Tono Bungay ........................................................................................................................................................1

H. G. Wells..............................................................................................................................................1

Most people in this world seem to live "in character"; they have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the

three are congruous one with another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak of them as being of

this sort of people or that. They are, as theatrical people say, no more (and no less) than "character actors."

They have a class, they have a place, they know what is becoming in them and what is due to them, and their

proper size of tombstone tells at last how properly they have played the part. But there is also another kind of

life that is not so much living as a miscellaneous tasting of life. One gets hit by some unusual transverse

force, one is jerked out of one's stratum and lives crosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a

succession of samples. That has been my lot, and that is what has set me at last writing something in the

nature of a novel. I have got an unusual series of impressions that I want very urgently to tell. I have seen life

at very different levels, and at all these levels I have seen it with a sort of intimacy and in good faith. I have

been a native in many social countries. I have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker, my cousin, who

has since died in the Chatham infirmary; I have eaten illegal snacksthe unjustifiable gifts of footmenin

pantries, and been despised for my want of style (and subsequently married and divorced) by the daughter of

a gasworks clerk; andto go to my other extremeI was onceoh, glittering days!an item in the

houseparty of a countess. She was, I admit, a countess with a financial aspect, but still, you know, a

countess. I've seen these people at various angles. At the dinnertable I've met not simply the titled but the

great. On one occasionit is my brightest memoryI upset my champagne over the trousers of the greatest

statesman in the empireHeaven forbid I should be so invidious as to name him!in the warmth of our

And once (though it is the most incidental thing in my life) I murdered a man....

Yes, I've seen a curious variety of people and ways of living altogether. Odd people they all are great and

small, very much alike at bottom and curiously different on their surfaces. I wish I had ranged just a little

further both up and down, seeing I have ranged so far. Royalty must be worth knowing and very great fun.

But my contacts with princes have been limited to quite public occasions, nor at the other end of the scale

have I had what I should call an inside acquaintance with that dusty but attractive class of people who go

about on the highroads drunk but enfamille (so redeeming the minor lapse), in the summertime, with a

perambulator, lavender to sell, sunbrown children, a smell, and ambiguous bundles that fire the imagination.

Navvies, farmlabourers, sailormen and stokers, all such as sit in 1834 beerhouses, are beyond me also, and

I suppose must remain so now for ever. My intercourse with the ducal rank too has been negligible; I once

went shooting with a duke, and in an outburst of what was no doubt snobbishness, did my best to get him in

You will ask by what merit I achieved this remarkable social range, this extensive crosssection of the British

Indeed, if I may make the remark so cosmic, everything is. But that is by the way. I was my uncle's nephew,

and my uncle was no less a person than Edward Ponderevo, whose cometlike transit of the financial heavens

happenedit is now ten years ago! Do you remember the days of Ponderevo, the great days, I mean, of

Ponderevo? Perhaps you had a trifle in some worldshaking enterprise! Then you know him only too well.

Astraddle on TonoBungay, he flashed athwart the empty heavenslike a cometrather, like a stupendous

rocket!and overawed investors spoke of his star. At his zenith he burst into a cloud of the most magnificent

I was his nephew, his peculiar and intimate nephew. I was hanging on to his coattails all the way through. I

made pills with him in the chemist's shop at Wimblehurst before he began. I was, you might say, the stick of

his rocket; and after our tremendous soar, after he had played with millions, a golden rain in the sky, after my

bird'seye view of the modern world, I fell again, a little scarred and blistered perhaps, two and twenty years

older, with my youth gone, my manhood eaten in upon, but greatly edified, into this Thamesside yard, into

these white heats and hammerings, amidst the fine realites of steelto think it all over in my leisure and jot

down the notes and inconsecutive observations that make this book. It was more, you know, than a figurative

soar. The zenith of that career was surely our flight across the channel in the Lord Roberts B....

I warn you this book is going to be something of an agglomeration. I want to trace my social trajectory (and

my uncle's) as the main line of my story, but as this is my first novel and almost certainly my last, I want to

get in, too, all sorts of things that struck me, things that amused me and impressions I goteven although

they don't minister directly to my narrative at all. I want to set out my own queer love experiences too, such

as they are, for they troubled and distressed and swayed me hugely, and they still seem to me to contain all

sorts of irrational and debatable elements that I shall be the clearerheaded for getting on paper. And possibly

I may even flow into descriptions of people who are really no more than people seen in transit, just because it

amuses me to recall what they said and did to us, and more particularly how they behaved in the brief but

splendid glare of TonoBungay and its still more glaring offspring. It lit some of them up, I can assure you!

Indeed, I want to get in all sorts of things. My ideas of a novel all through are comprehensive rather than

TonoBungay still figures on the hoardings, it stands in rows in every chemist's storeroom, it still assuages

the coughs of age and brightens the elderly eye and loosens the elderly tongue; but its social glory, its

financial illumination, have faded from the world for ever. And I, sole scorched survivor from the blaze, sit

writing of it here in an air that is never still for the clang and thunder of machines, on a table littered with

working drawings, and amid fragments of models and notes about velocities and air and water pressures and

I write that much and look at it, and wonder whether, after all, this is any fair statement of what I am

attempting in this book. I've given, I see, an impression that I want to make simply a hotchpotch of

anecdotes and experiences with my uncle swimming in the middle as the largest lump of victual. I'll own that

here, with the pen already started, I realise what a fermenting mass of things learnt and emotions experienced

and theories formed I've got to deal with, and how, in a sense, hopeless my book must be from the very

outset. I suppose what I'm really trying to render is nothing more nor less than Lifeas one man has found

it. I want to tellMYSELF, and my impressions of the thing as a whole, to say things I have come to feel

intensely of the laws, traditions, usages, and ideas we call society, and how we poor individuals get driven

and lured and stranded among these windy, perplexing shoals and channels. I've got, I suppose, to a time of

life when things begin to take on shapes that have an air of reality, and become no longer material for

dreaming, but interesting in themselves. I've reached the criticising, novelwriting age, and here I am writing

minemy one novelwithout having any of the discipline to refrain and omit that I suppose the regular

I've read an average share of novels and made some starts before this beginning, and I've found the restraints

and rules of the art (as I made them out) impossible for me. I like to write, I am keenly interested in writing,

but it is not my technique. I'm an engineer with a patent or two and a set of ideas; most of whatever artist

there is in me has been given to turbine machines and boat building and the problem of flying, and do what I

will I fail to see how I can be other than a lax, undisciplined storyteller. I must sprawl and flounder,

comment and theorise, if I am to get the thing out I have in mind. And it isn't a constructed tale I have to tell,

but unmanageable realities. My lovestoryand if only I can keep up the spirit of truthtelling all through

as strongly as I have now, you shall have it allfalls into no sort of neat scheme of telling. It involves three

But I've said enough, I hope, to excuse myself for the method or want of method in what follows, and I think

I had better tell without further delay of my boyhood and my early impressions in the shadow of Bladesover

There came a time when I realised that Bladesover House was not all it seemed, but when I was a little boy I

took the place with the entirest faith as a complete authentic microcosm. I believed that the Bladesover

system was a little workingmodeland not so very little eitherof the whole world.

Bladesover lies up on the Kentish Downs, eight miles perhaps from Ashborough; and its old pavilion, a little

wooden parody of the temple of Vesta at Tibur, upon the hill crest behind the house, commands in theory at

least a view of either sea, of the Channel southward and the Thames to the northeast. The park is the second

largest in Kent, finely wooded with wellplaced beeches, many elms and some sweet chestnuts, abounding in

little valleys and hollows of bracken, with springs and a stream and three fine ponds and multitudes of fallow

deer. The house was built in the eighteenth century, it is of pale red brick in the style of a French chateau, and

save for one pass among the crests which opens to blue distances, to minute, remote, oastset farmhouses

and copses and wheat fields and the occasional gleam of water, its hundred and seventeen windows look on

nothing but its own wide and handsome territories. A semicircular screen of great beeches masks the church

and village, which cluster picturesquely about the high road along the skirts of the great park. Northward, at

the remotest corner of that enclosure, is a second dependent village, Ropedean, less fortunate in its greater

distance and also on account of a rector. This divine was indeed rich, but he was vindictively economical

because of some shrinkage of his tithes; and by reason of his use of the word Eucharist for the Lord's Supper

he had become altogether estranged from the great ladies of Bladesover. So that Ropedean was in the

Now the unavoidable suggestion of that wide park and that fair large house, dominating church, village and

the country side, was that they represented the thing that mattered supremely in the world, and that all other

things had significance only in relation to them. They represented the Gentry, the Quality, by and through and

for whom the rest of the world, the farming folk and the labouring folk, the tradespeople of Ashborough,

and the upper servants and the lower servants and the servants of the estate, breathed and lived and were

permitted. And the Quality did it so quietly and thoroughly, the great house mingled so solidly and

effectually earth and sky, the contrast of its spacious hall and saloon and galleries, its airy housekeeper's

room and warren of offices with the meagre dignities of the vicar, and the pinched and stuffy rooms of even

the postoffice people and the grocer, so enforced these suggestions, that it was only when I was a boy of

thirteen or fourteen and some queer inherited strain of scepticism had set me doubting whether Mr. Bartlett,

the vicar, did really know with certainty all about God, that as a further and deeper step in doubting I began to

question the final rightness of the gentlefolks, their primary necessity in the scheme of things. But once that

scepticism had awakened it took me fast and far. By fourteen I had achieved terrible blasphemies and

sacrilege; I had resolved to marry a viscount's daughter, and I had blacked the left eyeI think it was the

The great house, the church, the village, and the labourers and the servants in their stations and degrees,

seemed to me, I say, to be a closed and complete social system. About us were other villages and great

estates, and from house to house, interlacing, correlated, the Gentry, the fine Olympians, came and went. The

country towns seemed mere collections of ships, marketing places for the tenantry, centres for such education

as they needed, as entirely dependent on the gentry as the village and scarcely less directly so. I thought this

was the order of the whole world. I thought London was only a greater country town where the gentlefolk

kept townhouses and did their greater shopping under the magnificent shadow of the greatest of all fine

gentlewomen, the Queen. It seemed to be in the divine order. That all this fine appearance was already

sapped, that there were forces at work that might presently carry all this elaborate social system in which my

mother instructed me so carefully that I might understand my "place," to Limbo, had scarcely dawned upon

There are many people in England today upon whom it has not yet dawned. There are times when I doubt

whether any but a very inconsiderable minority of English people realise how extensively this ostensible

order has even now passed away. The great houses stand in the parks still, the cottages cluster respectfully on

their borders, touching their eaves with their creepers, the English countrysideyou can range through Kent

from Bladesover northward and see persists obstinately in looking what it was. It is like an early day in a fine

October. The hand of change rests on it all, unfelt, unseen; resting for awhile, as it were half reluctantly,

before it grips and ends the thing for ever. One frost and the whole face of things will be bare, links snap,

For that we have still to wait a little while. The new order may have gone far towards shaping itself, but just

as in that sort of lantern show that used to be known in the village as the "Dissolving Views," the scene that is

going remains upon the mind, traceable and evident, and the newer picture is yet enigmatical long after the

lines that are to replace those former ones have grown bright and strong, so that the new England of our

children's children is still a riddle to me. The ideas of democracy, of equality, and above all of promiscuous

fraternity have certainly never really entered into the English mind. But what IS coming into it? All this book,

I hope, will bear a little on that. Our people never formulates; it keeps words for jests and ironies. In the

meanwhile the old shapes, the old attitudes remain, subtly changed and changing still, sheltering strange

tenants. Bladesover House is now let furnished to Sir Reuben Lichtenstein, and has been since old Lady Drew

died; it was my odd experience to visit there, in the house of which my mother had been housekeeper, when

my uncle was at the climax of TonoBungay. It was curious to notice then the little differences that had come

to things with this substitution. To borrow an image from my mineralogical days, these Jews were not so

much a new British gentry as "pseudomorphous" after the gentry. They are a very clever people, the Jews, but

not clever enough to suppress their cleverness. I wished I could have gone downstairs to savour the tone of

the pantry. It would have been very different I know. Hawksnest, over beyond, I noted, had its pseudomorph

too; a newspaper proprietor of the type that hustles along with stolen ideas from one loud sinkorswim

enterprise to another, had bought the place outright; Redgrave was in the hands of brewers.

But the people in the villages, so far as I could detect, saw no difference in their world. Two little girls

bobbed and an old labourer touched his hat convulsively as I walked through the village. He still thought he

knew his placeand mine. I did not know him, but I would have liked dearly to have asked him if he

remembered my mother, if either my uncle or old Lichtenstein had been man enough to stand being given

In that English countryside of my boyhood every human being had a "place." It belonged to you from your

birth like the colour of your eyes, it was inextricably your destiny. Above you were your betters, below you

were your inferiors, and there were even an unstable questionable few, cases so disputable that you might for

the rough purposes of every day at least, regard them as your equals. Head and centre of our system was Lady

Drew, her "leddyship," shrivelled, garrulous, with a wonderful memory for genealogies and very, very old,

and beside her and nearly as old, Miss Somerville, her cousin and companion. These two old souls lived like

driedup kernels in the great shell of Bladesover House, the shell that had once been gaily full of fops, of fine

ladies in powder and patches and courtly gentlemen with swords; and when there was no company they spent

whole days in the corner parlour just over the housekeeper's room, between reading and slumber and

caressing their two pet dogs. When I was a boy I used always to think of these two poor old creatures as

superior beings living, like God, somewhere through the ceiling. Occasionally they bumped about a bit and

one even heard them overhead, which gave them a greater effect of reality without mitigating their vertical

predominance. Sometimes too I saw them. Of course if I came upon them in the park or in the shrubbery

(where I was a trespasser) I hid or fled in pious horror, but I was upon due occasion taken into the Presence

by request. I remember her "leddyship" then as a thing of black silks and a golden chain, a quavering

injunction to me to be a good boy, a very shrunken looseskinned face and neck, and a ropy hand that

trembled a halfcrown into mine. Miss Somerville hovered behind, a paler thing of broken lavender and white

and black, with screwed up, sandylashed eyes. Her hair was yellow and her colour bright, and when we sat

in the housekeeper's room of a winter's night warming our toes and sipping elder wine, her maid would tell us

the simple secrets of that belated flush.... After my fight with young Garvell I was of course banished, and I

Then there came and went on these floors over our respectful heads, the Company; people I rarely saw, but

whose tricks and manners were imitated and discussed by their maids and valets in the housekeeper's room

and the steward's roomso that I had them through a medium at second hand. I gathered that none of the

company were really Lady Drew's equals, they were greater and lesser after the manner of all things in our

world. Once I remember there was a Prince, with a real live gentleman in attendance, and that was a little

above our customary levels and excited us all, and perhaps raised our expectations unduly. Afterwards,

Rabbits, the butler, came into my mother's room downstairs, red with indignation and with tears in his eyes.

"Look at that!" gasped Rabbits. My mother was speechless with horror. That was a sovereign, a mere

After Company, I remember, came anxious days, for the poor old women upstairs were left tired and cross

and vindictive, and in a state of physical and emotional indigestion after their social efforts....

On the lowest fringe of these real Olympians hung the vicarage people, and next to them came those

ambiguous beings who are neither quality nor subjects. The vicarage people certainly hold a place by

themselves in the typical English scheme; nothing is more remarkable than the progress the Church has

madesociallyin the last two hundred years. In the early eighteenth century the vicar was rather under

than over the housesteward, and was deemed a fitting match for the housekeeper or any not too morally

discredited discard. The eighteenth century literature is full of his complaints that he might not remain at

table to share the pie. He rose above these indignities because of the abundance of younger sons. When I

meet the large assumptions of the contemporary cleric, I am apt to think of these things. It is curious to note

that today that downtrodden, organplaying creature, the Church of England village Schoolmaster, holds

much the same position as the seventeenth century parson. The doctor in Bladesover ranked below the vicar

but above the "vet," artists and summer visitors squeezed in above or below this point according to their

appearance and expenditure, and then in a carefully arranged scale came the tenantry, the butler and

housekeeper, the village shopkeeper, the head keeper, the cook, the publican, the second keeper, the

blacksmith (whose status was complicated by his daughter keeping the postofficeand a fine hash she used

to make of telegrams too!) the village shopkeeper's eldest son, the first footman, younger sons of the village

All these conceptions and applications of a universal precedence and much else I drank in at Bladesover, as I

listened to the talk of valets, ladies'maids, Rabbits the butler and my mother in the muchcupboarded,

whitepainted, chintzbrightened housekeeper's room where the upper servants assembled, or of footmen and

Rabbits and estate men of all sorts among the green baize and Windsor chairs of the pantrywhere Rabbits,

being above the law, sold beer without a license or any compunctionor of housemaids and stillroom

maids in the bleak, mattingcarpeted stillroom or of the cook and her kitchen maids and casual friends

Of course their own ranks and places came by implication to these people, and it was with the ranks and

places of the Olympians that the talk mainly concerned itself. There was an old peerage and a Crockford

together with the books of recipes, the Whitaker's Almanack, the Old Moore's Almanack, and the eighteenth

century dictionary, on the little dresser that broke the cupboards on one side of my mother's room; there was

another peerage, with the covers off, in the pantry; there was a new peerage in the billiardroom, and I seem

to remember another in the anomalous apartment that held the upper servants' bagatelle board and in which,

after the Hall dinner, they partook of the luxury of sweets. And if you had asked any of those upper servants

how such and such a Prince of Battenberg was related to, let us say, Mr. Cunninghame Graham or the Duke

of Argyle, you would have been told upon the nail. As a boy, I heard a great deal of that sort of thing, and if

to this day I am still a little vague about courtesy titles and the exact application of honorifics, it is, I can

assure you, because I hardened my heart, and not from any lack of adequate opportunity of mastering these

Dominating all these memories is the figure of my mothermy mother who did not love me because I grew

liker my father every dayand who knew with inflexible decision her place and the place of every one in the

worldexcept the place that concealed my fatherand in some details mine. Subtle points were put to her. I

can see and hear her saying now, "No, Miss Fison, peers of England go in before peers of the United

Kingdom, and he is merely a peer of the United Kingdom." She had much exercise in placing people's

servants about her teatable, where the etiquette was very strict. I wonder sometimes if the etiquette of

housekeepers' rooms is as strict today, and what my mother would have made of a chauffeur....

On the whole I am glad that I saw so much as I did of Bladesoverif for no other reason than because seeing

it when I did, quite naively, believing in it thoroughly, and then coming to analyse it, has enabled me to

understand much that would be absolutely incomprehensible in the structure of English society. Bladesover

is, I am convinced, the clue to almost all that is distinctively British and perplexing to the foreign inquirer in

England and the Englishspeaking peoples. Grasp firmly that England was all Bladesover two hundred years

ago; that it has had Reform Acts indeed, and suchlike changes of formula, but no essential revolution since

then; that all that is modern and different has come in as a thing intruded or as a gloss upon this predominant

formula, either impertinently or apologetically; and you will perceive at once the reasonableness, the

necessity, of that snobbishness which is the distinctive quality of English thought. Everybody who is not

actually in the shadow of a Bladesover is as it were perpetually seeking after lost orientations. We have never

broken with our tradition, never even symbolically hewed it to pieces, as the French did in quivering fact in

the Terror. But all the organizing ideas have slackened, the old habitual bonds have relaxed or altogether

come undone. And America too, is, as it were, a detached, outlying part of that estate which has expanded in

queer ways. George Washington, Esquire, was of the gentlefolk, and he came near being a King. It was

Plutarch, you know, and nothing intrinsically American that prevented George Washington being a King....

I hated teatime in the housekeeper's room more than anything else at Bladesover. And more particularly I

hated it when Mrs. Mackridge and Mrs. Booch and Mrs. LatudeFernay were staying in the house. They

Old friends of Lady Drew's had rewarded them posthumously for a prolonged devotion to their minor

comforts, and Mrs. Booch was also trustee for a favourite Skye terrier. Every year Lady Drew gave them an

invitationa reward and encouragement of virtue with especial reference to my mother and Miss Fison, the

maid. They sat about in black and shiny and flouncey clothing adorned with gimp and beads, eating great

quantities of cake, drinking much tea in a stately manner and reverberating remarks.

I remember these women as immense. No doubt they were of negotiable size, but I was only a very little chap

and they have assumed nightmare proportions in my mind. They loomed, they bulged, they impended. Mrs.

Mackridge was large and dark; there was a marvel about her head, inasmuch as she was bald. She wore a

dignified cap, and in front of that upon her brow, hair was PAINTED. I have never seen the like since. She

had been maid to the widow of Sir Roderick Blenderhasset Impey, some sort of governor or suchlike portent

in the East Indies, and from her remainsin Mrs. MackridgeI judge Lady Impey was a very stupendous

and crushing creature indeed. Lady Impey had been of the Juno type, haughty, unapproachable, given to

irony and a caustic wit. Mrs. Mackridge had no wit, but she had acquired the caustic voice and gestures along

with the old satins and trimmings of the great lady. When she told you it was a fine morning, she seemed also

to be telling you you were a fool and a low fool to boot; when she was spoken to, she had a way of

acknowledging your poor tinkle of utterance with a voluminous, scornful "Haw!" that made you want to burn

Mrs. Booch was a smaller woman, brown haired, with queer little curls on either side of her face, large blue

eyes and a small set of stereotyped remarks that constituted her entire mental range. Mrs. LatudeFernay has

left, oddly enough, no memory at all except her name and the effect of a greengrey silk dress, all set with

gold and blue buttons. I fancy she was a large blonde. Then there was Miss Fison, the maid who served both

Lady Drew and Miss Somerville, and at the end of the table opposite my mother, sat Rabbits the butler.

Rabbits, for a butler, was an unassuming man, and at tea he was not as you know butlers, but in a morning

coat and a black tie with blue spots. Still, he was large, with side whiskers, even if his cleanshaven mouth

was weak and little. I sat among these people on a high, hard, early Gregorian chair, trying to exist, like a

feeble seedling amidst great rocks, and my mother sat with an eye upon me, resolute to suppress the slightest

manifestation of vitality. It was hard on me, but perhaps it was also hard upon these rather overfed, ageing,

pretending people, that my youthful restlessness and rebellious unbelieving eyes should be thrust in among

Tea lasted for nearly threequarters of an hour, and I sat it out perforce; and day after day the talk was

The word sugar would stir the mind of Mrs. Mackridge. "They say," she would begin, issuing her

proclamationat least half her sentences began "they say""sugar is fattaning, nowadays. Many of the

"Not with anything," said Mrs. Mackridge, with an air of crushing repartee, and drank.

