, and I still marvel at the consideration with which the world treated me. For now it was open and manifest that I and my uncle were no more than specimens of a modern species of brigand, wasting the savings of the public out of the sheer wantonness of enterprise. I think that in a way, his death produced a reaction in my favour and my flight, of which some particulars now appeared stuck in the popular imagination. It seemed a more daring and difficult feat than it was, and I couldn’t very well write to the papers to sustain my private estimate. There can be little doubt that men infinitely prefer the appearance of dash and enterprise to simple honesty. No one believed I was not an arch plotter in his financing. Yet they favoured me. I even got permission from the trustee to occupy my chalet for a fortnight while I cleared up the mass of papers, calculations, notes of work, drawings and the like, that I left in disorder when I started on that impulsive raid upon the Mordet quap heaps.

I was there alone. I got work for Cothope with the Ilchesters, for whom I now build these destroyers. They wanted him at once, and he was short of 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 away from the work for a full half-year and more, a half-year crowded with intense disconcerting things. For a time my brain refused these fine problems of balance and adjustment altogether; it wanted to think about my uncle’s dropping jaw, my aunt’s reluctant tears, about dead negroes and pestilential swamps, about the evident realities of cruelty and pain, about life and death. Moreover, it was weary with the frightful pile of figures and documents at the Hardingham, a task to which this raid to Lady Grove was simply an interlude. And there was Beatrice.

On the second morning, as I sat out upon the veranda recalling memories and striving in vain to attend to some too succinct pencil notes of Cothope’s, Beatrice rode up suddenly from behind the pavilion, and pulled rein and became still; Beatrice, a little flushed from riding and sitting 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 blank a 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 close to 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 curious air of proprietorship.

“You know I’m the living survivor now of the great smash. I’m rolling and 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 a crack into the darkness out of sight for a year or two.”

“The sun,” she remarked irrelevantly, “has burnt you… I’m getting down.”

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 close together, 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 helped her 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 that she gripped her riding-whip very tightly in her hand. She looked about her for a moment, – and then at me.

“It’s comfortable,” she remarked.

Our eyes met in a conversation very different from the one upon our lips. A sombre glow surrounded us, drew us together; an unwonted shyness kept us apart. She roused herself, after an instant’s pause, to examine my furniture.

“You have chintz curtains. I thought men were too feckless to have curtains without a woman. But, of course, your aunt did that! And a couch 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 and tobacco ash.”

She flitted to my colour prints and my little case of books. Then she went 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 of soul… 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. He is – how one would always like to work. Sometimes Chopin and those others, 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 of music rolls, became interested and took a piece, the first part of the Kreutzer Sonata, hesitated. “No,” she said, “that!”

She gave me Brahms’ Second Concerto, Op. 58, and curled up on the sofa watching me as I set myself slowly to play…

“I say,” he said when I had done, “that’s fine. I didn’t know those things could play like that. I’m all astir…”

She came and stood over me, looking at me. “I’m going to have a concert,” she said abruptly, and laughed uneasily and hovered at the pigeon-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 loaded that with suggestions, debauched it, made it a scandalous and intimate symbol. When I had played the first part of that, she came up to the pianola and hesitated over me. I sat stiffly – waiting.

Suddenly she seized my downcast head and kissed my hair. She caught at my face between her hands and kissed my lips. I put my arms about her and 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 social disorganisation in which we live, is a thing adrift, a fruitless thing broken away from its connexions. I tell of this love affair here because of its irrelevance, because it is so remarkable that it should mean nothing, and be nothing except itself. It glows in my memory like some bright casual flower starting up amidst the debris of a catastrophe. For nearly a fortnight we two met and made love together. Once more this mighty passion, that our aimless civilisation has fettered and maimed and sterilised and debased, gripped me and filled me with passionate delights and solemn joys – that were all, you know, futile and purposeless. Once more I had the persuasion “This matters. Nothing else matters so much as this.” We were both infinitely grave in such happiness as we had. I do not remember any laughter at all between us.

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

Except at the end, they were days of supreme summer, and there was a waxing moon. We met recklessly day by day. We were so intent upon each other at first so intent upon expressing ourselves to each other, and getting at each other, that we troubled very little about the appearance of our relationship. We met almost openly… We talked of ten thousand things, and of ourselves. We loved. We made love. There is no prose of mine that can tell of hours transfigured. The facts are nothing. Everything we touched, the meanest things, became glorious. How can I render bare tenderness and delight and mutual possession? I sit here at my 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 at least I met love.

I remember as we sat in a Canadian canoe, in a reedy, bush-masked shallow we had discovered operating out of that pine-shaded Woking canal, how she fell talking of the things that happened to her before she met me again…

She told me things, and they so joined and welded together other things that lay disconnected in my memory, that it seemed to me I had always known 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 girlhood after I had known her. “We were poor and pretending and managing. We hacked about on visits and things. I ought to have married. The chances I 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 finger just touching the water.

“One gets bored, bored beyond redemption. One does about to these huge expensive houses I suppose – the scale’s immense. One makes one’s self useful to the other women, and agreeable to the men. One has to dress… One has food and exercise and leisure, It’s the leisure, and the space, and the blank opportunity it seems a sin not to fill. Carnaby isn’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 little surprised.”