"They say," said Mrs. Mackridge, inflexibly, "the doctors are not recommanding it now."

Then, to the table at large: "Poor Sir Roderick, before he died, consumed great quantaties of sugar. I have

This ended the first skirmish. A certain gloom of manner and a pause was considered due to the sacred

Then, perhaps, Mrs. Booch would produce a favourite piece from her repertoire. "The evenings are drawing

out nicely," she would say, or if the season was decadent, "How the evenings draw in!" It was an invaluable

My mother, who sat with her back to the window, would always consider it due to Mrs. Booch to turn about

and regard the evening in the act of elongation or contraction, whichever phase it might be.

A brisk discussion of how long we were to the longest or shortest day would ensue, and die away at last

Mrs. Mackridge, perhaps, would reopen. She had many intelligent habits; among others she read the

paperThe Morning Post. The other ladies would at times tackle that sheet, but only to read the births,

marriages, and deaths on the front page. It was, of course, the old Morning Post that cost threepence, not the

brisk coruscating young thing of today. "They say," she would open, "that Lord Tweedums is to go to

"Isn't he," said my mother, "the Earl of Slumgold's cousin?" She knew he was; it was an entirely irrelevant

"The same, ma'am," said Mrs. Mackridge. "They say he was extremelay popular in New South Wales. They

looked up to him greatlay. I knew him, ma'am, as a young man. A very nice pleasant young fella."

"'Is predecessor," said Rabbits, who had acquired from some clerical model a precise emphatic articulation

without acquiring at the same time the aspirates that would have graced it, "got into trouble at Sydney."

"'E came to Templemorton after 'e came back, and I remember them talking 'im over after 'e'd gone again."

"'Is fuss was quotin' poetry, ma'am. 'E saidwhat was it 'e said'They lef' their country for their country's

good,'which in some way was took to remind them of their being originally convic's, though now

"Sir Roderick used to say," said Mrs. Mackridge, "that the First Thing,"here Mrs. Mackridge paused and

looked dreadfully at me"and the Second Thing"here she fixed me again"and the Third Thing"now

I was released"needed in a colonial governor is Tact." She became aware of my doubts again, and added

predominantly, "It has always struck me that that was a Singularly True Remark."

I resolved that if ever I found this polypus of Tact growing up in my soul, I would tear it out by the roots,

"They're queer peoplecolonials," said Rabbits, "very queer. When I was at Templemorton I see something

of 'em. Queer fellows, some of 'em. Very respectful of course, free with their money in a spasammy sort of

way, but Some of 'em, I must confess, make me nervous. They have an eye on you. They watch youas

My mother said nothing in that discussion. The word colonies always upset her. She was afraid, I think, that

if she turned her mind in that direction my errant father might suddenly and shockingly be discovered, no

doubt conspicuously bigamic and altogether offensive and revolutionary. She did not want to rediscover my

It is curious that when I was a little listening boy I had such an idea of our colonies that I jeered in my heart at

Mrs. Mackridge's colonial ascendancy. These brave emancipated sunburnt English of the open, I thought,

suffer these aristocratic invaders as a quaint anachronism, but as for being gratified!

It is a little difficult to explain why I did not come to do what was the natural thing for any one in my

circumstances to do, and take my world for granted. A certain innate scepticism, I think, explains it and a

certain inaptitude for sympathetic assimilation. My father, I believe, was a sceptic; my mother was certainly a

I was an only child, and to this day I do not know whether my father is living or dead. He fled my mother's

virtues before my distincter memories began. He left no traces in his flight, and she, in her indignation,

destroyed every vestige that she could of him. Never a photograph nor a scrap of his handwriting have I seen;

and it was, I know, only the accepted code of virtue and discretion that prevented her destroying her marriage

certificate and me, and so making a clean sweep of her matrimonial humiliation. I suppose I must inherit

something of the moral stupidity that would enable her to make a holocaust of every little personal thing she

had of him. There must have been presents made by him as a lover, for examplebooks with kindly

inscriptions, letters perhaps, a flattened flower, a ring, or suchlike gage. She kept her weddingring, of

course, but all the others she destroyed. She never told me his christian name or indeed spoke a word to me of

him; though at times I came near daring to ask her: add what I have of himit isn't muchI got from his

brother, my hero, my uncle Ponderevo. She wore her ring; her marriage certificate she kept in a sealed

envelope in the very bottom of her largest trunk, and me she sustained at a private school among the Kentish

hills. You must not think I was always at Bladesovereven in my holidays. If at the time these came round,

Lady Drew was vexed by recent Company, or for any other reason wished to take it out of my mother, then

she used to ignore the customary reminder my mother gave her, and I "stayed on" at the school.

But such occasions were rare, and I suppose that between ten and fourteen I averaged fifty days a year at

Don't imagine I deny that was a fine thing for me. Bladesover, in absorbing the whole countryside, had not

altogether missed greatness. The Bladesover system has at least done one good thing for England, it has

abolished the peasant habit of mind. If many of us still live and breathe pantry and housekeeper's room, we

are quit of the dream of living by economising parasitically on hens and pigs.... About that park there were

some elements of a liberal education; there was a great space of greensward not given over to manure and

food grubbing; there was mystery, there was matter for the imagination. It was still a park of deer. I saw

something of the life of these dappled creatures, heard the belling of stags, came upon young fawns among

the bracken, found bones, skulls, and antlers in lonely places. There were corners that gave a gleam of

meaning to the word forest, glimpses of unstudied natural splendour. There was a slope of bluebells in the

broken sunlight under the newly green beeches in the west wood that is now precious sapphire in my

And in the house there were books. The rubbish old Lady Drew read I never saw; stuff of the Maria Monk

type, I have since gathered, had a fascination for her; but back in the past there had been a Drew of

intellectual enterprise, Sir Cuthbert, the son of Sir Matthew who built the house; and thrust away, neglected

and despised, in an old room upstairs, were books and treasures of his that my mother let me rout among

during a spell of wintry wet. Sitting under a dormer window on a shelf above great stores of tea and spices, I

became familiar with much of Hogarth in a big portfolio, with Raphael, there was a great book of engravings

from the stanzas of Raphael in the Vaticanand with most of the capitals of Europe as they had looked

about 1780, by means of several pig ironmoulded books of views. There was also a broad eighteenth

century atlas with huge wandering maps that instructed me mightily. It had splendid adornments about each

map title; Holland showed a fisherman and his boat; Russia a Cossack; Japan, remarkable people attired in

pagodasI say it deliberately, "pagodas." There were Terrae Incognitae in every continent then, Poland,

Sarmatia, lands since lost; and many a voyage I made with a blunted pin about that large, incorrect and

dignified world. The books in that little old closet had been banished, I suppose, from the saloon during the

Victorian revival of good taste and emasculated orthodoxy, but my mother had no suspicion of their

character. So I read and understood the good sound rhetoric of Tom Paine's "Rights of Man," and his

"Common Sense," excellent books, once praised by bishops and since sedulously lied about. Gulliver was

there unexpurgated, strong meat for a boy perhaps but not too strong I holdI have never regretted that I

escaped niceness in these affairs. The satire of Traldragdubh made my blood boil as it was meant to do, but I

hated Swift for the Houyhnhnms and never quite liked a horse afterwards. Then I remember also a translation

of Voltaire's "Candide," and "Rasselas;" and, vast book though it was, I really believe I read, in a muzzy sort

of way of course, from end to end, and even with some reference now and then to the Atlas, Gibbonin

These readings whetted my taste for more, and surreptitiously I raided the bookcases in the big saloon. I got

through quite a number of books before my sacrilegious temerity was discovered by Ann, the old

headhousemaid. I remember that among others I tried a translation of Plato's "Republic" then, and found

extraordinarily little interest in it; I was much too young for that; but "Vathek""Vathek" was glorious stuff.

The thought of "Vathek" always brings back with it my boyish memory of the big saloon at Bladesover.

It was a huge long room with many windows opening upon the park, and each windowthere were a dozen

or more reaching from the floor uphad its elaborate silk or satin curtains, heavily fringed, a canopy (is it?)

above, its completely white shutters folding into the deep thickness of the wall. At either end of that great still

place was an immense marble chimneypiece; the end by the bookcase showed the wolf and Romulus and

Remus, with Homer and Virgil for supporters; the design of the other end I have forgotten. Frederick, Prince

of Wales, swaggered flatly over the one, twice lifesize, but mellowed by the surface gleam of oil; and over

the other was an equally colossal group of departed Drews as sylvan deities, scantily clad, against a

stormrent sky. Down the centre of the elaborate ceiling were three chandeliers, each bearing some hundreds

of dangling glass lustres, and over the interminable carpetit impressed me as about as big as Sarmatia in

the storeroom Atlaswere islands and archipelagoes of chintzcovered chairs and couches, tables, great

Sevres vases on pedestals, a bronze man and horse. Somewhere in this wilderness one came, I remember,

One came down the main service stairsthat was legal, and illegality began in a little landing when, very

cautiously, one went through a red baize door. A little passage led to the hall, and here one reconnoitered for

Ann, the old headhousemaidthe younger housemaids were friendly and did not count. Ann located, came

a dash across the open space at the foot of that great staircase that has never been properly descended since

powder went out of fashion, and so to the saloon door. A beast of an oscillating Chinaman in china, as large

as life, grimaced and quivered to one's lightest steps. That door was the perilous place; it was double with the

thickness of the wall between, so that one could not listen beforehand for the whisk of the featherbrush on

the other side. Oddly ratlike, is it not, this darting into enormous places in pursuit of the abandoned crumbs

And I found Langhorne's "Plutarch" too, I remember, on those shelves. It seems queer to me now to think that

I acquired pride and selfrespect, the idea of a state and the germ of public spirit, in such a furtive fashion;

queer, too, that it should rest with an old Greek, dead these eighteen hundred years to teach that.

The school I went to was the sort of school the Bladesover system permitted. The public schools that add

comic into existence in the brief glow of the Renascence had been taken possession of by the ruling class; the

lower classes were not supposed to stand in need of schools, and our middle stratum got the schools it

deserved, private schools, schools any unqualified pretender was free to establish. Mine was kept by a man

who had had the energy to get himself a College of Preceptors diploma, and considering how cheap his

charges were, I will readily admit the place might have been worse. The building was a dingy yellowbrick

residence outside the village, with the schoolroom as an outbuilding of lath and plaster.

I do not remember that my schooldays were unhappyindeed I recall a good lot of fine mixed fun in

thembut I cannot without grave risk of misinterpretation declare that we were at all nice and refined. We

fought much, not sound formal fighting, but "scrapping" of a sincere and murderous kind, into which one

might bring one's bootsit made us tough at any rateand several of us were the sons of London publicans,

who distinguished "scraps" where one meant to hurt from ordered pugilism, practising both arts, and having,

moreover, precocious linguistic gifts. Our cricketfield was bald about the wickets, and we played without

style and disputed with the umpire; and the teaching was chiefly in the hands of a lout of nineteen, who wore

readymade clothes and taught despicably. The headmaster and proprietor taught us arithmetic, algebra, and

Euclid, and to the older boys even trigonometry, himself; he had a strong mathematical bias, and I think now

We had one inestimable privilege at that school, and that was spiritual neglect. We dealt with one another

with the forcible simplicity of natural boys, we "cheeked," and "punched" and "clouted"; we thought

ourselves Red Indians and cowboys and suchlike honourable things, and not young English gentlemen; we

never felt the strain of "Onward Christian soldiers," nor were swayed by any premature piety in the cold oak

pew of our Sunday devotions. All that was good. We spent our rare pennies in the uncensored reading matter

of the village dame's shop, on the Boys of England, and honest penny dreadfulsripping stuff, stuff that

anticipated Haggard and Stevenson, badly printed and queerly illustrated, and very very good for us. On our

halfholidays we were allowed the unusual freedom of rambling in twos and threes wide and far about the

land, talking experimentally, dreaming wildly. There was much in those walks! To this day the landscape of

the Kentish world, with its low broad distances, its hop gardens and golden stretches of wheat, its oasts and

square church towers, its background of downland and hangers, has for me a faint sense of adventure added

to the pleasure of its beauty. We smoked on occasion, but nobody put us up to the proper "boyish" things to

do; we never "robbed an orchard" for example, though there were orchards all about us, we thought stealing

was sinful, we stole incidental apples and turnips and strawberries from the fields indeed, but in a criminal

inglorious fashion, and afterwards we were ashamed. We had our days of adventure, but they were natural

accidents, our own adventures. There was one hot day when several of us, walking out towards Maidstone,

were incited by the devil to despise ginger beer, and we fuddled ourselves dreadfully with ale; and a time

when our young minds were infected to the pitch of buying pistols, by the legend of the Wild West. Young

Roots from Highbury came back with a revolver and cartridges, and we went off six strong to live a free wild

life one holiday afternoon. We fired our first shot deep in the old flint mine at Chiselstead, and nearly burst

our ear drums; then we fired in a primrose studded wood by Pickthorn Green, and I gave a false alarm of

"keeper," and we fled in disorder for a mile. After which Roots suddenly shot at a pheasant in the high road

by Chiselstead, and then young Barker told lies about the severity of the game laws and made Roots sore

afraid, and we hid the pistol in a dry ditch outside the school field. A day or so after we got in again, and

ignoring a certain fouling and rusting of the barrel, tried for a rabbit at three hundred yards. Young Roots

blew a molehill at twenty paces into a dust cloud, burnt his fingers, and scorched his face; and the weapon

having once displayed this strange disposition to flame back upon the shooter, was not subsequently fired.

One main source of excitement for us was "cheeking" people in vans and carts upon the Goudhurst road; and

getting myself into a monstrous white mess in the chalk pits beyond the village, and catching yellow jaundice

as a sequel to bathing stark naked with three other Adamites, old Ewart leading that function, in the rivulet

across Hickson's meadows, are among my memorabilia. Those free imaginative afternoons! how much they

were for us! how much they did for us! All streams came from the then undiscovered "sources of the Nile" in

those days, all thickets were Indian jungles, and our best game, I say it with pride, I invented. I got it out of

the Bladesover saloon. We found a wood where "Trespassing" was forbidden, and did the "Retreat of the Ten

Thousand" through it from end to end, cutting our way bravely through a host of nettle beds that barred our

path, and not forgetting to weep and kneel when at last we emerged within sight of the High Road Sea. So we

have burst at times, weeping and rejoicing, upon startled wayfarers. Usually I took the part of that

distinguished general Xenophenand please note the quantity of the o. I have all my classical names like

that,Socrates rhymes with Bates for me, and except when the bleak eye of some scholar warns me of his

standards of judgment, I use those dear old mispronunciations still. The little splash into Latin made during

my days as a chemist washed off nothing of the habit. Well,if I met those great gentlemen of the past with

their accents carelessly adjusted I did at least meet them alive, as an equal, and in a living tongue. Altogether

my school might easily have been worse for me, and among other good things it gave me a friend who has

This was Ewart, who is now a monumental artist at Woking, after many vicissitudes. Dear chap, how he did

stick out of his clothes to be sure! He was a longlimbed lout, ridiculously tall beside my more youth full

compactness, and, except that there was no black moustache under his nose blob, he had the same round

knobby face as he has today, the same bright and active hazel brown eyes, the stare, the meditative moment,

the insinuating reply. Surely no boy ever played the fool as Bob Ewart used to play it, no boy had a readier

knack of mantling the world with wonder. Commonness vanished before Ewart, at his expository touch all

things became memorable and rare. From him I first heard tell of love, but only after its barbs were already

sticking in my heart. He was, I know now the bastard of that great improvident artist, Rickmann Ewart; he

brought the light of a lax world that at least had not turned its back upon beauty, into the growing

I won his heart by a version of Vathek, and after that we were inseparable yarning friends. We merged our

intellectual stock so completely that I wonder sometimes how much I did not become Ewart, how much

And then when I had newly passed my fourteenth birthday, came my tragic disgrace.

It was in my midsummer holidays that the thing happened, and it was through the Honourable Beatrice

She descended unexpectedly into a peaceful interlude that followed the annual going of those Three Great

Women. She came into the old nursery upstairs, and every day she had tea with us in the housekeeper's room.

She was eight, and she came with a nurse called Nannie; and to begin with, I did not like her at all.

Nobody liked this irruption into the downstairs rooms; the two "gave trouble,"a dire offence; Nannie's

sense of duty to her charge led to requests and demands that took my mother's breath away. Eggs at unusual

times, the reboiling of milk, the rejection of an excellent milk puddingnot negotiated respectfully but

dictated as of right. Nannie was a dark, longfeatured, taciturn woman in a grey dress; she had a furtive

inflexibility of manner that finally dismayed and crushed and overcame. She conveyed she was "under

orders"like a Greek tragedy. She was that strange product of the old time, a devoted, trusted servant; she

had, as it were, banked all her pride and will with the greater, more powerful people who employed her, in

return for a lifelong security of servitudethe bargain was nonetheless binding for being implicit. Finally

they were to pension her, and she would die the hated treasure of a boardinghouse. She had built up in

herself an enormous habit of reference to these upstairs people, she had curbed down all discordant

murmurings of her soul, her very instincts were perverted or surrendered. She was sexless, her personal pride

was all transferred, she mothered another woman's child with a hard, joyless devotion that was at least

entirely compatible with a stoical separation. She treated us all as things that counted for nothing save to fetch

The queer chances of later years come between me and a distinctly separated memory of that childish face.

When I think of Beatrice, I think of her as I came to know her at a later time, when at last I came to know her

so well that indeed now I could draw her, and show a hundred little delicate things you would miss in looking

at her. But even then I remember how I noted the infinite delicacy of her childish skin and the fine eyebrow,

finer than the finest feather that ever one felt on the breast of a bird. She was one of those elfin, rather

precocious little girls, quick coloured, with dark hair, naturally curling dusky hair that was sometimes astray

over her eyes, and eyes that were sometimes impishly dark, and sometimes a clear brown yellow. And from

the very outset, after a most cursory attention to Rabbits, she decided that the only really interesting thing at

The elders talked in their formal dull waytelling Nannie the trite old things about the park and the village

that they told every one, and Beatrice watched me across the table with a pitiless little curiosity that made me

"Nannie," she said, pointing, and Nannie left a question of my mother's disregarded to attend to her; "is he a

Nannie surveyed me with brutal inhumanity. "You mustn't talk too much," she said to her charge, and cut

Beatrice became malignant. Her eyes explored me with unjustifiable hostility. "He's got dirty hands," she

Then she gave herself up to cake with an appearance of entire forgetfulness of me that filled me with hate and

a passionate desire to compel her to admire me.... And the next day before tea, I did for the first time in my

So our acquaintance began, and presently was deepened by a whim of hers. She had a cold and was kept

indoors, and confronted Nannie suddenly with the alternative of being hopelessly naughty, which in her case

involved a generous amount of screaming unsuitable for the ears of an elderly, shaky, rich aunt, or having me

up to the nursery to play with her all the afternoon. Nannie came downstairs and borrowed me in a careworn

manner; and I was handed over to the little creature as if I was some large variety of kitten. I had never had

anything to do with a little girl before, I thought she was more beautiful and wonderful and bright than

anything else could possibly be in life, and she found me the gentlest of slavesthough at the same time, as I

made evident, fairly strong. And Nannie was amazed to find the afternoon slip cheerfully and rapidly away.

She praised my manners to Lady Drew and to my mother, who said she was glad to hear well of me, and after

that I played with Beatrice several times. The toys she had remain in my memory still as great splendid

things, gigantic to all my previous experience of toys, and we even went to the great doll's house on the

nursery landing to play discreetly with that, the great doll's house that the Prince Regent had given Sir Harry

Drew's firstborn (who died at five, that was a not ineffectual model of Bladesover itself, and contained

eightyfive dolls and had cost hundreds of pounds. I played under imperious direction with that toy of glory.

I went back to school when that holiday was over, dreaming of beautiful things, and got Ewart to talk to me

of love; and I made a great story out of the doll's house, a story that, taken over into Ewart's hands, speedily

One other holiday there was when I saw something of heroddly enough my memory of that second holiday

in which she played a part is vagueand then came a gap of a year, and then my disgrace.

Now I sit down to write my story and tell over again things in their order, I find for the first time how

inconsecutive and irrational a thing the memory can be. One recalls acts and cannot recall motives; one

recalls quite vividly moments that stand out inexplicably things adrift, joining on to nothing, leading

nowhere. I think I must have seen Beatrice and her halfbrother quite a number of times in my last holiday at

Bladesover, but I really cannot recall more than a little of the quality of the circumstances. That great crisis of

my boyhood stands out very vividly as an effect, as a sort of cardinal thing for me, but when I look for

details, particularly details that led up to the crisisI cannot find them in any developing order at all. This

halfbrother, Archie Garvell, was a new factor in the affair. I remember him clearly as a fairhaired,

supercilious looking, weedilylank boy, much taller than I, but I should imagine very little heavier, and that

we hated each other by a sort of instinct from the beginning; and yet I cannot remember my first meeting with

Looking back into these past thingsit is like rummaging in a neglected attic that has experienced the

attentions of some whimsical robberI cannot even account for the presence of these children at Bladesover.

They were, I know, among the innumerable cousins of Lady Drew, and according to the theories of

downstairs candidates for the ultimate possession of Bladesover. If they were, their candidature was

unsuccessful. But that great place, with all its faded splendour, its fine furniture, its large traditions, was

entirely at the old lady's disposition; and I am inclined to think it is true that she used this fact to torment and

dominate a number of eligible people. Lord Osprey was among the number of these, and she showed these

hospitalities to his motherless child and stepchild, partly, no doubt, because he was poor, but quite as much,

I nowadays imagine, in the dim hope of finding some affectionate or imaginative outcome of contact with

them. Nannie had dropped out of the world this second time, and Beatrice was in the charge of an extremely

amiable and ineffectual poor armyclass young woman whose name I never knew. They were, I think, two

remarkably illmanaged and enterprising children. I seem to remember too, that it was understood that I was

not a fit companion for them, and that our meetings had to be as unostentatious as possible. It was Beatrice

I am certain I knew quite a lot about love at fourteen and that I was quite as much in love with Beatrice then

as any impassioned adult could be, and that Beatrice was, in her way, in love with me. It is part of the decent

and useful pretences of our world that children of the age at which we were, think nothing, feel nothing,

know nothing of love. It is wonderful what people the English are for keeping up pretences. But indeed I

cannot avoid telling that Beatrice and I talked of love and kissed and embraced one another.

I recall something of one talk under the overhanging bushes of the shrubberyI on the park side of the stone

wall, and the lady of my worship a little inelegantly astride thereon. Inelegantly do I say? you should have

seen the sweet imp as I remember her. Just her poise on the wall comes suddenly clear before me, and behind

her the light various branches of the bushes of the shrubbery that my feet might not profane, and far away and

high behind her, dim and stately, the cornice of the great facade of Bladesover rose against the dappled sky.

Our talk must have been serious and businesslike, for we were discussing my social position.

"I don't love Archie," she had said, apropos of nothing; and then in a whisper, leaning forward with the hair

But she had been a little pressing to have it clear that I was not and could not be a servant.

"I'd like to fight," I said. "But a common soldier it's no honour to have to be told to fight and to be looked

"Couldn't you be?" she said, and looked at me doubtfully; and the spaces of the social system opened between

Then, as became a male of spirit, I took upon myself to brag and lie my way through this trouble. I said I was

a poor man, and poor men went into the navy; that I "knew" mathematics, which no army officer did; and I

claimed Nelson for an exemplar, and spoke very highly of my outlook upon blue water. "He loved Lady

We were somewhere near that when the egregious governess became audible, calling "Beeeeatrice!

"Snifty beast!" said my lady, and tried to get on with the conversation; but that governess made things

"Come here!" said my lady suddenly, holding out a grubby hand; and I went very close to her, and she put her

"You are my humble, faithful lover," she demanded in a whisper, her warm flushed face near touching mine,

And she put her arm about my head and put out her lips and we kissed, and boy though I was, I was all

My lady had vanished, with one wild kick of her blackstocking leg. A moment after, I heard her sustaining

the reproaches of her governess, and explaining her failure to answer with an admirable lucidity and

I felt it was unnecessary for me to be seen just then, and I vanished guiltily round the corner into the West

Wood, and so to lovedreams and singlehanded play, wandering along one of those meandering bracken

valleys that varied Bladesover park. And that day and for many days that kiss upon my lips was a seal, and by

Then I remember an expedition we madeshe, I, and her halfbrotherinto those West Woodsthey two

were supposed to be playing in the shrubberyand how we were Indians there, and made a wigwam out of a

pile of beech logs, and how we stalked deer, crept near and watched rabbits feeding in a glade, and almost got

a squirrel. It was play seasoned with plentiful disputing between me and young Garvell, for each firmly

insisted upon the leading roles, and only my wider readingI had read ten stories to his onegave me the

ascendency over him. Also I scored over him by knowing how to find the eagle in a bracken stem. And

somehowI don't remember what led to it at allI and Beatrice, two hot and ruffled creatures, crept in

among the tall bracken and hid from him. The great fronds rose above us, five feet or more, and as I had

learnt how to wriggle through that undergrowth with the minimum of betrayal by tossing greenery above, I

led the way. The ground under bracken is beautifully clear and faintly scented in warm weather; the stems

come up black and then green; if you crawl flat, it is a tropical forest in miniature. I led the way and Beatrice

crawled behind, and then as the green of the further glade opened before us, stopped. She crawled up to me,

her hot little face came close to mine; once more she looked and breathed close to me, and suddenly she flung

her arm about my neck and dragged me to earth beside her, and kissed me and kissed me again. We kissed,

we embraced and kissed again, all without a word; we desisted, we stared and hesitatedthen in a suddenly

damped mood and a little perplexed at ourselves, crawled out, to be presently run down and caught in the

That comes back very clearly to me, and other vague memoriesI know old Hall and his gun, out shooting

at jackdaws, came into our common experiences, but I don't remember how; and then at last, abruptly, our

fight in the Warren stands out. The Warren, like most places in England that have that name, was not

particularly a warren, it was a long slope of thorns and beeches through which a path ran, and made an

alternative route to the downhill carriage road between Bladesover and Ropedean. I don't know how we three

got there, but I have an uncertain fancy it was connected with a visit paid by the governess to the Ropedean

vicarage people. But suddenly Archie and I, in discussing a game, fell into a dispute for Beatrice. I had made

him the fairest offer: I was to be a Spanish nobleman, she was to be my wife, and he was to be a tribe of

Indians trying to carry her off. It seems to me a fairly attractive offer to a boy to be a whole tribe of Indians

"You can't be a gentleman, because you aren't. And you can't play Beatrice is your wife. It'sit's

Some earlier grudge in the day's affairs must have been in Archie's mind. "We let you play with us," said

But he carried his point. I let him carry it, and only began to grow angry three or four minutes later. Then we

were still discussing play and disputing about another game. Nothing seemed right for all of us.

He pointed a finger at me. He had struck to the heart of my shame. I made the only possible reply by a rush at

him. "Hello!" he cried, at my blackavised attack. He dropped back into an attitude that had some style in it,

parried my blow, got back at my cheek, and laughed with surprise and relief at his own success. Whereupon I

became a thing of murderous rage. He could box as well or better than Ihe had yet to realise I knew

anything of that at allbut I had fought once or twice to a finish with bare fists. I was used to inflicting and

enduring savage hurting, and I doubt if he had ever fought. I hadn't fought ten seconds before I felt this

softness in him, realised all that quality of modern upperclass England that never goes to the quick, that

hedges about rules and those petty points of honour that are the ultimate comminution of honour, that claims

credit for things demonstrably half done. He seemed to think that first hit of his and one or two others were

going to matter, that I ought to give in when presently my lip bled and dripped blood upon my clothes. So

before we had been at it a minute he had ceased to be aggressive except in momentary spurts, and I was

knocking him about almost as I wanted to do; and demanding breathlessly and fiercely, after our school

manner, whether he had had enough, not knowing that by his high code and his soft training it was equally

I have a very distinct impression of Beatrice dancing about us during the affair in a state of unladylike

appreciation, but I was too preoccupied to hear much of what she was saying. But she certainly backed us

both, and I am inclined to think nowit may be the disillusionment of my ripened yearswhichever she

Then young Garvell, giving way before my slogging, stumbled and fell over a big flint, and I, still following

the tradition of my class and school, promptly flung myself on him to finish him. We were busy with each

"Oh, Lady Drew!" I heard Beatrice cry. "They're fighting! They're fighting something awful!"

I looked over my shoulder. Archie's wish to get up became irresistible, and my resolve to go on with him

I became aware of the two old ladies, presences of black and purple silk and fur and shining dark things; they

had walked up through the Warren, while the horses took the hill easily, and so had come upon us. Beatrice

had gone to them at once with an air of taking refuge, and stood beside and a little behind them. We both rose

dejectedly. The two old ladies were evidently quite dreadfully shocked, and peering at us with their poor old

"It's Mrs. Ponderevo's George!" said Miss Somerville, so adding a conviction for ingratitude to my evident

"He broke the rules" said Archie, sobbing for breath. "I slipped, andhe hit me while I was down. He knelt

I produced an experienced handkerchief rolled up into a tight ball, and wiped the blood from my chin, but I

offered no explanation of my daring. Among other things that prevented that, I was too short of breath.

Beatrice, from behind the old ladies, regarded me intently and without hostility. I am inclined to think the

modification of my face through the damage to my lip interested her. It became dimly apparent to my

confused intelligence that I must not say these two had been playing with me. That would not be after the

rules of their game. I resolved in this difficult situation upon a sulky silence, and to take whatever

I have regretfully to admit that the Honourable Beatrice Normandy did, at the age of ten, betray me, abandon

me, and lie most abominably about me. She was, as a matter of fact, panicstricken about me, conscience

stricken too; she bolted from the very thought of my being her affianced lover and so forth, from the faintest

memory of kissing; she was indeed altogether disgraceful and human in her betrayal. She and her

halfbrother lied in perfect concord, and I was presented as a wanton assailant of my social betters. They

On the whole, I now perceive Lady Drew's decisions were, in the light of the evidence, reasonable and

They were conveyed to me by my mother, who was, I really believe, even more shocked by the grossness of

my social insubordination than Lady Drew. She dilated on her ladyship's kindnesses to me, on the effrontery

and wickedness of my procedure, and so came at last to the terms of my penance. "You must go up to young

I folded my arms on her tablecloth, and delivered my wicked little ultimatum. "I won't beg his pardon

"I don't care where I have to go or what I have to do, I won't beg his pardon," I said.

After that I was one against the world. Perhaps in my mother's heart there lurked some pity for me, but she

did not show it. She took the side of the young gentleman; she tried hard, she tried very hard, to make me say

So I went into exile in the dogcart to Redwood station, with Jukes the coachman, coldly silent, driving me,

I felt I had much to embitter me; the game had and the beginnings of fairness by any standards I knew.... But

the thing that embittered me most was that the Honourable Beatrice Normandy should have repudiated and

fled from me as though I was some sort of leper, and not even have taken a chance or so, to give me a

goodbye. She might have done that anyhow! Supposing I had told on her! But the son of a servant counts as

I solaced myself with some extraordinary dream of coming back to Bladesover, stern, powerful, after the

fashion of Coriolanus. I do not recall the details, but I have no doubt I displayed great magnanimity...

Well, anyhow I never said I was sorry for pounding young Garvell, and I am not sorry to this day.

When I was thus banished from Bladesover House, as it was then thought for good and all, I was sent by my

mother in a vindictive spirit, first to her cousin Nicodemus Frapp, and then, as a fully indentured apprentice,

My cousin Nicodemus Frapp was a baker in a back streeta slum ratherjust off that miserable narrow

mean high road that threads those exquisite beads, Rochester and Chatham. He was, I must admit, a shock to

me, much dominated by a young, plump, prolific, malingering wife; a bent, slowmoving, unwilling dark

man with flour in his hair and eyelashes, in the lines of his face and the seams of his coat. I've never had a

chance to correct my early impression of him, and he still remains an almost dreadful memory, a sort of

caricature of incompetent simplicity. As I remember him, indeed, he presented the servile tradition perfected.

He had no pride in his person; fine clothes and dressing up wasn't "for the likes of" him, so that he got his

wife, who was no artist at it, to cut his black hair at irregular intervals, and let his nails become disagreeable

to the fastidious eye; he had no pride in his business nor any initiative; his only virtues were not doing certain

things and hard work. "Your uncle," said my motherall grownup cousins were uncles by courtesy among

the Victorian middleclass "isn't much to look at or talk to, but he's a Good HardWorking Man." There

was a sort of base honourableness about toil, however needless, in that system of inversion. Another point of

It was very distinctly impressed on my mind that the Good HardWorking Man would have thought it

"fallallish" to own a pocket handkerchief. Poor old Frappdirty and crushed by, product of, Bladesover's

magnificence! He made no fight against the world at all, he was floundering in small debts that were not so

small but that finally they overwhelmed him, whenever there was occasion for any exertion his wife fell back

upon pains and her "condition," and God sent them many children, most of whom died, and so, by their

Resignation to God's will was the common device of these people in the face of every duty and every

emergency. There were no books in the house; I doubt if either of them had retained the capacity for reading

consecutively for more than a minute or so, and it was with amazement that day after day, over and above

stale bread, one beheld food and again more food amidst the litter that held permanent session on the

One might have doubted if either of them felt discomfort in this dusty darkness of existence, if it was not that

they did visibly seek consolation. They sought this and found it of a Sunday, not in strong drink and raving,

but in imaginary draughts of blood. They met with twenty or thirty other darkened and unclean people, all

dressed in dingy colours that would not show the dirt, in a little brickbuilt chapel equipped with a spavined

roarer of a harmonium, and there solaced their minds on the thought that all that was fair and free in life, all

that struggled, all that planned and made, all pride and beauty and honour, all fine and enjoyable things, were

irrevocably damned to everlasting torments. They were the selfappointed confidants of God's mockery of

his own creation. So at any rate they stick in my mind. Vaguer, and yet hardly less agreeable than this cosmic

jest, this coming "Yah, clever!" and general serving out and "showing up" of the lucky, the bold, and the

so they sang. I hear the drone and wheeze of that hymn now. I hated them with the bitter uncharitable

condemnation of boyhood, and a twinge of that hate comes back to me. As I write the words, the sounds and

then the scene return, these obscure, undignified people, a fat woman with asthma, an old Welsh milkseller

with a tumour on his bald head, who was the intellectual leader of the sect, a hugevoiced haberdasher with a

big black beard, a whitefaced, extraordinarily pregnant woman, his wife, a spectacled rate collector with a

bent back.... I hear the talk about souls, the strange battered old phrases that were coined ages ago in the

seaports of the sundry Levant, of balm of Gilead and manna in the desert, of gourds that give shade and

water in a thirsty land; I recall again the way in which at the conclusion of the service the talk remained pious

in form but became medical in substance, and how the women got together for obstetric whisperings. I, as a

If Bladesover is my key for the explanation of England, I think my invincible persuasion that I understand

I slept in a dingy sheeted bed with the two elder survivors of Frapp fecundity, and spent my week days in

helping in the laborious disorder of the shop and bakehouse, in incidental deliveries of bread and so forth, and

in parrying the probings of my uncle into my relations with the Blood, and his confidential explanations that

ten shillings a weekwhich was what my mother paid himwas not enough to cover my accommodation.

He was very anxious to keep that, but also he wanted more. There were neither books nor any seat nor corner

in that house where reading was possible, no newspaper ever brought the clash of worldly things into its

heavenward seclusion; horror of it all grew in me daily, and whenever I could I escaped into the streets and

tramped about Chatham. The news shops appealed to me particularly. One saw there smudgy illustrated

sheets, the Police News in particular, in which vilely drawn pictures brought home to the dullest intelligence

an interminable succession of squalid crimes, women murdered and put into boxes, buried under floors, old

men bludgeoned at midnight by robbers, people thrust suddenly out of trains, happy lovers shot, vitrioled and

so forth by rivals. I got my first glimpse of the life of pleasure in foully drawn pictures of "police raids" on

this and that. Interspersed with these sheets were others in which Sloper, the urban John Bull, had his fling

with gin bottle and obese umbrella, or the kindly empty faces of the Royal Family appeared and reappeared,

visiting this, opening that, getting married, getting offspring, lying in state, doing everything but anything, a

I have never revisited Chatham; the impression it has left on my mind is one of squalid compression, unlit by

any gleam of a maturer charity. All its effects arranged themselves as antithetical to the Bladesover effects.

They confirmed and intensified all that Bladesover suggested. Bladesover declared itself to be the land, to be

essentially England; I have already told how its airy spaciousness, its wide dignity, seemed to thrust village,

church, and vicarage into corners, into a secondary and conditional significance. Here one gathered the

corollary of that. Since the whole wide country of Kent was made up of contiguous Bladesovers and for the

gentlefolk, the surplus of population, all who were not good tenants nor good labourers, Church of England,

submissive and respectful, were necessarily thrust together, jostled out of sight, to fester as they might in this

place that had the colours and even the smells of a wellpacked dustbin. They should be grateful even for

And I loafed about this wilderness of crowded dinginess, with young, receptive, wideopen eyes, and

through the blessing (or curse) of some fairy godmother of mine, asking and asking again: "But after all,

I wandered up through Rochester once, and had a glimpse of the Stour valley above the town, all horrible

with cement works and foully smoking chimneys and rows of workmen's cottages, minute, ugly,

uncomfortable, and grimy. So I had my first intimation of how industrialism must live in a landlord's land. I

spent some hours, too, in the streets that give upon the river, drawn by the spell of the sea. But I saw barges

and ships stripped of magic and mostly devoted to cement, ice, timber, and coal. The sailors looked to me

gross and slovenly men, and the shipping struck me as clumsy, ugly, old, and dirty. I discovered that most

sails don't fit the ships that hoist them, and that there may be as pitiful and squalid a display of poverty with a

vessel as with a man. When I saw colliers unloading, watched the workers in the hold filling up silly little

sacks and the succession of blackened, halfnaked men that ran to and fro with these along a plank over a

thirtyfoot drop into filth and mud, I was first seized with admiration of their courage and toughness and

then, "But after all, WHY?" and the stupid ugliness of all this waste of muscle and endurance came home

to me. Among other things it obviously wasted and deteriorated the coal.... And I had imagined great things

But such impressions came into my leisure, and of that I had no excess. Most of my time was spent doing

things for Uncle Frapp, and my evenings and nights perforce in the company of the two eldest of my cousins.

He was errand boy at an oil shop and fervently pious, and of him I saw nothing until the evening except at

meals; the other was enjoying the midsummer holidays without any great elation; a singularly thin and abject,

stunted creature he was, whose chief liveliness was to pretend to be a monkey, and who I am now convinced

had some secret disease that drained his vitality away. If I met him now I should think him a pitiful little

creature and be extremely sorry for him. Then I felt only a wondering aversion. He sniffed horribly, he was

tired out by a couple of miles of loafing, he never started any conversation, and he seemed to prefer his own

Serious trouble came suddenly out of a conversation we held in bed one night. Some particularly pious phrase

of my elder cousin's irritated me extremely, and I avowed outright my entire disbelief in the whole scheme of

revealed religion. I had never said a word about my doubts to any one before, except to Ewart who had first

evolved them. I had never settled my doubts until at this moment when I spoke. But it came to me then that

the whole scheme of salvation of the Frappes was not simply doubtful, but impossible. I fired this discovery

At first they could not understand what I was saying, and when they did I fully believe they expected an

instant answer in thunderbolts and flames. They gave me more room in the bed forthwith, and then the elder

sat up and expressed his sense of my awfulness. I was already a little frightened at my temerity, but when he

asked me categorically to unsay what I had said, what could I do but confirm my repudiation?

"There's no hell," I said, "and no eternal punishment. No God would be such a fool as that."

My elder cousin cried aloud in horror, and the younger lay scared, but listening. "Then you mean," said my

elder cousin, when at last he could bring himself to argue, "you might do just as you liked?"

Our little voices went on interminably, and at one stage my cousin got out of bed and made his brother do

likewise, and knelt in the night dimness and prayed at me. That I found trying, but I held out valiantly.

"You can pray if you like," I said, "but if you're going to cheek me in your prayers I draw the line."

The last I remember of that great discussion was my cousin deploring the fact that he "should ever sleep in

The next day he astonished me by telling the whole business to his father. This was quite outside all my

"You been sayin' queer things, George," he said abruptly. "You better mind what you're saying."

"Ask 'IM," said my uncle, pointing with his knife to his informant, and making me realise the nature of my

My aunt couldn't touch another mouthful. I was already a little troubled in my conscience by my daring, and

I had a still more dreadful moment when presently I met my cousin in the brick alley behind the yard, that led

He started back, astonished and alarmed. His eyes met mine, and I saw a sudden gleam of resolution. He

I felt I had never encountered a more detestable way of evading a licking. I shoved him against the wall and

"You better not speak to your cousins, George," said my aunt, "till you're in a better state of mind."

I became an outcast forthwith. At supper that night a gloomy silence was broken by my cousin saying

"'E's got the evil one be'ind 'im now, a ridin' on 'is back," said my aunt, to the grave discomfort of the eldest

After supper my uncle, in a few illchosen words, prayed me to repent before I slept.

"Suppose you was took in your sleep, George," he said; "where'd you be then? You jest think of that me boy."

By this time I was thoroughly miserable and frightened, and this suggestion unnerved me dreadfully but I

kept up an impenitent front. "To wake in 'ell," said Uncle Nicodemus, in gentle tones. "You don't want to

wake in 'ell, George, burnin' and screamin' for ever, do you? You wouldn't like that?"

He tried very hard to get me to "jest 'ave a look at the bake'ouse fire" before I retired. "It might move you," he

I was awake longest that night. My cousins slept, the sleep of faith on either side of me. I decided I would

whisper my prayers, and stopped midway because I was ashamed, and perhaps also because I had an idea one

"No," I said, with a sudden confidence, "damn me if you're coward enough.... But you're not. No! You

I woke my cousins up with emphatic digs, and told them as much, triumphantly, and went very peacefully to

I slept not only through that night, but for all my nights since then. So far as any fear of Divine injustice goes,

I sleep soundly, and shall, I know, to the end of things. That declaration was an epoch in my spiritual life.

It was. It all comes back to me, that convergence of attention, even the faint leathery smell of its atmosphere

returns, and the coarse feel of my aunt's black dress beside me in contact with my hand. I see again the old

Welsh milkman "wrestling" with me, they all wrestled with me, by prayer or exhortation. And I was holding

out stoutly, though convinced now by the contagion of their universal conviction that by doing so I was

certainly and hopelessly damned. I felt that they were right, that God was probably like them, and that on the

whole it didn't matter. And to simplify the business thoroughly I had declared I didn't believe anything at all.

They confuted me by texts from Scripture which I now perceive was an illegitimate method of reply. When I

got home, still impenitent and eternally lost and secretly very lonely and miserable and alarmed, Uncle

One person only spoke to me like a human being on that day of wrath, and that was the younger Frapp. He

came up to me in the afternoon while I was confined upstairs with a Bible and my own thoughts.

"You can't 'elp thoughts," said my cousin, "anyhow. You mean" He stopped hovering. "I s'pose I oughtn't

The following week made life quite intolerable for me; these people forced me at last into an Atheism that

terrified me. When I learnt that next Sunday the wrestling was to be resumed, my courage failed me

I happened upon a map of Kent in a stationer's window on Saturday, and that set me thinking of one form of

release. I studied it intently for half an hour perhaps, on Saturday night, got a route list of villages well fixed

in my memory, and got up and started for Bladesover about five on Sunday morning while my two bed mates

I remember something, but not so much of it as I should like to recall, of my long tramp to Bladesover House.

The distance from Chatham is almost exactly seventeen miles, and it took me until nearly one. It was very

interesting and I do not think I was very fatigued, though I got rather pinched by one boot.

The morning must have been very clear, because I remember that near Itchinstow Hall I looked back and saw

the estuary of the Thames, that river that has since played so large a part in my life. But at the time I did not

know it was the Thames, I thought this great expanse of mud flats and water was the sea, which I had never

yet seen nearly. And out upon it stood ships, sailing ships and a steamer or so, going up to London or down

out into the great seas of the world. I stood for a long time watching these and thinking whether after all I

The nearer I drew to Bladesover, the more doubtful I grew of the duality of my reception, and the more I

regretted that alternative. I suppose it was the dirty clumsiness of the shipping I had seen nearly, that put me

out of mind of that. I took a short cut through the Warren across the corner of the main park to intercept the

people from the church. I wanted to avoid meeting any one before I met my mother, and so I went to a place

where the path passed between banks, and without exactly hiding, stood up among the bushes. This place

among other advantages eliminated any chance of seeing Lady Drew, who would drive round by the carriage

Standing up to waylay in this fashion I had a queer feeling of brigandage, as though I was some intrusive sort

of bandit among these orderly things. It is the first time I remember having that outlaw feeling distinctly, a

feeling that has played a large part in my subsequent life. I felt there existed no place for me that I had to

Presently, down the hill, the servants appeared, straggling by twos and threes, first some of the garden people

and the butler's wife with them, then the two laundry maids, odd inseparable old creatures, then the first

footman talking to the butler's little girl, and at last, walking grave and breathless beside old Ann and Miss

My boyish mind suggested the adoption of a playful form of appearance. "Cooee, mother" said I, coming

I suppose there was a fearful fuss about me. And of course I was quite unable to explain my reappearance.

But I held out stoutly, "I won't go back to Chatham; I'll drown myself first." The next day my mother carried

me off to Wimblehurst, took me fiercely and aggressively to an uncle I had never heard of before, near

though the place was to us. She gave me no word as to what was to happen, and I was too subdued by her

manifest wrath and humiliation at my last misdemeanour to demand information. I don't for one moment

think Lady Drew was "nice" about me. The finality of my banishment was endorsed and underlined and

stamped home. I wished very much now that I had run away to sea, in spite of the coal dust and squalour

I do not remember much of my journey to Wimblehurst with my mother except the image of her as sitting

bolt upright, as rather disdaining the thirdclass carriage in which we traveled, and how she looked away

from me out of the window when she spoke of my uncle. "I have not seen your uncle," she said, "since he

"He married about three years ago, and set up for himself in Wimblehurst.... So I suppose she had some

She mused on scenes she had long dismissed from her mind. "Teddy," she said at last in the tone of one who

has been feeling in the dark and finds. "He was called Teddy... about your age.... Now he must be twentysix

I thought of my uncle as Teddy directly I saw him; there was something in his personal appearance that in the

light of that memory phrased itself at once as Teddinessa certain Teddidity. To describe it in and other

terms is more difficult. It is nimbleness without grace, and alertness without intelligence. He whisked out of

his shop upon the pavement, a short figure in grey and wearing grey carpet slippers; one had a sense of a

young fattish face behind gilt glasses, wiry hair that stuck up and forward over the forehead, an irregular nose

that had its aquiline moments, and that the body betrayed an equatorial laxity, an incipient "bow window" as

the image goes. He jerked out of the shop, came to a stand on the pavement outside, regarded something in

the window with infinite appreciation, stroked his chin, and, as abruptly, shot sideways into the door again,

We came past the window whose contents I was presently to know by heart, a very ordinary chemist's

window except that there was a frictional electrical machine, an air pump and two or three tripods and retorts

replacing the customary blue, yellow, and red bottles above. There was a plaster of Paris horse to indicate

veterinary medicines among these breakables, and below were scent packets and diffusers and sponges and

sodawater syphons and suchlike things. Only in the middle there was a rubricated card, very neatly painted

Buy Ponderevo's Cough Linctus NOW. NOW! WHY? Twopence Cheaper than in Winter. You Store apples!

My uncle's face appeared above a card of infant's comforters in the glass pane of the door. I perceived his

eyes were brown, and that his glasses creased his nose. It was manifest he did not know us from Adam. A

stare of scrutiny allowed an expression of commercial deference to appear in front of it, and my uncle flung

My uncle would not own he did not, but his curiosity was manifest. My mother sat down on one of the little

chairs before the soap and patent medicinepiled counter, and her lips opened and closed.

"A glass of water, madam," said my uncle, waved his hand in a sort of curve and shot away.

My mother drank the water and spoke. "That boy," she said, "takes after his father. He grows more like him

For a moment the chemist was still at a loss. He stood behind the counter with the glass my mother had

"By Gosh!" he said. "Lord!" he cried. His glasses fell off. He disappeared replacing them, behind a pile of

boxedup bottles of blood mixture. "Eleven thousand virgins!" I heard him cry. The glass was banged down.

He shot away out of the shop through some masked door. One heard his voice. "Susan! Susan!"

Then he reappeared with an extended hand. "Well, how are you?" he said. "I was never so surprised in my

He shook my mother's impassive hand and then mine very warmly holding his glasses on with his left

"Come right in!" he cried"come right in! Better late than never!" and led the way into the parlour behind

After Bladesover that apartment struck me as stuffy and petty, but it was very comfortable in comparison

with the Frapp livingroom. It had a faint, disintegrating smell of meals about it, and my most immediate

impression was of the remarkable fact that something was hung about or wrapped round or draped over

everything. There was brightpatterned muslin round the gasbracket in the middle of the room, round the

mirror over the mantel, stuff with ballfringe along the mantel and casing in the fireplace,I first saw

ballfringe hereand even the lamp on the little bureau wore a shade like a large muslin hat. The

tablecloth had ballfringe and so had the window curtains, and the carpet was a bed of roses. There were

little cupboards on either side of the fireplace, and in the recesses, illmade shelves packed with books, and

enriched with pinked American cloth. There was a dictionary lying face downward on the table, and the open

bureau was littered with foolscap paper and the evidences of recently abandoned toil. My eye caught "The

Ponderevo Patent Flat, a Machine you can Live in," written in large firm letters. My uncle opened a little door

like a cupboard door in the corner of this room, and revealed the narrowest twist of staircase I had ever set

There came an inaudible reply, and a sudden loud bump over our heads as of some article of domestic utility

pettishly flung aside, then the cautious steps of someone descending the twist, and then my aunt appeared in

"It's Aunt Ponderevo," cried my uncle. "George's wifeand she's brought over her son!" His eye roamed

about the room. He darted to the bureau with a sudden impulse, and turned the sheet about the patent flat face

down. Then he waved his glasses at us, "You know, Susan, my elder brother George. I told you about 'im lots

He fretted across to the hearthrug and took up a position there, replaced his glasses and coughed.

My aunt Susan seemed to be taking it in. She was then rather a pretty slender woman of twentythree or four,

I suppose, and I remember being struck by the blueness of her eyes and the clear freshness of her complexion.

She had little features, a button nose, a pretty chin and a long graceful neck that stuck out of her pale blue

cotton morning dress. There was a look of halfassumed perplexity on her face, a little quizzical wrinkle of

the brow that suggested a faintly amused attempt to follow my uncle's mental operations, a vain attempt and a

certain hopelessness that had in succession become habitual. She seemed to be saying, "Oh Lord! What's he

giving me THIS time?" And as came to know her better I detected, as a complication of her effort of

apprehension, a subsidiary riddle to "What's he giving me?" and that wasto borrow a phrase from my

schoolboy language "Is it keeps?" She looked at my mother and me, and back to her husband again.

"Well," she said to my mother, descending the last three steps of the staircase and holding out her hand!

"you're welcome. Though it's a surprise.... I can't ask you to HAVE anything, I'm afraid, for there isn't

anything in the house." She smiled, and looked at her husband banteringly. "Unless he makes up something

"Well, let's all sit down," said my uncle, suddenly whistling through his clenched teeth, and briskly rubbing

his hands together. He put up a chair for my mother, raised the blind of the little window, lowered it again,

and returned to his hearthrug. "I'm sure," he said, as one who decides, "I'm very glad to see you."

I noted him in great detail. I remember now his partially unbuttoned waistcoat, as though something had

occurred to distract him as he did it up, and a little cut upon his chin. I liked a certain humour in his eyes. I

watched, too, with the fascination that things have for an observant boy, the play of his lipsthey were a

little oblique, and there was something "slipshod," if one may strain a word so far, about his mouth, so that he

lisped and sibilated ever and again and the coming and going of a curious expression, triumphant in quality it

was, upon his face as he talked. He fingered his glasses, which did not seem to fit his nose, fretted with things

in his waistcoat pockets or put his hands behind him, looked over our heads, and ever and again rose to his

toes and dropped back on his heels. He had a way of drawing air in at times through his teeth that gave a

He did most of the talking. My mother repeated what she had already said in the shop, "I have brought

George over to you," and then desisted for a time from the real business in hand. "You find this a comfortable

house?" she asked; and this being affirmed: "It looksvery convenient.... Not too big to be a troubleno.

My uncle retorted with some inquiries about the great people of Bladesover, and my mother answered in the

character of a personal friend of Lady Drew's. The talk hung for a time, and then my uncle embarked upon a

"He's always wanting something to happen," said my aunt Susan. "Some day he'll get a shower of things and

"Oh! one rubs along. But there's no Developmentno growth. They just come along here and buy pills when

they want 'emand a horseball or such. They've got to be ill before there's a prescription. That sort they are.

You can't get 'em to launch out, you can't get 'em to take up anything new. For instance, I've been trying

latelyinduce them to buy their medicines in advance, and in larger quantities. But they won't look for it!

Then I tried to float a little notion of mine, sort of an insurance scheme for colds; you pay so much a week,

and when you've got a cold you get a bottle of Cough Linctus so long as you can produce a substantial sniff.

See? But Lord! they've no capacity for ideas, they don't catch on; no Jump about the place, no Life.

"He's always trying to make his old business jump," she said. "Always putting fresh cards in the window, or

From the beginning of their conversation there had been the promise of this pause, and I pricked my ears. I

knew perfectly what was bound to come; they were going to talk of my father. I was enormously

strengthened in my persuasion when I found my mother's eyes resting thoughtfully upon me in the silence,

and than my uncle looked at me and then my aunt. I struggled unavailingly to produce an expression of meek

"I think," said my uncle, "that George will find it more amusing to have a turn in the marketplace than to sit

here talking with us. There's a pair of stocks there, Georgevery interesting. Oldfashioned stocks."

My uncle rose and in the most friendly way led me through the shop. He stood on his doorstep and jerked

"Ain't it sleepy, George, eh? There's the butcher's dog over there, asleep in the roadhalf an hour from

midday! If the last Trump sounded I don't believe it would wake. Nobody would wake! The chaps up there in

the churchyardthey'd just turn over and say: 'Naaryou don't catch us, you don't! See?'.... Well, you'll find

When I returned, my uncle had in some remarkable way become larger and central. "Tha'chu, George?" he

cried, when the shopdoor bell sounded. "Come right through"; and I found him, as it were, in the chairman's

My mother looked at me. "I had hoped," she said, "that Lady Drew would have done something for him"

"She might have spoken to some one, got him into something perhaps...." She had the servant's invincible

"He is not the sort of boy for whom things are done," she added, dismissing these dreams. "He doesn't

accommodate himself. When he thinks Lady Drew wishes a thing, he seems not to wish it. Towards Mr.

"Disobedient," said my mother. "He has no idea of his place. He seems to think he can get on by slighting

My uncle stroked his cut chin and me. "Have you learnt any Latin?" he asked abruptly.

"He'll have to learn a little Latin," he explained to my mother, "to qualify. H'm. He could go down to the chap

at the grammar school hereit's just been routed into existence again by the Charity Commissioners and

I had long been obsessed by the idea that having no Latin was a disadvantage in the world, and Archie

Garvell had driven the point of this pretty earnestly home. The literature I had read at Bladesover had all

tended that way. Latin had had a quality of emancipation for me that I find it difficult to convey. And

"It's no good to you, of course," said my uncle, "except to pass exams with, but there you are!"

"You'll have to learn Latin because you have to learn Latin," said my mother, "not because you want to. And

The idea that I was to go on learning, that to read and master the contents of books was still to be justifiable

as a duty, overwhelmed all other facts. I had had it rather clear in my mind for some weeks that all that kind

of opportunity might close to me for ever. I began to take a lively interest in this new project.

"Then shall I live here?" I asked, "with you, and study... as well as work in the shop?"

I parted from my mother that day in a dream, so sudden and important was this new aspect of things to me. I

was to learn Latin! Now that the humiliation of my failure at Bladesover was past for her, now that she had a

little got over her first intense repugnance at this resort to my uncle and contrived something that seemed like

a possible provision for my future, the tenderness natural to a parting far more significant than any of our

She sat in the train to return, I remember, and I stood at the open door of her compartment, and neither of us

"You must be a good boy, George," she said. "You must learn.... And you mustn't set yourself up against

I promised carelessly. Her eyes were fixed upon me. I was wondering whether I could by any means begin

Something touched her heart then, some thought, some memory; perhaps some premonition.... The solitary

She caught me in her arms quite eagerly, she pressed me to hera strange thing for her to do. I perceived her

eyes were extraordinarily bright, and then this brightness burst along the lower lids and rolled down her

For the first and last time in my life I saw my mother's tears. Then she had gone, leaving me discomforted

and perplexed, forgetting for a time even that I was to learn Latin, thinking of my mother as of something

The thing recurred though I sought to dismiss it, it stuck itself into my memory against the day of fuller

understanding. Poor, proud, habitual, sternly narrow soul! poor difficult and misunderstanding son! it was the

My mother died suddenly and, it was thought by Lady Drew, inconsiderately, the following spring. Her

ladyship instantly fled to Folkestone with Miss Somerville and Fison, until the funeral should be over and my

My uncle took me over to the funeral. I remember there was a sort of prolonged crisis in the days preceding

this because, directly he heard of my loss, he had sent a pair of check trousers to the Judkins people in

London to be dyed black, and they did not come back in time. He became very excited on the third day, and

sent a number of increasingly fiery telegrams without any result whatever, and succumbed next morning with

a very ill grace to my aunt Susan's insistence upon the resources of his dresssuit. In my memory those black

legs of his, in a particularly thin and shiny black clothfor evidently his dresssuit dated from adolescent

and slenderer daysstraddle like the Colossus of Rhodes over my approach to my mother's funeral.

Moreover, I was inconvenienced and distracted by a silk hat he had bought me, my first silk hat, much

I remember, but rather indistinctly, my mother's white paneled housekeeper's room and the touch of oddness

about it that she was not there, and the various familiar faces made strange by black, and I seem to recall the

exaggerated selfconsciousness that arose out of their focussed attention. No doubt the sense of the new silk

hat came and went and came again in my emotional chaos. Then something comes out clear and sorrowful,

rises out clear and sheer from among all these rather base and inconsequent things, and once again I walk

before all the other mourners close behind her coffin as it is carried along the churchyard path to her grave,

with the old vicar's slow voice saying regretfully and unconvincingly above me, triumphant solemn things.

"I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he

Never die! The day was a high and glorious morning in spring, and all the trees were budding and bursting

into green. Everywhere there were blossoms and flowers; the pear trees and cherry trees in the sexton's

garden were sunlit snow, there were nodding daffodils and early tulips in the graveyard beds, great multitudes

of daisies, and everywhere the birds seemed singing. And in the middle was the brown coffin end, tilting on

For a time I was very observant, watching the coffin lowered, hearing the words of the ritual. It seemed a

Suddenly as the service drew to its end, I felt something had still to be said which had not been said, realised

that she had withdrawn in silence, neither forgiving me nor hearing from methose now lost assurances.

Suddenly I knew I had not understood. Suddenly I saw her tenderly; remembered not so much tender or

kindly things of her as her crossed wishes and the ways in which I had thwarted her. Surprisingly I realised

that behind all her hardness and severity she had loved me, that I was the only thing she had ever loved and

that until this moment I had never loved her. And now she was there and deaf and blind to me, pitifully

I dug my nails into the palms of my hands, I set my teeth, but tears blinded me, sobs would have choked me

had speech been required of me. The old vicar read on, there came a mumbled responseand so on to the

end. I wept as it were internally, and only when we had come out of the churchyard could I think and speak

Stamped across this memory are the little black figures of my uncle and Rabbits, telling Avebury, the sexton

That is the last I shall tell of Bladesover. The dropscene falls on that, and it comes no more as an actual

presence into this novel. I did indeed go back there once again, but under circumstances quite immaterial to

my story. But in a sense Bladesover has never left me; it is, as I said at the outset, one of those dominant

explanatory impressions that make the framework of my mind. Bladesover illuminates England; it has

become all that is spacious, dignified pretentious, and truly conservative in English life. It is my social datum.

When I came back at last to the real Bladesover on an inconsequent visit, everything was far smaller than I

could have supposed possible. It was as though everything had shivered and shrivelled a little at the

Lichtenstein touch. The harp was still in the saloon, but there was a different grand piano with a painted lid

and a metrostyle pianola, and an extraordinary quantity of artistic litter and bricabrac scattered about.

There was the trail of the Bond Street showroom over it all. The furniture was still under chintz, but it wasn't

the same sort of chintz although it pretended to be, and the lustredangling chandeliers had passed away.

Lady Lichtenstein's books replaced the brown volumes I had browsed amongthey were mostly

presentation copies of contemporary novels and the National Review and the Empire Review, and the

Nineteenth Century and after jostled current books on the tablesEnglish new books in gaudy catchpenny

"artistic" covers, French and Italian novels in yellow, German art handbooks of almost incredible ugliness.

There were abundant evidences that her ladyship was playing with the Keltic renascence, and a great number

of ugly cats made of chinashe "collected" china and stoneware catsstood about everywherein all

It is nonsense to pretend that finance makes any better aristocrats than rent. Nothing can make an aristocrat

but pride, knowledge, training, and the sword. These people were no improvement on the Drews, none

whatever. There was no effect of a beneficial replacement of passive unintelligent people by active intelligent

ones. One felt that a smaller but more enterprising and intensely undignified variety of stupidity had replaced

the large dullness of the old gentry, and that was all. Bladesover, I thought, had undergone just the same

change between the seventies and the new century that had overtaken the dear old Times, and heaven knows

how much more of the decorous British fabric. These Lichtensteins and their like seem to have no promise in

them at all of any fresh vitality for the kingdom. I do not believe in their intelligence or their powerthey

have nothing new about them at all, nothing creative nor rejuvenescent, no more than a disorderly instinct of

acquisition; and the prevalence of them and their kind is but a phase in the broad slow decay of the great

social organism of England. They could not have made Bladesover they cannot replace it; they just happen to

So far as I can remember now, except for that one emotional phase by the graveside, I passed through all

these experiences rather callously. I had already, with the facility of youth, changed my world, ceased to

think at all of the old school routine and put Bladesover aside for digestion at a latter stage. I took up my new

world in Wimblehurst with the chemist's shop as its hub, set to work at Latin and materia medica, and

concentrated upon the present with all my heart. Wimblehurst is an exceptionally quiet and grey Sussex town

rare among south of England towns in being largely built of stone. I found something very agreeable and

picturesque in its clean cobbled streets, its odd turnings and abrupt corners; and in the pleasant park that

crowds up one side of the town. The whole place is under the Eastry dominion and it was the Eastry influence

and dignity that kept its railway station a mile and threequarters away. Eastry House is so close that it

dominates the whole; one goes across the marketplace (with its old lockup and stocks), past the great

prereformation church, a fine grey shell, like some empty skull from which the life has fled, and there at

once are the huge wroughtiron gates, and one peeps through them to see the facade of this place, very white

and large and fine, down a long avenue of yews. Eastry was far greater than Bladesover and an altogether

completer example of the eighteenth century system. It ruled not two villages, but a borough, that had sent its

sons and cousins to parliament almost as a matter of right so long as its franchise endured. Every one was in

My uncle was the first real breach I found in the great front of Bladesover the world had presented me, for

Chatham was not so much a breach as a confirmation. But my uncle had no respect for Bladesover and

Eastrynone whatever. He did not believe in them. He was blind even to what they were. He propounded

strange phrases about them, he exfoliated and wagged about novel and incredible ideas.

"This place," said my uncle, surveying it from his open doorway in the dignified stillness of a summer

"I'd like to let a dozen young Americans loose into it," said my uncle. "Then we'd see."

I made a tick against Mother Shipton's Sleeping Syrup. We had cleared our forward stock.

"Things must be happening SOMEWHERE, George," he broke out in a querulously rising note as he came

back into the little shop. He fiddled with the piled dummy boxes of fancy soap and scent and so forth that

adorned the end of the counter, then turned about petulantly, stuck his hands deeply into his pockets and

withdrew one to scratch his head. "I must do SOMETHING," he said. "I can't stand it.

"Or a play. There's a deal of money in a play, George. What would you think of me writing a play eh?...

"Sacramental wine!" he swore, "this isn't the worldit's Cold Mutton Fat! That's what Wimblehurst is!

Cold Mutton Fat!dead and stiff! And I'm buried in it up to the arm pits. Nothing ever happens, nobody

wants things to happen 'scept me! Up in London, George, things happen. America! I wish to Heaven, George,

"What can one do here? How can one grow? While we're sleepin' here with our Capital oozing away into

Lord Eastry's pockets for rentmen are up there...." He indicated London as remotely over the top of the

dispensing counter, and then as a scene of great activity by a whirl of the hand and a wink and a meaning

"Rush about," he said. "Do things! Somethin' glorious. There's cover gambling. Ever heard of that, George?"

He drew the air in through his teeth. "You put down a hundred say, and buy ten thousand pounds worth. See?

That's a cover of one per cent. Things go up one, you sell, realise cent per cent; down, whiff, it's gone! Try

again! Cent per cent, George, every day. Men are made or done for in an hour. And the shoutin'! Zzzz....

"Oh, if you go in for wheat or steelyes. But suppose you tackled a little thing, George. Just some little

thing that only needed a few thousands. Drugs for example. Shoved all you had into itstaked your liver on

it, so to speak. Take a drugtake ipecac, for example. Take a lot of ipecac. Take all there is! See? There you

are! There aren't unlimited supplies of ipecacuanhacan't be!and it's a thing people must have. Then

quinine again! You watch your chance, wait for a tropical war breaking out, let's say, and collar all the

"Lord! there's no end of thingsno end of little things. Dillwaterall the suffering babes yowling for it.

Eucalyptus againcascarawitch hazelmentholall the toothache things. Then there's antiseptics, and

"They got to look out for themselves. By Jove, yes. They'll do you if they can, and you do them. Like

brigands. That makes it romantic. That's the Romance of Commerce, George. You're in the mountains there!

Think of having all the quinine in the world, and some millionaire's pampered wife gone ill with malaria, eh?

That's a squeeze, George, eh? Eh? Millionaire on his motor car outside, offering you any price you liked.

That 'ud wake up Wimblehurst.... Lord! You haven't an Idea down here. Not an idea. Zzzz."

He passed into a rapt dream, from which escaped such fragments as: "Fifty per cent. advance sir;

The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a sort of irresponsible monkey trick that no one

would ever be permitted to do in reality. It was the sort of nonsense one would talk to make Ewart laugh and

set him going on to still odder possibilities. I thought it was part of my uncle's way of talking. But I've learnt

differently since. The whole trend of modern moneymaking is to foresee something that will presently be

needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself wealthy. You buy up land upon which people will

presently want to build houses, you secure rights that will bar vitally important developments, and so on, and

so on. Of course the naive intelligence of a boy does not grasp the subtler developments of human

inadequacy. He begins life with a disposition to believe in the wisdom of grownup people, he does not

realise how casual and disingenuous has been the development of law and custom, and he thinks that

somewhere in the state there is a power as irresistible as a head master's to check mischievous and foolish

enterprises of every sort. I will confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I had a clear

impression that any one who contrived to do that would pretty certainly go to jail. Now I know that any one

who could really bring it off would be much more likely to go to the House of Lords!

My uncle ranged over the gilt labels of his bottles and drawers for a while, dreaming of corners in this and

"Jeerusalem!" he cried. "Why did I plant myself here? Everything's done. The game's over. Here's Lord

Eastry, and he's got everything, except what his lawyers get, and before you get any more change this way

you'll have to dynamite himand them. HE doesn't want anything more to happen. Why should he? Any

chance 'ud be a loss to him. He wants everything to burble along and burble along and go on as it's going for

the next ten thousand years, Eastry after Eastry, one parson down another come, one grocer dead, get another!

Any one with any ideas better go away. They HAVE gone away! Look at all these blessed people in this

place! Look at 'em! All fast asleep, doing their business out of habitin a sort of dream, Stuffed men would

do just as welljust. They've all shook down into their places. THEY don't want anything to happen either.

He concluded as he often concluded these talks. "I must invent something,that's about what I must do.

Something people want.... Strike out.... You can't think, George, of anything everybody wants and hasn't got?

I mean something you could turn out retail under a shilling, say? Well, YOU think, whenever you haven't got

So I remember my uncle in that first phase, young, but already a little fat, restless, fretful, garrulous, putting

in my fermenting head all sorts of discrepant ideas. Certainly he was educational....

For me the years at Wimblehurst were years of pretty active growth. Most of my leisure and much of my time

in the shop I spent in study. I speedily mastered the modicum of Latin necessary for my qualifying

examinations, anda little assisted by the Government Science and Art Department classes that were held in

the Grammar Schoolwent on with my mathematics. There were classes in physics, in chemistry, in

mathematics and machine drawing, and I took up these subjects with considerable avidity. Exercise I got

chiefly in the form of walks. There was some cricket in the summer and football in the winter sustained by

young men's clubs that levied a parasitic blackmail of the big people and the sitting member, but I was never

very keen at these games. I didn't find any very close companions among the youths of Wimblehurst. They

struck me, after my cockney schoolmates, as loutish and slow, servile and furtive, spiteful and mean. WE

used to swagger, but these countrymen dragged their feet and hated an equal who didn't; we talked loud, but

you only got the real thoughts of Wimblehurst in a knowing undertone behind its hand. And even then they

No, I didn't like those young countrymen, and I'm no believer in the English countryside under the

Bladesover system as a breeding ground for honourable men. One hears a frightful lot of nonsense about the

Rural Exodus and the degeneration wrought by town life upon our population. To my mind, the English

townsman, even in the slums, is infinitely better spiritually, more courageous, more imaginative and cleaner,

than his agricultural cousin. I've seen them both when they didn't think they were being observed, and I

know. There was something about my Wimblehurst companions that disgusted me. It's hard to define.

Heaven knows that at that cockney boardingschool at Goudhurst we were coarse enough; the Wimblehurst

youngsters had neither words nor courage for the sort of thing we used to dofor our bad language, for

example; but, on the other hand, they displayed a sort of sluggish, real lewdness, lewdness is the worda

baseness of attitude. Whatever we exiled urbans did at Goudhurst was touched with something, however

coarse, of romantic imagination. We had read the Boys of England, and told each other stories. In the English

countryside there are no books at all, no songs, no drama, no valiant sin even; all these things have never

come or they were taken away and hidden generations ago, and the imagination aborts and bestialises. That, I

think, is where the real difference against the English rural man lies. It is because I know this that I do not

share in the common repinings because our countryside is being depopulated, because our population is

passing through the furnace of the towns. They starve, they suffer, no doubt, but they come out of it

Of an evening the Wimblehurst blade, shinyfaced from a wash and with some loud finery, a coloured

waistcoat or a vivid tie, would betake himself to the Eastry Arms billiardroom, or to the bar parlour of some

minor pub where nap could be played. One soon sickened of his slow knowingness, the cunning observation

of his deadened eyes, his idea of a "good story," always, always told in undertones, poor dirty worm! his

shrewd, elaborate maneuvers for some petty advantage, a drink to the good or suchlike deal. There rises

before my eyes as I write, young Hopley Dodd, the son of the Wimblehurst auctioneer, the pride of

Wimblehurst, its finest flower, with his fur waistcoat and his bulldog pipe, his riding breecheshe had no

horseand his gaiters, as he used to sit, leaning forward and watching the billiardtable from under the brim

of his artfully tilted hat. A halfdozen phrases constituted his conversation: "hard lines!" he used to say, and

"Good baazness," in a bass bleat. Moreover, he had a long slow whistle that was esteemed the very cream of

Also you knew he would not understand that _I_ could play billiards, and regarded every stroke I made as a

fluke. For a beginner I didn't play so badly, I thought. I'm not so sure now; that was my opinion at the time.

But young Dodd's scepticism and the "good baazness" finally cured me of my disposition to frequent the

I made no friends among the young men of the place at all, and though I was entering upon adolescence I

have no loveaffair to tell of here. Not that I was not waking up to that aspect of life in my middle teens I did,

indeed, in various slightly informal ways scrape acquaintance with casual Wimblehurst girls; with a little

dressmaker's apprentice I got upon shyly speaking terms, and a pupil teacher in the National School went

further and was "talked about" in connection with me but I was not by any means touched by any reality of

passion for either of these young people; lovelove as yet came to me only in my dreams. I only kissed

these girls once or twice. They rather disconcerted than developed those dreams. They were so clearly not

"it." I shall have much to say of love in this story, but I may break it to the reader now that it is my role to be

a rather ineffectual lover. Desire I knew well enoughindeed, too well; but love I have been shy of. In all

my early enterprises in the war of the sexes, I was torn between the urgency of the body and a habit of

romantic fantasy that wanted every phase of the adventure to be generous and beautiful. And I had a

curiously haunting memory of Beatrice, of her kisses in the bracken and her kiss upon the wall, that somehow

pitched the standard too high for Wimblehurst's opportunities. I will not deny I did in a boyish way attempt a

shy, rude adventure or so in lovemaking at Wimblehurst; but through these various influences, I didn't bring

things off to any extent at all. I left behind me no devastating memories, no splendid reputation. I came away

at last, still inexperienced and a little thwarted, with only a natural growth of interest and desire in sexual

If I fell in love with any one in Wimblehurst it was with my aunt. She treated me with a kindliness that was

only half maternalshe petted my books, she knew about my certificates, she made fun of me in a way that

My adolescent years at Wimblehurst were on the whole laborious, uneventful years that began in short

jackets and left me in many ways nearly a man, years so uneventful that the Calculus of Variations is

associated with one winter, and an examination in Physics for Science and Art department Honours marks an

epoch. Many divergent impulses stirred within me, but the master impulse was a grave young disposition to

work and learn and thereby in some not very clearly defined way get out of the Wimblehurst world into

which I had fallen. I wrote with some frequency to Ewart, selfconscious, but, as I remember them, not

intelligent letters, dated in Latin and with lapses into Latin quotation that roused Ewart to parody. There was

something about me in those days more than a little priggish. But it was, to do myself justice, something

more than the petty pride of learning. I had a very grave sense of discipline and preparation that I am not

ashamed at all to remember. I was serious. More serious than I am at the present time. More serious, indeed,

than any adult seems to be. I was capable then of effortsof nobilities.... They are beyond me now. I don't

see why, at forty, I shouldn't confess I respect my own youth. I had dropped being a boy quite abruptly. I

thought I was presently to go out into a larger and quite important world and do significant things there. I

thought I was destined to do something definite to a world that had a definite purpose. I did not understand

then, as I do now, that life was to consist largely in the world's doing things to me. Young people never do

seem to understand that aspect of things. And, as I say, among my educational influences my uncle, all

unsuspected, played a leading part, and perhaps among other things gave my discontent with Wimblehurst,

my desire to get away from that clean and picturesque emptiness, a form and expression that helped to

emphasise it. In a way that definition made me patient. "Presently I shall get to London," I said, echoing him.

I remember him now as talking, always talking, in those days. He talked to me of theology, he talked of

politics, of the wonders of science and the marvels of art, of the passions and the affections, of the

immortality of the soul and the peculiar actions of drugs; but predominantly and constantly he talked of

getting on, of enterprises, of inventions and great fortunes, of Rothschilds, silver kings, Vanderbilts, Goulds,

flotations, realisations and the marvelous ways of Chance with menin all localities, that is to say, that are

When I think of those early talks, I figure him always in one of three positions. Either we were in the

dispensing lair behind a high barrier, he pounding up things in a mortar perhaps, and I rolling pillstuff into

long rolls and cutting it up with a sort of broad, fluted knife, or he stood looking out of the shop door against

the case of sponges and spraydiffusers, while I surveyed him from behind the counter, or he leant against

the little drawers behind the counter, and I hovered dusting in front. The thought of those early days brings

back to my nostrils the faint smell of scent that was always in the air, marbled now with streaks of this drug

and now of that, and to my eyes the rows of jejune glass bottles with gold labels, mirrorreflected, that stood

behind him. My aunt, I remember, used sometimes to come into the shop in a state of aggressive

sprightliness, a sort of connubial ragging expedition, and get much fun over the abbreviated Latinity of those

gilt inscriptions. "Ol Amjig, George," she would read derisively, "and he pretends it's almond oil!

"Look at him, George, looking dignified. I'd like to put an old label on to him round the middle like his

bottles are, with Ol Pondo on it. That's Latin for Impostor, George MUST be. He'd look lovely with a

My aunt, dear soul, was in those days quite thin and slender, with a delicate rosebud completion and a

disposition to connubial badinage, to a sort of gentle skylarking. There was a silvery ghost of lisping in her

speech. She was a great humourist, and as the constraint of my presence at meals wore off, I became more

and more aware of a filmy but extensive net of nonsense she had woven about her domestic relations until it

had become the reality of her life. She affected a derisive attitude to the world at large and applied the epithet

"old" to more things than I have ever heard linked to it before or since. "Here's the old newspaper," she used

to sayto my uncle. "Now don't go and get it in the butter, you silly old Sardine!"

"Old Monday, Sossidge," she would say, and add, "I got all my Old Washing to do. Don't I KNOW it!"...

She had evidently been the wit and joy of a large circle of schoolfellows, and this style had become a second

nature with her. It made her very delightful to me in that quiet place. Her customary walk even had a sort of

hello! in it. Her chief preoccupation in life was, I believe, to make my uncle laugh, and when by some new

nickname, some new quaintness or absurdity, she achieved that end, she was, behind a mask of sober

amazement, the happiest woman on earth. My uncle's laugh when it did come, I must admit was, as Baedeker

says, "rewarding." It began with gusty blowings and snortings, and opened into a clear "Ha ha!" but in fullest

development it included, in those youthful days, falling about anyhow and doubling up tightly, and

whackings of the stomach, and tears and cries of anguish. I never in my life heard my uncle laugh to his

maximum except at her; he was commonly too much in earnest for that, and he didn't laugh much at all, to

my knowledge, after those early years. Also she threw things at him to an enormous extent in her resolve to

keep things lively in spite of Wimblehurst; sponges out of stock she threw, cushions, balls of paper, clean

washing, bread; and once up the yard when they thought that I and the errand boy and the diminutive maid of

all work were safely out of the way, she smashed a boxful of eightounce bottles I had left to drain,

assaulting my uncle with a new soft broom. Sometimes she would shy things at mebut not often. There

seemed always laughter round and about herall three of us would share hysterics at timesand on one

occasion the two of them came home from church shockingly ashamed of themselves, because of a storm of

mirth during the sermon. The vicar, it seems, had tried to blow his nose with a black glove as well as the

customary pockethandkerchief. And afterwards she had picked up her own glove by the finger, and looking

innocently but intently sideways, had suddenly by this simple expedient exploded my uncle altogether. We

"But it shows you," cried my uncle, suddenly becoming grave, "what Wimblehurst is, to have us all laughing

at a little thing like that! We weren't the only ones that giggled. Not by any means! And, Lord! it was funny!"

Socially, my uncle and aunt were almost completely isolated. In places like Wimblehurst the tradesmen's

lives always are isolated socially, all of them, unless they have a sister or a bosom friend among the other

wives, but the husbands met in various barparlours or in the billiardroom of the Eastry Arms. But my

uncle, for the most part, spent his evenings at home. When first he arrived in Wimblehurst I think he had

spread his effect of abounding ideas and enterprise rather too aggressively; and Wimblehurst, after a

temporary subjugation, had rebelled and done its best to make a butt of him. His appearance in a

"You wait," my uncle used to answer, disconcerted, and sulk for the rest of his visit.

Or some one with an immense air of innocence would remark to the world generally, "They're talkin' of

rebuildin' Wimblehurst all over again, I'm told. Anybody heard anything of it? Going to make it a reg'lar

"Earthquake and a pestilence before you get that," my uncle would mutter, to the infinite delight of every one,

We were torn apart by a financial accident to my uncle of which I did not at first grasp the full bearings. He

had developed what I regarded as an innocent intellectual recreation which he called stockmarket

meteorology. I think he got the idea from one use of curves in the graphic presentation of associated

variations that he saw me plotting. He secured some of my squared paper and, having cast about for a time,

decided to trace the rise and fall of certain lines and railways. "There's something in this, George," he said,

and I little dreamt that among other things that were in it, was the whole of his spare money and most of what

"It's as plain as can be," he said. "See, here's one system of waves and here's another! These are prices for

Union Pacificsextending over a month. Now next week, mark my words, they'll be down one whole point.

We're getting near the steep part of the curve again. See? It's absolutely scientific. It's verifiable. Well, and

I was so convinced of the triviality of this amusement that to find at last that he had taken it in the most

He took me for a long walk to break it to me, over the hills towards Yare and across the great gorse commons

"There are ups and downs in life, George," he saidhalfway across that great open space, and paused against

"DID you?" I said, struck by the sudden chance in his voice. "But you don't mean?"

I stopped and turned on him in the narrow sandy rut of pathway and he stopped likewise.

"Oh, you!YOU'RE all right. You can transfer your apprenticeship, anderwell, I'm not the sort of man

to be careless with trust funds, you can be sure. I kept that aspect in mind. There's some of it left

"It isn't QUITE the way we meant to leave Wimblehurst, George; but we shall have to go. Sale; all the things

shoved about and ticketedlot a hundred and one. Ugh!... It's been a larky little house in some ways. The

first we had. Furnishinga spree in its way.... Very happy..." His face winced at some memory. "Let's go on,

When we were back in the high road again he came alongside, and for a time we walked in silence.

"Don't say anything home yet," he said presently. "Fortunes of War. I got to pick the proper time with

Susanelse she'll get depressed. Not that she isn't a firstrate brick whatever comes along."

"All right," I said, "I'll be careful"; and it seemed to me for the time altogether too selfish to bother him with

any further inquiries about his responsibility as my trustee. He gave a little sigh of relief at my note of assent,

and was presently talking quite cheerfully of his plans.... But he had, I remember, one lapse into moodiness

that came and went suddenly. "Those others!" he said, as though the thought had stung him for the first time.

"All those damned stickinthemudanddieslowly tradespeople: Ruck, the butcher, Marbel, the grocer.

I thought him over in the next few weeks, and I remember now in great detail the last talk we had together

before he handed over the shop and me to his successor. For he had the good luck to sell his business, "lock,

stock, and barrel"in which expression I found myself and my indentures included. The horrors of a sale by

I remember that either coming or going on that occasion, Ruck, the butcher, stood in his doorway and

"You halfwitted hog!" said my uncle. "You grinning hyaena"; and then, "Pleasant day, Mr. Ruck."

"Goin' to make your fortun' in London, then?" said Mr. Ruck, with slow enjoyment.

That last excursion took us along the causeway to Beeching, and so up the downs and round almost as far as

Steadhurst, home. My moods, as we went, made a mingled web. By this time I had really grasped the fact that

my uncle had, in plain English, robbed me; the little accumulations of my mother, six hundred pounds and

more, that would have educated me and started me in business, had been eaten into and was mostly gone into

the unexpected hollow that ought to have been a crest of the Union Pacific curve, and of the remainder he still

gave no account. I was too young and inexperienced to insist on this or know how to get it, but the thought of

it all made streaks of decidedly black anger in that scheme of interwoven feelings. And you know, I was also

acutely sorry for himalmost as sorry as I was for my aunt Susan. Even then I had quite found him out. I

knew him to be weaker than myself; his incurable, irresponsible childishness was as clear to me then as it was

on his deathbed, his redeeming and excusing imaginative silliness. Through some odd mental twist perhaps I

was disposed to exonerate him even at the cost of blaming my poor old mother who had left things in his

I should have forgiven him altogether, I believe, if he had been in any manner apologetic to me; but he wasn't

that. He kept reassuring me in a way I found irritating. Mostly, however, his solicitude was for Aunt Susan

"It's these Crises, George," he said, "try Character. Your aunt's come out well, my boy."

"Had her cry of course,"the thing had been only too painfully evident to me in her eyes and swollen

"We'll be sorry to leave the little house of course. It's a bit like Adam and Eve, you know. Lord! what a chap

"'The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.'

It sounds, George.... Providence their guide!... Wellthank goodness there's no imeedgit prospect of either

"After all, it won't be so bad up there. Not the scenery, perhaps, or the air we get here, butLIFE! We've got

very comfortable little rooms, very comfortable considering, and I shall rise. We're not done yet, we're not

beaten; don't think that, George. I shall pay twenty shillings in the pound before I've doneyou mark my

words, George,twentyfive to you.... I got this situation within twentyfour hoursothers offered. It's an

important firmone of the best in London. I looked to that. I might have got four or five shillings a week

moreelsewhere. Quarters I could name. But I said to them plainly, wages to go on with, but opportunity's

He threw out his chest, and the little round eyes behind his glasses rested valiantly on imaginary employers.

We would go on in silence for a space while he revised and restated that encounter. Then he would break out

He ignored or waived the poor little attempts I made to ascertain my own position. "That's all right," he

would say; or, "Leave all that to me. I'LL look after them." And he would drift away towards the philosophy

"Never put all your resources into one chance, George; that's the lesson I draw from this. Have forces in

reserve. It was a hundred to one, George, that I was righta hundred to one. I worked it out afterwards. And

here we are spiked on the offchance. If I'd have only kept back a little, I'd have had it on U.P. next day, like

"It's where you'll bump up against Chance like this, George, that you feel the need of religion. Your

hardandfast scientific menyour Spencers and Huxleysthey don't understand that. I do. I've thought of

it a lot latelyin bed and about. I was thinking of it this morning while I shaved. It's not irreverent for me to

say it, I hopebut God comes in on the offchance, George. See? Don't you be too cocksure of anything,

good or bad. That's what I make out of it. I could have sworn. Well, do you think Iparticular as I

amwould have touched those Union Pacifics with trust money at all, if I hadn't thought it a thoroughly

"It's a lesson to me. You start in to get a hundred percent. and you come out with that. It means, in a way, a

reproof for Pride. I've thought of that, Georgein the Night Watches. I was thinking this morning when I

was shaving, that that's where the good of it all comes in. At the bottom I'm a mystic in these affairs. You

calculate you're going to do this or that, but at bottom who knows at all WHAT he's doing? When you most

think you're doing things, they're being done right over your head. YOU'RE being donein a sense. Take a

hundredto one chance, or one to a hundredwhat does it matter? You're being Led."

It's odd that I heard this at the time with unutterable contempt, and now that I recall itwell, I ask myself,

"I wish," said I, becoming for a moment outrageous, "YOU were being Led to give me some account of my

"Not without a bit of paper to figure on, George, I can't. But you trust me about that never fear. You trust

I think the bankruptcy hit my aunt pretty hard. There was, so far as I can remember now, a complete cessation

of all those cheerful outbreaks of elasticity, no more skylarking in the shop nor scampering about the house.

But there was no fuss that I saw, and only little signs in her complexion of the fits of weeping that must have

taken her. She didn't cry at the end, though to me her face with its strain of selfpossession was more pathetic

than any weeping. "Well" she said to me as she came through the shop to the cab, "Here's old orf, George!

Orf to Mome number two! Goodbye!" And she took me in her arms and kissed me and pressed me to her.

My uncle followed, and he seemed to me a trifle too valiant and confident in his bearing for reality. He was

unusually white in the face. He spoke to his successor at the counter. "Here we go!" he said. "One down, the

other up. You'll find it a quiet little business so long as you run it on quiet linesa nice quiet little business.

There's nothing more? No? Well, if you want to know anything write to me. I'll always explain fully.

Anythingbusiness, place or people. You'll find Pil Antibil. a little overstocked bytheby, I found it

soothed my mind the day before yesterday making 'em, and I made 'em all day. Thousands! And where's

George? Ah! there you are! I'll write to you, George, FULLY, about all that affair. Fully!"

It became clear to me as if for the first time, that I was really parting from my aunt Susan. I went out on to the

pavement and saw her head craned forward, her wideopen blue eyes and her little face intent on the shop

that had combined for her all the charms of a big doll's house and a little home of her very own. "Goodbye!"

she said to it and to me. Our eyes met for a momentperplexed. My uncle bustled out and gave a few totally

unnecessary directions to the cabman and got in beside her. "All right?" asked the driver. "Right," said I; and

he woke up the horse with a flick of his whip. My aunt's eyes surveyed me again. "Stick to your old science

and things, George, and write and tell me when they make you a Professor," she said cheerfully.

She stared at me for a second longer with eyes growing wider and brighter and a smile that had become fixed,

glanced again at the bright little shop still saying "Ponderevo" with all the emphasis of its fascia, and then

flopped back hastily out of sight of me into the recesses of the cab. Then it had gone from before me and I

beheld Mr. Snape, the hairdresser, inside his store regarding its departure with a quiet satisfaction and

I was left, I say, as part of the lock, stock, and barrel, at Wimblehurst with my new master, a Mr. Mantell;

who plays no part in the progress of this story except in so far as he effaced my uncle's traces. So soon as the

freshness of this new personality faded, I began to find Wimblehurst not only a dull but a lonely place, and to

miss my aunt Susan immensely. The advertisements of the summer terms for Cough Linctus were removed;

the bottles of coloured waterred, green, and yellowrestored to their places; the horse announcing

veterinary medicine, which my uncle, sizzling all the while, had coloured in careful portraiture of a

Goodwood favourite, rewhitened; and I turned myself even more resolutely than before to Latin (until the

passing of my preliminary examination enabled me to drop that), and then to mathematics and science.

There were classes in Electricity and Magnetism at the Grammar School. I took a little "elementary" prize in

that in my first year and a medal in my third; and in Chemistry and Human Physiology and Sound, Light and

Heat, I did well. There was also a lighter, more discursive subject called Physiography, in which one ranged

among the sciences and encountered Geology as a process of evolution from Eozoon to Eastry House, and

Astronomy as a record of celestial movements of the most austere and invariable integrity. I learnt out of

badlywritten, condensed little textbooks, and with the minimum of experiment, but still I learnt. Only

thirty years ago it was, and I remember I learnt of the electric light as an expensive, impracticable toy, the

telephone as a curiosity, electric traction as a practical absurdity. There was no argon, no radium, no

phagocytesat least to my knowledge, and aluminium was a dear, infrequent metal. The fastest ships in the

world went then at nineteen knots, and no one but a lunatic here and there ever thought it possible that men

Many things have happened since then, but the last glance I had of Wimblehurst two years ago remarked no

change whatever in its pleasant tranquillity. They had not even built any fresh housesat least not actually in

the town, though about the station there had been some building. But it was a good place to do work in, for

all its quiescence. I was soon beyond the small requirements of the Pharmaceutical Society's examination,

and as they do not permit candidates to sit for that until one and twenty, I was presently filling up my time

and preventing my studies becoming too desultory by making an attack upon the London University degree

of Bachelor of Science, which impressed me then as a very splendid but almost impossible achievement. The

degree in mathematics and chemistry appealed to me as particularly congenialalbeit giddily inaccessible. I

set to work. I had presently to arrange a holiday and go to London to matriculate, and so it was I came upon

my aunt and uncle again. In many ways that visit marked an epoch. It was my first impression of London at

all. I was then nineteen, and by a conspiracy of chances my nearest approach to that human wilderness had

been my brief visit to Chatham. Chatham too had been my largest town. So that I got London at last with an

exceptional freshness of effect, as the sudden revelation of a whole unsuspected other side to life.

I came to it on a dull and smoky day by the South Eastern Railway, and our train was half an hour late,

stopping and going on and stopping again. I marked beyond Chiselhurst the growing multitude of villas, and

so came stage by stage through multiplying houses and diminishing interspaces of market garden and dingy

grass to regions of interlacing railway lines, big factories, gasometers and wide reeking swamps of dingy

little homes, more of them and more and more. The number of these and their dinginess and poverty

increased, and here rose a great public house and here a Board School and there a gaunt factory; and away to

the east there loomed for a time a queer, incongruous forest of masts and spars. The congestion of houses

intensified and piled up presently into tenements; I marveled more and more at this boundless world of dingy

people; whiffs of industrial smell, of leather, of brewing, drifted into the carriage; the sky darkened, I

rumbled thunderously over bridges, vancrowded streets, peered down on and crossed the Thames with an

abrupt eclat of sound. I got an effect of tall warehouses, of grey water, barge crowded, of broad banks of

indescribable mud, and then I was in Cannon Street Stationa monstrous dirty cavern with trains packed

across its vast floor and more porters standing along the platform than I had ever been in my life before. I

alighted with my portmanteau and struggled along, realising for the first time just how small and weak I

could still upon occasion feel. In this world, I felt, an Honours medal in Electricity and magnetism counted

Afterwards I drove in a cab down a canon of rushing street between high warehouses, and peeped up

astonished at the blackened greys of Saint Paul's. The traffic of Cheapsideit was mostly in horse

omnibuses in those daysseemed stupendous, its roar was stupendous; I wondered where the money came

from to employ so many cabs, what industry could support the endless jostling stream of silkhatted,

frockcoated, hurrying men. Down a turning I found the Temperance Hotel Mr. Mantell had recommended to

me. The porter in a green uniform who took over my portmanteau, seemed, I thought, to despise me a good

Matriculation kept me for four full days and then came an afternoon to spare, and I sought out Tottenham

Court Road through a perplexing network of various and crowded streets. But this London was vast! it was

endless! it seemed the whole world had changed into packed frontages and hoardings and street spaces. I got

there at last and made inquiries, and I found my uncle behind the counter of the pharmacy he managed, an

establishment that did not impress me as doing a particularly highclass trade. "Lord!" he said at the sight of

He greeted me warmly. I had grown taller, and he, I thought, had grown shorter and smaller and rounder but

otherwise he was unchanged. He struck me as being rather shabby, and the silk hat he produced and put on,

when, after mysterious negotiations in the back premises he achieved his freedom to accompany me, was past

"Oh, among other things," said I, with a sudden regrettable politeness, and waived the topic of his trusteeship

"We'll have her out of it," he said suddenly; "we'll go somewhere. We don't get you in London every day."

"It's my first visit," I said, "I've never seen London before"; and that made him ask me what I thought of it,

and the rest of the talk was London, London, to the exclusion of all smaller topics. He took me up the

Hampstead Road almost to the Cobden statue, plunged into some back streets to the left, and came at last to a

blistered front door that responded to his latchkey, one of a long series of blistered front doors with fanlights

and apartment cards above. We found ourselves in a drabcoloured passage that was not only narrow and

dirty but desolatingly empty, and then he opened a door and revealed my aunt sitting at the window with a

little sewingmachine on a bamboo occasional table before her, and "work"a plumcoloured walking

dress I judged at its most analytical stagescattered over the rest of the apartment.

At the first glance I judged my aunt was plumper than she had been, but her complexion was just as fresh and

She still "cheeked" my uncle, I was pleased to find. "What are you old Poking in for at THIS

timeGubbitt?," she said when he appeared, and she still looked with a practised eye for the facetious side

of things. When she saw me behind him, she gave a little cry and stood up radiant. Then she became grave.

I was surprised at my own emotion in seeing her. She held me at arm's length for a moment, a hand on each

shoulder, and looked at me with a sort of glad scrutiny. She seemed to hesitate, and then pecked little kiss off

"You're a man, George," she said, as she released me, and continued to look at me for a while.

Their menage was one of a very common type in London. They occupied what is called the diningroom

floor of a small house, and they had the use of a little inconvenient kitchen in the basement that had once

been scullery. The two rooms, bedroom behind and living room in front, were separated by foldingdoors

that were never now thrown back, and indeed, in the presence of a visitor, not used at all. There was of course

no bathroom or anything of that sort available, and there was no water supply except to the kitchen below.

My aunt did all the domestic work, though she could have afforded to pay for help if the build of the place

had not rendered that inconvenient to the pitch of impossibility. There was no sort of help available except

that of indoor servants, for whom she had no accommodation. The furniture was their own; it was partly

secondhand, but on the whole it seemed cheerful to my eye, and my aunt's bias for cheap, gayfigured muslin

had found ample score. In many ways I should think it must have been an extremely inconvenient and

cramped sort of home, but at the time I took it, as I was taking everything, as being there and in the nature of

things. I did not see the oddness of solvent decent people living in a habitation so clearly neither designed nor

adapted for their needs, so wasteful of labour and so devoid of beauty as this was, and it is only now as I

describe this that I find myself thinking of the essential absurdity of an intelligent community living in such

makeshift homes. It strikes me now as the next thing to wearing secondhand clothes.

You see it was a natural growth, part of that system to which Bladesover, I hold, is the key. There are wide

regions of London, miles of streets of houses, that appear to have been originally designed for

prosperousmiddleclass homes of the early Victorian type. There must have been a perfect fury of such

building in the thirties, forties, and fifties. Street after street must have been rushed into being, Campden

Town way, Pentonville way, Brompton way, West Kensington way in the Victoria region and all over the

I am doubtful if many of these houses had any long use as the residences of single families if from the very

first almost their tenants did not makeshift and take lodgers and sublet. They were built with basements, in

which their servants worked and livedservants of a more submissive and troglodytic generation who did

not mind stairs. The diningroom (with folding doors) was a little above the ground level, and in that the

wholesome boiled and roast with damp boiled potatoes and then pie to follow, was consumed and the

numerous family read and worked in the evening, and above was the drawingroom (also with folding

doors), where the infrequent callers were received. That was the vision at which those industrious builders

aimed. Even while these houses were being run up, the threads upon the loom of fate were shaping to abolish

altogether the type of household that would have fitted them. Means of transit were developing to carry the

moderately prosperous middleclass families out of London, education and factory employment were

whittling away at the supply of rough, hardworking, obedient girls who would stand the subterranean

drudgery of these places, new classes of hardup middleclass people such as my uncle, employees of

various types, were coming into existence, for whom no homes were provided. None of these classes have

ideas of what they ought to be, or fit in any legitimate way into the Bladesover theory that dominates our

minds. It was nobody's concern to see them housed under civilised conditions, and the beautiful laws of

supply and demand had free play. They had to squeeze in. The landlords came out financially intact from

their blundering enterprise. More and more these houses fell into the hands of married artisans, or struggling

widows or old servants with savings, who became responsible for the quarterly rent and tried to sweat a living

I remember now that a poor greyhaired old woman who had an air of having been roused from a nap in the

dust bin, came out into the area and looked up at us as we three went out from the front door to "see London"

under my uncle's direction. She was the subletting occupier; she squeezed out a precarious living by taking

the house whole and subletting it in detail and she made her food and got the shelter of an attic above and a

basement below by the transaction. And if she didn't chance to "let" steadily, out she went to pauperdom and

It is a foolish community that can house whole classes, useful and helpful, honest and loyal classes, in such

squalidly unsuitable dwellings. It is by no means the social economy it seems, to use up old women, savings

and inexperience in order to meet the landlord's demands. But any one who doubts this thing is going on right

up to today need only spend an afternoon in hunting for lodgings in any of the regions of London I have

But where has my story got to? My uncle, I say, decided I must be shown London, and out we three went as

It pleased my uncle extremely to find I had never seen London before. He took possession of the metropolis

forthwith. "London, George," he said, "takes a lot of understanding. It's a great place. Immense. The richest

town in the world, the biggest port, the greatest manufacturing town, the Imperial citythe centre of

civilisation, the heart of the world! See those sandwich men down there! That third one's hat! Fair treat! You

don't see poverty like that in Wimblehurst George! And many of them high Oxford honour men too. Brought

down by drink! It's a wonderful place, Georgea whirlpool, a maelstrom! whirls you up and whirls you

I have a very confused memory of that afternoon's inspection of London. My uncle took us to and fro

showing us over his London, talking erratically, following a route of his own. Sometimes we were walking,

sometimes we were on the tops of great staggering horse omnibuses in a heaving jumble of traffic, and at one

point we had tea in an Aerated Bread Shop. But I remember very distinctly how we passed down Park Lane

under an overcast sky, and how my uncle pointed out the house of this child of good fortune and that with

I remember, too, that as he talked I would find my aunt watching my face as if to check the soundness of his

She bit her bun extensively, and gesticulated with the remnant to indicate that she had more to say.

"How are YOU going to make your fortune?" she said so soon as she could speak again. "You haven't told us

"If I make it at all," I said. "For my part I think shall be satisfied with something less than a fortune."

"He won't tell me whenso I can't get anything ready. But it's coming. Going to ride in our carriage and

She finished her bun and twiddled crumbs from her fingers. "I shall be glad of the garden," she said. "It's

going to be a real big one with rosaries and things. Fountains in it. Pampas grass. Hothouses."

"Grey horses in the carriage, George," she said. "It's nice to think about when one's dull. And dinners in

restaurants often and often. And theatresin the stalls. And money and money and money."

"Just as though an old Porpoise like him would ever make money," she said, turning her eyes upon his profile

"I'll do something," said my uncle, "you bet! Zzzz!" and rapped with a shilling on the marble table.

"When you do you'll have to buy me a new pair of gloves," she said, "anyhow. That finger's past mending.

Look! you Cabbageyou." And she held the split under his nose, and pulled a face of comical fierceness.

My uncle smiled at these sallies at the time, but afterwards, when I went back with him to the Pharmacythe

lowclass business grew brisker in the evening and they kept open latehe reverted to it in a low expository

tone. "Your aunt's a bit impatient, George. She gets at me. It's only natural.... A woman doesn't understand

how long it takes to build up a position. No.... In certain directions nowI amquietlybuilding up a

position. Now here.... I get this room. I have my three assistants. Zzzz. It's a position that, judged by the

criterion of imeedjit income, isn't perhaps so good as I deserve, but strategicallyyes. It's what I want. I

"Well, George, there's one thing you can rely upon, I'm doing nothing in a hurry. I turn over this one and that,

and I don't talkindiscreetly. There's No! I don't think I can tell you that. And yet, why NOT?"

He got up and closed the door into the shop. "I've told no one," he remarked, as he sat down again. "I owe

I thought he was asking me to hear some remote, strange noise. "I don't hear anything," I said reluctantly to

his expectant face. He smiled undefeated. "Try again," he said, and repeated, "TonoBungay."

"Ah!" said my uncle, rejoicing and expanding. "What IS it? That's what you got to ask? What won't it be?"

He dug me violently in what he supposed to be my ribs. "George," he cried"George, watch this place!

That, I believe, was the very first time that the words TonoBungay ever heard on earthunless my uncle

indulged in monologues in his chambera highly probable thing. Its utterance certainly did not seem to me

at the time to mark any sort of epoch, and had I been told this word was the Open Sesame to whatever pride

and pleasure the grimy front of London hid from us that evening, I should have laughed aloud.

"Coming now to business," I said after a pause, and with a chill sense of effort; and I opened the question of

My uncle sighed, and leant back in his chair. "I wish I could make all this business as clear to you as it is to

After I left my uncle that evening I gave way to a feeling of profound depression. My uncle and aunt seemed

to me to be leadingI have already used the word too often, but I must use it againDINGY lives. They

seemed to be adrift in a limitless crowd of dingy people, wearing shabby clothes, living uncomfortably in

shabby secondhand houses, going to and fro on pavements that had always a thin veneer of greasy, slippery

mud, under grey skies that showed no gleam of hope of anything for them but dinginess until they died. It

seemed absolutely clear to me that my mother's little savings had been swallowed up and that my own

prospect was all too certainly to drop into and be swallowed up myself sooner or later by this dingy London

ocean. The London that was to be an adventurous escape from the slumber of Wimblehurst, had vanished

from my dreams. I saw my uncle pointing to the houses in Park Lane and showing a frayed shirtcuff as he

My feelings towards my uncle were extraordinarily mixed. I was intensely sorry not only for my aunt Susan

but for himfor it seemed indisputable that as they were living then so they must go onand at the same

time I was angry with the garrulous vanity and illness that had elipped all my chance of independent study,

and imprisoned her in those grey apartments. When I got back to Wimblehurst I allowed myself to write him

a boyishly sarcastic and sincerely bitter letter. He never replied. Then, believing it to be the only way of

escape for me, I set myself far more grimly and resolutely to my studies than I had ever done before. After a

time I wrote to him in more moderate terms, and he answered me evasively. And then I tried to dismiss him

Yes, that first raid upon London under the moist and chilly depression of January had an immense effect upon

me. It was for me an epochmaking disappointment. I had thought of London as a large, free, welcoming,

I did not realise at all what human things might be found behind those grey frontages, what weakness that

whole forbidding facade might presently confess. It is the constant error of youth to overestimate the Will in

things. I did not see that the dirt, the discouragement, the discomfort of London could be due simply to the

fact that London was a witless old giantess of a town, too slack and stupid to keep herself clean and maintain

a brave face to the word. No! I suffered from the sort of illusion that burnt witches in the seventeenth century.

I endued her grubby disorder with a sinister and magnificent quality of intention.

And my uncle's gestures and promises filled me with doubt and a sort of fear for him. He seemed to me a lost

little creature, too silly to be silent, in a vast implacable condemnation. I was full of pity and a sort of

tenderness for my aunt Susan, who was doomed to follow his erratic fortunes mocked by his grandiloquent

I was to learn better. But I worked with the terror of the grim underside of London in my soul during all my

I came to live in London, as I shall tell you, when I was nearly twentytwo. Wimblehurst dwindles in

perspective, is now in this book a little place far off, Bladesover no more than a small pinkish speck of

frontage among the distant Kentish hills; the scene broadens out, becomes multitudinous and limitless, full of

the sense of vast irrelevant movement. I do not remember my second coming to London as I do my first, for

my early impressions, save that an October memory of softened amber sunshine stands out, amber sunshine

falling on grey house fronts I know not where. That, and a sense of a large tranquillity.

I could fill a book, I think, with a more or less imaginary account of how I came to apprehend London, how

first in one aspect and then in another it grew in my mind. Each day my accumulating impressions were

added to and qualified and brought into relationship with new ones; they fused inseparably with others that

were purely personal and accidental. I find myself with a certain comprehensive perception of London,

complete indeed, incurably indistinct in places and yet in some way a whole that began with my first visit and

At first, no doubt, it was a chaos of streets and people and buildings and reasonless going to and fro. I do not

remember that I ever struggled very steadily to understand it, or explored it with any but a personal and

adventurous intention. Yet in time there has grown up in me a kind of theory of London; I do think I see lines

of an ordered structure out of which it has grown, detected a process that is something more than a confusion

I said at the outset of my first book that I find in Bladesover the clue to all England. Well, I certainly imagine

it is the clue to the structure of London. There have been no revolutions no deliberate restatements or

abandonments of opinion in England since the days of the fine gentry, since 1688 or thereabouts, the days

when Bladesover was built; there have been changes, dissolving forest replacing forest, if you will; but then it

was that the broad lines of the English system set firmly. And as I have gone to and fro in London in certain

regions constantly the thought has recurred this is Bladesover House, this answers to Bladesover House. The

fine gentry may have gone; they have indeed largely gone, I think; rich merchants may have replaced them,

financial adventurers or what not. That does not matter; the shape is still Bladesover.

I am most reminded of Bladesover and Eastry by all those regions round about the West End parks; for

example, estate parks, each more or less in relation to a palace or group of great houses. The roads and back

ways of Mayfair and all about St. James's again, albeit perhaps of a later growth in point of time, were of the

very spirit and architectural texture of the Bladesover passages and yards; they had the same smells, the

space, the large cleanest and always going to and fro where one met unmistakable Olympians and even more

unmistakable valets, butlers, footmen in mufti. There were moments when I seemed to glimpse down areas

I could trace out now on a map what I would call the GreatHouse region; passing southwestward into

Belgravia, becoming diffused and sporadic westward, finding its last systematic outbreak round and about

Regent's Park. The Duke of Devonshire's place in Piccadilly, in all its insolent ugliness, pleases me

particularly; it is the quintessence of the thing; Apsley House is all in the manner of my theory, Park Lane has

its quite typical mansions, and they run along the border of the Green Park and St. James's. And I struck out a

truth one day in Cromwell Road quite suddenly, as I looked over the Natural History Museum "By Jove,"

said I "but this is the little assemblage of cases of stuffed birds and animals upon the Bladesover staircase

grown enormous, and yonder as the corresponding thing to the Bladesover curios and porcelain is the Art

Museume and there in the little observatories in Exhibition Road is old Sir Cuthbert's Gregorian telescope

that I hunted out in the storeroom and put together." And diving into the Art Museum under this inspiration, I

It was really a good piece of social comparative anatomy I did that day; all these museums and libraries that

are dotted over London between Piccadilly and West Kensington, and indeed the museum and library

movement throughout the world, sprang from the elegant leisure of the gentlemen of taste. Theirs were the.

first libraries, the first houses of culture; by my ratlike raids into the Bladesover saloon I became, as it were,

the last dwindled representative of such a man of letters as Swift. But now these things have escaped out of

the Great House altogether, and taken on a strange independent life of their own.

It is this idea of escaping parts from the seventeenth century system of Bladesover, of proliferating and

overgrowing elements from the Estates, that to this day seems to me the best explanation, not simply of

London, but of all England. England is a country of great Renascence landed gentlefolk who have been

unconsciously outgrown and overgrown. The proper shops for Bladesover custom were still to be found in

Regent Street and Bond Street in my early London days in those days they had been but lightly touched by

the American's profaning handand in Piccadilly. I found the doctor's house of the country village or

country town up and down Harley Street, multiplied but not otherwise different, and the family solicitor (by

the hundred) further eastward in the abandoned houses of a previous generation of gentlepeople, and down in

Westminster, behind Palladian fronts, the public offices sheltered in large Bladesoverish rooms and looked

out on St. James's Park. The Parliament Houses of lords and gentlemen, the parliament house that was

horrified when merchants and brewers came thrusting into it a hundred years ago, stood out upon its terrace

And the more I have paralleled these things with my BladesoverEastry model, the more evident it has

become to me that the balance is not the same, and the more evident is the presence of great new forces, blind

forces of invasion, of growth. The railway termini on the north side of London have been kept as remote as

Eastry had kept the railwaystation from Wimblehurst, they stop on the very outskirts of the estates, but from

the south, the South Eastern railway had butted its great stupid rusty iron head of Charing Cross station, that

great head that came smashing down in 1905clean across the river, between Somerset House and

Whitehall. The south side had no protecting estate. Factory chimneys smoke right over against Westminster

with an air of carelessly not having permission, and the whole effect of industrial London and of all London

east of Temple Bar and of the huge dingy immensity of London port is to me of something disproportionately

large, something morbidly expanded, without plan or intention, dark and sinister toward the clean clear social

assurance of the West End. And south of this central London, southeast, southwest, far west, northwest,

all round the northern hills, are similar disproportionate growths, endless streets of undistinguished houses,

undistinguished industries, shabby families, secondrate shops, inexplicable people who in a once

fashionable phrase do not "exist." All these aspects have suggested to my mind at times, do suggest to this

day, the unorganised, abundant substance of some tumorous growthprocess, a process which indeed bursts

all the outlines of the affected carcass and protrudes such masses as ignoble comfortable Croydon, as tragic

impoverished West Ham. To this day I ask myself will those masses ever become structural, will they indeed

shape into anything new whatever, or is that cancerous image their true and ultimate diagnosis?...

Moreover, together with this hypertrophy there is an immigration of elements that have never understood and

never will understand the great tradition, wedges of foreign settlement embedded in the heart of this yeasty

English expansion. One day I remember wandering eastward out of pure curiosityit must have been in my

early student daysand discovering a shabbily bright foreign quarter, shops displaying Hebrew placards and

weird, unfamiliar commodities and a concourse of brighteyed, eaglenosed people talking some

incomprehensible gibberish between the shops and the barrows. And soon I became quite familiar with the

devious. vicious, dirtilypleasant eroticism of Soho. I found those crowded streets a vast relief from the dull

grey exterior of Brompton where I lodged and lived my daily life. In Soho, indeed, I got my first inkling of

the factor of replacement that is so important in both the English and the American process.

Even in the West End, in Mayfair and the square, about Pall Mall, Ewart was presently to remind me the face

of the old aristocratic dignity was fairer than its substance; here were actors and actresses, here money

lenders and Jews, here bold financial adventurers, and I thought of my uncle's frayed cuff as he pointed out

this house in Park Lane and that. That was so and so's who made a corner in borax, and that palace belonged

to that hero among modern adventurers, Barmentrude, who used to be an I.D.B.,an illicit diamond buyer

that is to say. A city of Bladesovers, the capital of a kingdom of Bladesovers, all much shaken and many

altogether in decay, parasitically occupied, insidiously replaced by alien, unsympathetic and irresponsible

elements; and with a ruling an adventitious and miscellaneous empire of a quarter of this daedal earth

complex laws, intricate social necessities, disturbing insatiable suggestions, followed from this. Such was the

world into which I had come, into which I had in some way to thrust myself and fit my problem, my

temptations, my efforts, my patriotic instinct, all my moral instincts, my physical appetites, my dreams and

London! I came up to it, young and without advisers, rather priggish, rather dangerously openminded and

very openeyed, and with somethingit is, I think, the common gift of imaginative youth, and I claim it

unblushinglyfine in me, finer than the world and seeking fine responses. I did not want simply to live or

simply to live happily or well; I wanted to serve and do and makewith some nobility. It was in me. It is in

I had come to London as a scholar. I had taken the Vincent Bradley scholarship of the Pharmaceutical

Society, but I threw this up when I found that my work of the Science and Art Department in mathematics,

physics and chemistry had given me one of the minor Technical Board Scholarships at the Consolidated

Technical Schools at South Kensington. This latter was in mechanics and metallurgy; and I hesitated between

the two. The Vincent Bradley gave me L70 a year and quite the best startoff a pharmaceutical chemist could

have; the South Kensington thing was worth about twentytwo shillings a week, and the prospects it opened

were vague. But it meant far more scientific work than the former, and I was still under the impulse of that

great intellectual appetite that is part of the adolescence of men of my type. Moreover it seemed to lead

towards engineering, in which I imaginedI imagine to this daymy particular use is to be found. I took its

greater uncertainty as a fair risk. I came up very keen, not doubting that the really hard and steady industry

that had carried me through Wimblehurst would go on still in the new surroundings.

When I look back now at my Wimblehurst days, I still find myself surprised at the amount of steady grinding

study, of strenuous selfdiscipline that I maintained throughout my apprenticeship. In many ways I think that

time was the most honourable period in my life. I wish I could say with a certain mind that my motives in

working so well were large and honourable too. To a certain extent they were so; there was a fine sincere

curiosity, a desire for the strength and power of scientific knowledge and a passion for intellectual exercise;

but I do not think those forces alone would have kept me at it so grimly and closely if Wimblehurst had not

been so dull, so limited and so observant. Directly I came into the London atmosphere, tasting freedom,

tasting irresponsibility and the pull of new forces altogether, my discipline fell from me like a garment.

Wimblehurst to a youngster in my position offered no temptations worth counting, no interests to conflict

with study, no vicessuch vices as it offered were coarsely stripped of any imaginative glamourfull

drunkenness, clumsy leering shameful lust, no social intercourse even to waste one's time, and on the other

hand it would minister greatly to the selfesteem of a conspicuously industrious student. One was marked as

"clever," one played up to the part, and one's little accomplishment stood out finely in one's private reckoning

against the sunlit small ignorance of that agreeable place. One went with an intent rush across the market

square, one took one's exercise with as dramatic a sense of an ordered day as an Oxford don, one burnt the

midnight oil quite consciously at the rare respectful, benighted passerby. And one stood out finely in the

local paper with one's unapproachable yearly harvest of certificates. Thus I was not only a genuinely keen

student, but also a little of a prig and poseur in those daysand the latter kept the former at it, as London

But I did not realise all this when I came to London, did not perceive how the change of atmosphere began at

once to warp and distribute my energies. In the first place I became invisible. If I idled for a day, no one

except my fellowstudents (who evidently had no awe for me) remarked it. No one saw my midnight taper;

no one pointed me out as I crossed the street as an astonishing intellectual phenomenon. In the next place I

became inconsiderable. In Wimblehurst I felt I stood for Science; nobody there seemed to have so much as I

and to have it so fully and completely. In London I walked ignorant in an immensity, and it was clear that

among my fellowstudents from the midlands and the north I was illequipped and undertrained. With the

utmost exertion I should only take a secondary position among them. And finally, in the third place, I was

distracted by voluminous new interests; London took hold of me, and Science, which had been the universe,

shrank back to the dimensions of tiresome little formulae compacted in a book. I came to London in late

September, and it was a very different London from that great greylyovercast, smokestained

housewilderness of my first impressions. I reached it by Victoria and not by Cannon Street, and its centre

was now in Exhibition Road. It shone, pale amber, bluegrey and tenderly spacious and fine under clear

autumnal skies. a London of hugely handsome buildings and vistas and distances, a London of gardens and

labyrinthine tall museums, of old trees and remote palaces and artificial waters. I lodged near by in West

So London faced me the second time, making me forget altogether for a while the grey, drizzling city visage

that had first looked upon me. I settled down and went to and fro to my lectures and laboratory; in the

beginning I worked hard, and only slowly did the curiosity that presently possessed me to know more of this

huge urban province arise, the desire to find something beyond mechanism that I could serve, some use other

than learning. With this was a growing sense of loneliness, a desire for adventure and intercourse. I found

myself in the evenings poring over a map of London I had bought, instead of copying out lecture notesand

on Sundays I made explorations, taking omnibus rides east and west and north and south, and to enlarging

and broadening the sense of great swarming hinterlands of humanity with whom I had no dealings, of whom I

The whole illimitable place teemed with suggestions of indefinite and sometimes outrageous possibility, of

It wasn't simply that I received a vast impression of space and multitude and opportunity; intimate things also

were suddenly dragged from neglected, veiled and darkened corners into an acute vividness of perception.

Close at hand in the big art museum I came for the first time upon the beauty of nudity, which I had hitherto

held to be a shameful secret, flaunted and gloried in; I was made aware of beauty as not only permissible, but

desirable and frequent and of a thousand hitherto unsuspected rich aspects of life. One night in a real rapture,

I walked round the upper gallery of the Albert Hall and listened for the first time to great music; I believe

My apprehension of spaces and places was reinforced by a quickened apprehension of persons. A constant

stream of people passed by me, eyes met and challenged mine and passedmore and more I wanted then to

stayif I went eastward towards Piccadilly, women who seemed then to my boyish inexperience softly

splendid and alluring, murmured to me as they passed. Extraordinarily life unveiled. The very hoardings

clamoured strangely at one's senses and curiosities. One bought pamphlets and papers full of strange and

daring ideas transcending one's boldest; in the parks one heard men discussing the very existence of God,

denying the rights of property, debating a hundred things that one dared not think about in Wimblehurst. And

after the ordinary overcast day, after dull mornings, came twilight, and London lit up and became a thing of

white and yellow and red jewels of light and wonderful floods of golden illumination and stupendous and

unfathomable shadowsand there were no longer any mean or shabby peoplebut a great mysterious

Always I was coming on the queerest new aspects. Late one Saturday night I found myself one of a great

slowmoving crowd between the blazing shops and the flaring barrows in the Harrow Road; I got into

conversation with two boldeyed girls, bought them boxes of chocolate, made the acquaintance of father and

mother and various younger brothers and sisters, sat in a publichouse hilariously with them all, standing and

being stood drinks, and left them in the small hours at the door of "home," never to see them again. And once

I was accosted on the outskirts of a Salvation Army meeting in one of the parks by a silkhatted young man

of eager and serious discourse, who argued against scepticism with me, invited me home to tea into a clean

and cheerful family of brothers and sisters and friends, and there I spent the evening singing hymns to the

harmonium (which reminded me of halfforgotten Chatham), and wishing all the sisters were not so

How well I remember the first morning, a bright Sunday morning in early October, when I raided in upon

Ewart! I found my old schoolfellow in bed in a room over an oilshop in a back street at the foot of Highgate

Hill. His landlady, a pleasant, dirty young woman with softbrown eyes, brought down his message for me to

come up; and up I went. The room presented itself as ample and interesting in detail and shabby with a quite

commendable shabbiness. I had an impression of brown wallsthey were papered with brown paper of a

long shelf along one side of the room, with dusty plaster casts and a small cheap lay figure of a horse, of a

table and something of grey wax partially covered with a cloth, and of scattered drawings. There was a gas

stove in one corner, and some enameled ware that had been used for overnight cooking. The oilcloth on the

floor was streaked with a peculiar white dust. Ewart himself was not in the first instance visible, but only a

fourfold canvas screen at the end of the room from which shouts proceeded of "Come on!" then his wiry

black hair, very much rumpled, and a staring redbrown eye and his stump of a nose came round the edge of

this at a height of about three feet from the ground "It's old Ponderevo!" he said, "the Early bird! And he's

caught the worm! By Jove, but it's cold this morning! Come round here and sit on the bed!"

He was lying on a small wooden foldup bed, the scanty covering of which was supplemented by an overcoat

and an elderly but still cheerful pair of check trousers, and he was wearing pajamas of a virulent pink and

green. His neck seemed longer and more stringy than it had been even in our schooldays, and his upper lip

had a wiry black moustache. The rest of his ruddy, knobby countenance, his erratic hair and his general hairy

"By Jove!" he said, "you've got quite decentlooking, Ponderevo! What do you think of me?"

"Art, my sonsculpture! And incidentally" He hesitated. "I ply a trade. Will you hand me that pipe and

those smoking things? So! You can't make coffee, eh? Well, try your hand. Cast down this screennofold

it up and so we'll go into the other room. I'll keep in bed all the same. The fire's a gas stove. Yes. Don't make

it bang too loud as you light itI can't stand it this morning. You won't smoke ?... Well, it does me good to

see you again, Ponderevo. Tell me what you're doing, and how you're getting on."

He directed me in the service of his simple hospitality, and presently I came back to his bed and sat down and

smiled at him there, smoking comfortably, with his hands under his head, surveying me.

"How's Life's Morning, Ponderevo? By Jove, it must be nearly six years since we met! They've got

I felt a pipe was becoming after all, and that lit, I gave him a favourable sketch of my career.

"Science! And you've worked like that! While I've been potting round doing odd jobs for stonemasons and

people, and trying to get to sculpture. I've a sort of feeling that the chiselI began with painting, Ponderevo,

and found I was colourblind, colourblind enough to stop it. I've drawn about and thought aboutthought

more particularly. I give myself three days a week as an art student, and the rest of the time I've a sort of trade

that keeps me. And we're still in the beginning of things, young men starting. Do you remember the old times

at Goudhurst, our doll'shouse island, the Retreat of the Ten Thousand Young Holmes and the rabbits, eh?

It's surprising, if you think of it, to find we are still young. And we used to talk of what we would be, and we

I finished and hesitated on some vague foolish lie, "No," I said, a little ashamed of the truth. "Do you? I've

He sucked at his pipe for a space and stared at the plaster cast of a flayed hand that hung on the wall.

"The fact is, Ponderevo, I'm beginning to find life a most extraordinary queer setout; the things that pull

one, the things that don't. The wantsThis business of sex. It's a net. No end to it, no way out of it, no sense

in it. There are times when women take possession of me, when my mind is like a painted ceiling at Hampton

Court with the pride of the flesh sprawling all over it. WHY?... And then again sometimes when I have to

encounter a woman, I am overwhelmed by a terror of tantalising boredomI fly, I hide, I do anything.

You've got your scientific explanations perhaps; what's Nature and the universe up to in that matter?"

"But it doesn't," said Ewart. "That's just it! No. I have succumbed todissipationdown the hill there.

And it was damned ugly and mean, and I hate having done it. And the continuity of the speciesLord!...

And why does Nature make a man so infernally ready for drinks? There's no sense in that anyhow." He sat up

in bed, to put this question with the greater earnestness. "And why has she given me a most violent desire

towards sculpture and an equally violent desire to leave off work directly I begin it, eh?... Let's have some

more coffee. I put it to you, these things puzzle me, Ponderevo. They dishearten me. They keep me in bed."

He had an air of having saved up these difficulties for me for some time. He sat with his chin almost touching

"That's what I mean," he went on, "when I say life is getting on to me as extraordinarily queer, I don't see my

game, nor why I was invited. And I don't make anything of the world outside either. What do you make of

"Isn't it! And it's all up to nothing. You find chaps keeping grocers' shopswhy the DEVIL, Ponderevo, do

they keep grocers' shops? They all do it very carefully, very steadily, very meanly. You find people running

about and doing the most remarkable things being policemen, for example, and burglars. They go about these

businesses quite gravely and earnestly. I somehowcan't go about mine. Is there any sense in it at

"We're youngyes. But one must inquire. The grocer's a grocer because, I suppose, he sees he comes in

there. Feels that on the whole it amounts to a call.... But the bother is I don't see where I come in at all. Do

"Not exactly, yet," I said. "I want to do some good in the worldsomethingsomething effectual, before I

"Yes," he mused." And I've got a sort of idea my sculpture,but now it is to come in and WHY,I've no

idea at all." He hugged his knees for a space. "That's what puzzles me, Ponderevo, no end."

He became animated. "If you will look in that cupboard," he said, "you will find an old respectable looking

roll on a plate and a knife somewhere and a gallipot containing butter. You give them me and I'll make my

breakfast, and then if you don't mind watching me paddle about at my simple toilet I'll get up. Then we'll go

for a walk and talk about this affair of life further. And about Art and Literature and anything else that crops

up on the way.... Yes, that's the gallipot. Cockroach got in it? Chuck him outdamned interloper...."

So in the first five minutes of our talk, as I seem to remember it now, old Ewart struck the note that ran

To me it was a most memorable talk because it opened out quite new horizons of thought. I'd been working

rather close and out of touch with Ewart's free gesticulating way. He was pessimistic that day and sceptical to

the very root of things. He made me feel clearly, what I had not felt at all before, the general adventurousness

of life, particularly of life at the stage we had reached, and also the absence of definite objects, of any

concerted purpose in the lives that were going on all round us. He made me feel, too, how ready I was to take

up commonplace assumptions. Just as I had always imagined that somewhere in social arrangements there

was certainly a HeadMaster who would intervene if one went too far, so I had always had a sort of implicit

belief that in our England there were somewhere people who understood what we were all, as a nation, about.

He brought out, sharply cut and certain, the immense effect of purposelessness in London that I was already

indistinctly feeling. We found ourselves at last returning through Highgate Cemetery and Waterlow

"Look at it there," he said, stopping and pointing to the great vale of London spreading wide and far. "It's like

a seaand we swim in it. And at last down we go, and then up we comewashed up here." He swung his

arms to the long slopes about us, tombs and headstones in long perspectives, in limitless rows.

"We're young, Ponderevo, but sooner or later our whitened memories will wash up on one of these beaches,

on some such beach as this. George Ponderevo, F.R.S., Sidney Ewart, R.I.P. Look at the rows of 'em!"

He paused. "Do you see that hand? The hand, I mean, pointing upward, on the top of a blunted obelisk. Yes.

Well, that's what I do for a livingwhen I'm not thinking, or drinking, or prowling, or making love, or

pretending I'm trying to be a sculptor without either the money or the morals for a model. See? And I do

those hearts afire and those pensive angel guardians with the palm of peace. Damned well I do 'em and

That was the way of it, anyhow. I drank deep of talk that day; we went into theology, into philosophy; I had

my first glimpse of socialism. I felt as though I had been silent in a silence since I and he had parted. At the

thought of socialism Ewart's moods changed for a time to a sort of energy. "After all, all this confounded

It was a good talk that rambled through all the universe. I thought I was giving my mind refreshment, but

indeed it was dissipation. All sorts of ideas, even now, carry me back as it were to a fountainhead, to

Waterlow Park and my resuscitated Ewart. There stretches away south of us long garden slopes and white

gravestones and the wide expanse of London, and somewhere in the picture is a red old wall, sunwarmed,

and a great blaze of Michaelmas daisies set off with late golden sunflowers and a drift of mottled, bloodred,

fallen leaves. It was with me that day as though I had lifted my head suddenly out of dull and immediate

things and looked at life altogether.... But it played the very devil with the copying up of my arrears of notes

After that reunion Ewart and I met much and talked much, and in our subsequent encounters his monologue

was interrupted and I took my share. He had exercised me so greatly that I lay awake at nights thinking him

over, and discoursed and answered him in my head as I went in the morning to the College. I am by nature a

doer and only by the way a critic; his philosophical assertion of the incalculable vagueness of life which fitted

his natural indolence roused my more irritable and energetic nature to active protests. "It's all so pointless," I

said, "because people are slack and because it's in the ebb of an age. But you're a socialist. Well, let's bring

Ewart gave me all my first conceptions of socialism; in a little while I was an enthusiastic socialist and he

was a passive resister to the practical exposition of the theories he had taught me. "We must join some

organisation," I said. "We ought to do things.... We ought to go and speak at street corners. People don't

You must figure me a rather illdressed young man in a state of great earnestness, standing up in that shabby

studio of his and saying these things, perhaps with some gesticulations, and Ewart with a claysmudged face,

dressed perhaps in a flannel shirt and trousers, with a pipe in his mouth, squatting philosophically at a table,

It was only very slowly I came to gauge Ewart's real position in the scheme of things, to understand how

deliberate and complete was this detachment of his from the moral condemnation and responsibilities that

played so fine a part in his talk. His was essentially the nature of an artistic appreciator; he could find interest

and beauty in endless aspects of things that I marked as evil, or at least as not negotiable; and the impulse I

had towards selfdeception, to sustained and consistent selfdevotion, disturbed and detached and pointless

as it was at that time, he had indeed a sort of admiration for but no sympathy. Like many fantastic and ample

talkers he was at bottom secretive, and he gave me a series of little shocks of discovery throughout our

The first of these came in the realisation that he quite seriously meant to do nothing in the world at all

towards reforming the evils he laid bare in so easy and dexterous a manner. The next came in the sudden

appearance of a person called "Milly"I've forgotten her surnamewhom I found in his room one evening,

simply attired in a blue wrapthe rest of her costume behind the screensmoking cigarettes and sharing a

flagon of an amazingly cheap and selfassertive grocer's wine Ewart affected, called "Canary Sack." "Hullo!"

said Ewart, as I came in. "This is Milly, you know. She's been being a modelshe IS a model really.... (keep

Milly was a woman of thirty, perhaps, with a broad, rather pretty face, a placid disposition, a bad accent and

delightful blond hair that waved off her head with an irrepressible variety of charm; and whenever Ewart

spoke she beamed at him. Ewart was always sketching this hair of hers and embarking upon clay statuettes of

her that were never finished. She was, I know now, a woman of the streets, whom Ewart had picked up in the

most casual manner, and who had fallen in love with him, but my inexperience in those days was too great

for me to place her then, and Ewart offered no elucidations. She came to him, he went to her, they took

holidays together in the country when certainly she sustained her fair share of their expenditure. I suspect him

now even of taking money from her. Odd old Ewart! It was a relationship so alien to my orderly conceptions

of honour, to what I could imagine any friend of mine doing, that I really hardly saw it with it there under my

Before I fully grasped the discursive manner in which Ewart was committed to his particular way in life, I

did, I say, as the broad constructive ideas of socialism took hold of me, try to get him to work with me in

After some pains we discovered the office of the Fabian Society, lurking in a cellar in Clement's Inn; and we

went and interviewed a rather discouraging secretary who stood astraddle in front of a fire and questioned us

severely and seemed to doubt the integrity of our intentions profoundly. He advised us to attend the next open

meeting in Clifford's Inn and gave us the necessary data. We both contrived to get to the affair, and heard a

discursive gritty paper on Trusts and one of the most inconclusive discussions you can imagine.

Threequarters of the speakers seemed under some jocular obsession which took the form of pretending to be

conceited. It was a sort of family joke, and as strangers to the family we did not like it.... As we came out

through the narrow passage from Clifford's Inn to the Strand, Ewart suddenly pitched upon a wizened,

The little man gave a nervous selfsatisfied laugh. "I suppose they're up to sample," he said.

The little man dropped out of existence and we emerged upon the Strand. Ewart twisted his arm into a

queerly eloquent gesture that gathered up all the tall facades of the banks, the business places, the projecting

clock and towers of the Law Courts, the advertisements, the luminous signs, into one social immensity, into a

"These socialists have no sense of proportion," he said. "What can you expect of them?"

Ewart, as the embodiment of talk, was certainly a leading factor in my conspicuous failure to go on studying.

Social theory in its first crude form of Democratic Socialism gripped my intelligence more and more

powerfully. I argued in the laboratory with the man who shared my bench until we quarreled and did not

The ferment of sex had been creeping into my being like a slowly advancing tide through all my Wimblehurst

days, the stimulus of London was like the rising of a wind out of the sea that brings the waves in fast and

high. Ewart had his share in that. More and more acutely and unmistakably did my perception of beauty, form

and sound, my desire for adventure, my desire for intercourse, converge on this central and commanding

I began to fall in love faintly with girls I passed in the street, with women who sat before me in trains, with

girl fellowstudents, with ladies in passing carriages, with loiterers at the corners, with neathanded

waitresses in shops and tearooms, with pictures even of girls and women. On my rare visits to the theatre I

always became exalted, and found the actresses and even the spectators about me mysterious, attractive,

creatures of deep interest and desire. I had a stronger and stronger sense that among these glancing, passing

multitudes there was somewhere one who was for me. And in spite of every antagonistic force in the world,

there was something in my very marrow that insisted: "Stop! Look at this one! Think of her! Won't she do ?

This signifiesthis before all things signifies! Stop! Why are you hurrying by? This may be the predestined

It is odd that I can't remember when first I saw Marion, who became my wifewhom I was to make

wretched, who was to make me wretched, who was to pluck that fine generalised possibility of love out of my

early manhood and make it a personal conflict. I became aware of her as one of a number of interesting

attractive figures that moved about in my world, that glanced back at my eyes, that flitted by with a kind of

averted watchfulness. I would meet her coming through the Art Museum, which was my short cut to the

Brompton Road, or see her sitting, reading as I thought, in one of the bays of the Education Library. But

really, as I found out afterwards, she never read. She used to come there to eat a bun in quiet. She was a very

gracefullymoving figure of a girl then, very plainly dressed, with dark brown hair I remember, in a knot low

on her neck behind that confessed the pretty roundness of her head and harmonised with the admirable lines

She stood out among the other girls very distinctly because they dressed more than she did, struck emphatic

notes of colour, startled one by novelties in hats and bows and things. I've always hated the rustle, the

disconcerting colour boundaries, the smart unnatural angles of women's clothes. Her plain black dress gave

I do remember, though, how one afternoon I discovered the peculiar appeal of her form for me. I had been

restless with my work and had finally slipped out of the Laboratory and come over to the Art Museum to

lounge among the pictures. I came upon her in an odd corner of the Sheepshanks gallery, intently copying

something from a picture that hung high. I had just been in the gallery of casts from the antique, my mind

was all alive with my newly awakened sense of line, and there she stood with face upturned, her body

After that I know I sought to see her, felt a distinctive emotion at her presence, began to imagine things about

her. I no longer thought of generalised womanhood or of this casual person or that. I thought of her.

An accident brought us together. I found myself one Monday morning in an omnibus staggering westward

from VictoriaI was returning from a Sunday I'd spent at Wimblehurst in response to a unique freak of

hospitality on the part of Mr. Mantell. She was the sole other inside passenger. And when the time came to

pay her fare, she became an extremely scared, disconcerted and fumbling young woman; she had left her

She looked at me with startled, troubled brown eyes; she permitted my proffered payment to the conductor

with a certain ungraciousness that seemed a part of her shyness, and then as she rose to go, she thanked me

"Thank you so much," she said in a pleasant soft voice; and then less gracefully, "Awfully kind of you, you

I fancy I made polite noises. But just then I wasn't disposed to be critical. I was full of the sense of her

presence; her arm was stretched out over me as she moved past me, the gracious slenderness of her body was

near me. The words we used didn't seem very greatly to matter. I had vague ideas of getting out with

That encounter, I have no doubt, exercised me enormously. I lay awake at night rehearsing it, and wondering

about the next phase of our relationship. That took the form of the return of my twopence. I was in the

Science Library, digging something out of the Encyclopedia Britannica, when she appeared beside me and

placed on the open page an evidently premeditated thin envelope, bulgingly confessing the coins within.

"It was so very kind of you," she said, "the other day. I don't know what I should have done, Mr."

"Well, anyhow, I knew you were here frequently. And I'm a student myself at the Consolidated Technical

I plunged into autobiography and questionings, and so entangled her in a conversation that got a quality of

intimacy through the fact that, out of deference to our fellowreaders, we were obliged to speak in

undertones. And I have no doubt that in substance it was singularly banal. Indeed I have an impression that

all our early conversations were incredibly banal. We met several times in a manner halfaccidental, half

furtive and wholly awkward. Mentally I didn't take hold of her. I never did take hold of her mentally. Her

talk, I now know all too clearly, was shallow, pretentious, evasive. Onlyeven to this dayI don't

remember it as in any way vulgar. She was, I could see quite clearly, anxious to overstate or conceal her real

social status, a little desirous to be taken for a student in the art school and a little ashamed that she wasn't.

She came to the museum to "copy things," and this, I gathered, had something to do with some way of

partially earning her living that I wasn't to inquire into. I told her things about myself, vain things that I felt

might appeal to her, but that I learnt long afterwards made her think me "conceited." We talked of books, but

there she was very much on her guard and secretive, and rather more freely of pictures. She "liked" pictures. I

think from the outset I appreciated and did not for a moment resent that hers was a commonplace mind, that

she was the unconscious custodian of something that had gripped my most intimate instinct, that she

embodied the hope of a possibility, was the careless proprietor of a physical quality that had turned my head

like strong wine. I felt I had to stick to our acquaintance, flat as it was. Presently we should get through these

I saw her in dreams released, as it were, from herself, beautiful, worshipful, glowing. And sometimes when

we were together, we would come on silences through sheer lack of matter, and then my eyes would feast on

her, and the silence seemed like the drawing back of a curtainher superficial self. Odd, I confess. Odd,

particularly, the enormous hold of certain things about her upon me, a certain slight rounded duskiness of

skin, a certain perfection of modelling in her lips, her brow, a certain fine flow about the shoulders. She

wasn't indeed beautiful to many peoplethese things are beyond explaining. She had manifest defects of

form and feature, and they didn't matter at all. Her complexion was bad, but I don't think it would have

mattered if it had been positively unwholesome. I had extraordinarily limited, extraordinarily painful, desires.

The affair was immensely serious and commanding to me. I don't remember that in these earlier phases I had

any thought of turning back at all. It was clear to me that she regarded me with an eye entirely more critical

than I had for her, that she didn't like my scholarly untidiness, my want of even the most commonplace style.

"Why do you wear collars like that?" she said, and sent me in pursuit of gentlemanly neckwear. I remember

when she invited me a little abruptly one day to come to tea at her home on the following Sunday and meet

her father and mother and aunt, that I immediately doubted whether my hitherto unsuspected best clothes

would create the impression she desired me to make on her belongings. I put off the encounter until the

Sunday after, to get myself in order. I had a morning coat made and I bought a silk hat, and had my reward in

the first glance of admiration she ever gave me. I wonder how many of my sex are as preposterous. I was,

you see, abandoning all my beliefs, my conventions unasked. I was forgetting myself immensely. And there

was a conscious shame in it all. Never a worddid I breathe to Ewartto any living soul of what was going

Her father and mother and aunt struck me as the dismalest of people, and her home in Walham Green was

chiefly notable for its black and amber tapestry carpets and curtains and tablecloths, and the age and

irrelevance of its books, mostly books with faded gilt on the covers. The windows were fortified against the

intrusive eye by cheap lace curtains and an "art pot" upon an unstable octagonal table. Several framed Art

School drawings of Marion's, bearing official South Kensington marks of approval, adorned the room, and

there was a black and gilt piano with a hymnbook on the top of it. There were draped mirrors over all the

mantels, and above the sideboard in the diningroom in which we sat at tea was a portrait of her father,

villainously truthful after the manner of such works. I couldn't see a trace of the beauty I found in her in

These people pretended in a way that reminded me of the Three Great Women in my mother's room, but they

had not nearly so much social knowledge and did not do it nearly so well. Also, I remarked, they did it with

an eye on Marion. They had wanted to thank me, they said, for the kindness to their daughter in the matter of

the 'bus fare, and so accounted for anything unusual in their invitation. They posed as simple gentlefolk, a

little hostile to the rush and gaddingabout of London, preferring a secluded and unpretentious quiet.

When Marion got out the white tablecloth from the sideboarddrawer for tea, a card bearing the word

"APARTMENTS" fell to the floor. I picked it up and gave it to her before I realised from her quickened

colour that I should not have seen it; that probably had been removed from the window in honour of my

Her father spoke once in a large remote way of he claims of business engagements, and it was only long

afterwards I realised that he was a supernumerary clerk in the Walham Green Gas Works and otherwise a

useful man at home. He was a large, loose, fattish man with unintelligent brown eyes magnified by

spectacles; he wore an illfitting frockcoat and a paper collar, and he showed me, as his great treasure and

interest, a large Bible which he had grangerised with photographs of pictures. Also he cultivated the little

gardenyard behind the house, and he had a small greenhouse with tomatoes. "I wish I 'ad 'eat," he said. "One

can do such a lot with 'eat. But I suppose you can't 'ave everything you want in this world."

Both he and Marion's mother treated her with a deference that struck me as the most natural thing in the

world. Her own manner changed, became more authoritative and watchful, her shyness disappeared. She had

taken a line of her own I gathered, draped the mirror, got the secondhand piano, and broken her parents in.

Her mother must once have been a pretty woman; she had regular features and Marion's hair without its

lustre, but she was thin and careworn. The aunt, Miss Ramboat, was a large, abnormally shy person very like

To begin with there was a good deal of tension, Marion was frightfully nervous and every one was under the

necessity of behaving in a mysteriously unreal fashion until I plunged, became talkative and made a certain

ease and interest. I told them of the schools, of my lodgings, of Wimblehurst and my apprenticeship days.

"There's a lot of this Science about nowadays," Mr. Ramboat reflected; "but I sometimes wonder a bit what

I was young enough to be led into what he called "a bit of a discussion," which Marion truncated before our

voices became unduly raised. "I dare say, "she said, "there's much to be said on both sides."

I remember Marion's mother asked me what church I attended, and that I replied evasively. After tea there

was music and we sang hymns. I doubted if I had a voice when this was proposed, but that was held to be a

trivial objection, and I found sitting close beside the sweep of hair from Marion's brow had many

compensations. I discovered her mother sitting in the horsehair armchair and regarding us sentimentally. I

went for a walk with Marion towards Putney Bridge, and then there was more singing and a supper of cold

bacon and pie, after which Mr. Ramboat and I smoked. During that walk, I remember, she told me the import

of her sketchings and copyings in the museum. A cousin of a friend of hers whom she spoke of as Smithie,

had developed an original business in a sort of teagown garment which she called a Persian Robe, a plain

sort of wrap with a gaily embroidered yoke, and Marion went there and worked in the busy times. In the

times that weren't busy she designed novelties in yokes by an assiduous use of eyes and notebook in the

museum, and went home and traced out the captured forms on the foundation material. "I don't get much,"

said Marion, "but it's interesting, and in the busy times we work all day. Of course the workgirls are

dreadfully common, but we don't say much to them. And Smithie talks enough for ten."

I don't remember that the Walham Green menage and the quality of these people, nor the light they threw on

Marion, detracted in the slightest degree at that time from the intent resolve that held me to make her mine. I

didn't like them. But I took them as part of the affair. Indeed, on the whole, I think they threw her up by an

effect of contrast; she was so obviously controlling them, so consciously superior to them.

More and more of my time did I give to this passion that possessed me. I began to think chiefly of ways of

pleasing Marion, of acts of devotion, of treats, of sumptuous presents for her, of appeals she would

understand. If at times she was manifestly unintelligent, in her ignorance became indisputable, I told myself

her simple instincts were worth all the education and intelligence in the world. And to this day I think I wasn't

really wrong about her. There was something extraordinarily fine about her, something simple and high, that

flickered in and out of her ignorance and commonness and limitations like the tongue from the mouth of a

One night I was privileged to meet her and bring her home from an entertainment at the Birkbeck Institute.

We came back on the underground railway and we travelled firstclassthat being the highest class

available. We were alone in the carriage, and for the first time I ventured to put my arm about her.

"I love you," I whispered suddenly with my heart beating wildly, drew her to me, drew all her beauty to me

"Love me?" she said, struggling away from me, "Don't!" and then, as the train ran into a station, "You must

When we found ourselves alone together, walking towards Battersea, she had decided to be offended. I parted

I had dreamt that to kiss her lips was ultimate satisfaction. But it was indeed only the beginning of desires. I

"But," she said, "you're not in a position What's the good of talking like that?"

I stood not a yard from the sweet lips I had kissed; I stood within arm's length of the inanimate beauty I

desired to quicken, and I saw opening between us a gulf of years, toil, waiting, disappointments and an

I can remember now my sense of frustration by her unresilient reply. I should have perceived then that for her

my ardour had no quickening fire. But how was I to know? I had let myself come to want her, my

imagination endowed her with infinite possibilities. I wanted her and wanted her, stupidly and instinctively....

"One has to be sensible," she replied. "I like going about with you. Can't we keep as we are?'"

Well, you begin to understand my breakdown now, I have been copious enough with these apologia. My

work got more and more spiritless, my behaviour degenerated, my punctuality declined; I was more and more

outclassed in the steady grind by my fellowstudents. Such supplies of moral energy as I still had at

I fell away dreadfully, more and more I shirked and skulked; the humped men from the north, the pale men

with thin, clenched minds, the intent, hardbreathing students I found against me, fell at last from keen

rivalry to moral contempt. Even a girl got above me upon one of the lists. Then indeed I made it a point of

honour to show by my public disregard of every rule that I really did not even pretend to try.

So one day I found myself sitting in a mood of considerable astonishment in Kensington Gardens, reacting on

a recent heated interview with the school Registrar in which I had displayed more spirit than sense. I was

astonished chiefly at my stupendous falling away from all the militant ideals of unflinching study I had

brought up from Wimblehurst. I had displayed myself, as the Registrar put it, "an unmitigated rotter." My

failure to get marks in the written examination had only been equalled by the insufficiency of my practical

"I ask you," the Registrar had said, "what will become of you when your scholarship runs out?"

It was clear there would be nothing for me in the schools as I had once dared to hope; there seemed, indeed,

scarcely anything in the world except an illpaid assistantship in some provincial organized Science School or

grammar school. I knew that for that sort of work, without a degree or any qualification, one earned hardly a

bare living and had little leisure to struggle up to anything better. If only I had even as little as fifty pounds I

might hold out in London and take my B.Sc. degree, and quadruple my chances! My bitterness against my

uncle returned at the thought. After all, he had some of my money still, or ought to have. Why shouldn't I act

within my rights, threaten to 'take proceedings'? I meditated for a space on the idea, and then returned to the

Science Library and wrote him a very considerable and occasionally pungent letter.

That letter to my uncle was the nadir of my failure. Its remarkable consequences, which ended my student

I say "my failure." Yet there are times when I can even doubt whether that period was a failure at all, when I

become defensively critical of those exacting courses I did not follow, the encyclopaedic process of scientific

exhaustion from which I was distracted. My mind was not inactive, even if it fed on forbidden food. I did not

learn what my professors and demonstrators had resolved I should learn, but I learnt many things. My mind

After all, those other fellows who took high places in the College examinations and were the professor's

model boys haven't done so amazingly. Some are professors themselves, some technical experts; not one can

show things done such as I, following my own interest, have achieved. For I have built boats that smack

across the water like whiplashes; no one ever dreamt of such boats until I built them; and I have surprised

three secrets that are more than technical discoveries, in the unexpected hidingplaces of Nature. I have come

nearer flying than any man has done. Could I have done as much if I had had a turn for obeying those rather

mediocre professors at the college who proposed to train my mind? If I had been trained in researchthat

ridiculous contradiction in termsshould I have done more than produce additions to the existing store of

little papers with blunted conclusions, of which there are already too many? I see no sense in mock modesty

upon this matter. Even by the standards of worldly success I am, by the side of my fellowstudents, no

failure. I had my F.R.S. by the time I was thirtyseven, and if I am not very wealthy poverty is as far from me

as the Spanish Inquisition. Suppose I had stamped down on the head of my wandering curiosity, locked my

imagination in a box just when it wanted to grow out to things, worked by soandso's excellent method and

I may be all wrong in this. It may be I should be a far more efficient man than I am if I had cut off all those

divergent expenditures of energy, plugged up my curiosity about society with more currently acceptable

rubbish or other, abandoned Ewart, evaded Marion instead of pursuing her, concentrated. But I don't believe

However, I certainly believed it completely and was filled with remorse on that afternoon when I sat

dejectedly in Kensington Gardens and reviewed, in the light of the Registrar's pertinent questions my first

Throughout my student days I had not seen my uncle. I refrained from going to him in spite of an occasional

regret that in this way I estranged myself from my aunt Susan, and I maintained a sulky attitude of mind

towards him. And I don't think that once in all that time I gave a thought to that mystic word of his that was

to alter all the world for us. Yet I had not altogether forgotten it. It was with a touch of memory, dim transient

perplexity if no morewhy did this thing seem in some way personal?that I read a new inscription upon

That was all. It was simple and yet in some way arresting. I found myself repeating the word after I had

passed; it roused one's attention like the sound of distant guns. "Tono"what's that? and deep, rich,

Then came my uncle's amazing telegram, his answer to my hostile note: "Come to me at once you are wanted

In his Napoleonic way my uncle had omitted to give an address. His telegram had been handed in at

Farringdon Road, and after complex meditations I replied to Ponderevo, Farringdon Road, trusting to the

The next day I took an unsanctioned holiday after the morning's lecture. I discovered my uncle in a

wonderfully new silk hatoh, a splendid hat! with a rolling brim that went beyond the common fashion. It

was decidedly too big for himthat was its only fault. It was stuck on the back of his head, and he was in a

white waistcoat and shirt sleeves. He welcomed me with a forgetfulness of my bitter satire and my hostile

abstinence that was almost divine. His glasses fell off at the sight of me. His round inexpressive eyes shone

"Here we are, George! What did I tell you? Needn't whisper it now, my boy. Shout itLOUD! spread it

Raggett Street, you must understand, was a thoroughfare over which some one had distributed large

quantities of cabbage stumps and leaves. It opened out of the upper end of Farringdon Street, and 192A was a

shop with the plateglass front coloured chocolate, on which several of the same bills I had read upon the

hoardings had been stuck. The floor was covered by street mud that had been brought in on dirty boots, and

three energetic young men of the hooligan type, in neckwraps and caps, were packing wooden cases with

paperedup bottles, amidst much straw and confusion. The counter was littered with these same swathed

bottles, of a pattern then novel but now amazingly familiar in the world, the blue paper with the coruscating

figure of a genially nude giant, and the printed directions of how under practically all circumstances to take

TonoBungay. Beyond the counter on one side opened a staircase down which I seem to remember a girl

descending with a further consignment of bottles, and the rest of the background was a high partition, also

chocolate, with "Temporary Laboratory" inscribed upon it in white letters, and over a door that pierced it,

"Office." Here I rapped, inaudible amid much hammering, and then entered unanswered to find my uncle,

dressed as I have described, one hand gripping a sheath of letters, and the other scratching his head as he

dictated to one of three toiling typewriter girls. Behind him was a further partition and a door inscribed

"ABSOLUTELY PRIVATENO ADMISSION," thereon. This partition was of wood painted the universal

chocolate, up to about eight feet from the ground, and then of glass. Through the glass I saw dimly a crowded

suggestion of crucibles and glass retorts, andby Jove!yes!the dear old Wimblehurst airpump still! It

gave me quite a little thrillthat airpump! And beside it was the electrical machinebut

somethingsome serious troublehad happened to that. All these were evidently placed on a shelf just at

"Come right into the sanctum," said my uncle, after he had finished something about "esteemed

consideration," and whisked me through the door into a room that quite amazingly failed to verify the

promise of that apparatus. It was papered with dingy wallpaper that had peeled in places; it contained a

fireplace, an easychair with a cushion, a table on which stood two or three big bottles, a number of

cigarboxes on the mantel, whisky Tantalus and a row of soda syphons. He shut the door after me carefully.

"Well, here we are!" he said. "Going strong! Have a whisky, George? No!Wise man! Neither will I! You

"Read it," and he thrust into my hand a labelthat label that has now become one of the most familiar

objects of the chemist's shop, the greenishblue rather oldfashioned bordering, the legend, the name in good

black type, very clear, and the strong man all set about with lightning flashes above the double column of

skilful lies in redthe label of TonoBungay. "It's afloat," he said, as I stood puzzling at this. "It's afloat. I'm

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

"Ripping song that is, George. Not so much a bark as a solution, but stillit does! Here we are at it!

Bytheby! Half a mo'! I've thought of a thing." He whisked out, leaving me to examine this nuclear spot at

leisure while his voice became dictatorial without. The den struck me as in its large grey dirty way quite

unprecedented and extraordinary. The bottles were all labelled simply A, B, C, and so forth, and that dear old

apparatus above, seen from this side, was even more patiently "on the shelf" than when it had been used to

impress Wimblehurst. I saw nothing for it but to sit down in the chair and await my uncle's explanations. I

remarked a frockcoat with satin lapels behind the door; there was a dignified umbrella in the corner and a

clothesbrush and a hatbrush stood on a sidetable. My uncle returned in five minutes looking at his

watcha gold watch "Gettin' lunchtime, George," he said. "You'd better come and have lunch with me!"

"Exuberant. Never saw her so larky. This has bucked her up something wonderfulall this."

My uncle hesitated. "Tell you after lunch, George," he said. "Come along!" and having locked up the sanctum

after himself, led the way along a narrow dirty pavement, lined with barrows and swept at times by

avalanchelike porters bearing burthens to vans, to Farringdon Street. He hailed a passing cab superbly, and

the cabman was infinitely respectful. "Schafer's," he said, and off we went side by sideand with me more

and more amazed at all these thingsto Schafer's Hotel, the second of the two big places with huge lace

I will confess I felt a magic charm in our relative proportions as the two colossal, paleblueandred liveried

porters of Schafers' held open the inner doors for us with a respectful salutation that in some manner they

seemed to confine wholly to my uncle. Instead of being about four inches taller, I felt at least the same size as

he, and very much slenderer. Still more respectfulwaiters relieved him of the new hat and the dignified

umbrella, and took his orders for our lunch. He gave them with a fine assurance.

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

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

"Well," said my uncle, and then leant forward and spoke softly under cover of his hand, "It's nothing more or

(But here an unfortunate scruple intervenes. After all, TonoBungay is still a marketable commodity and in

the hands of purchasers, who bought it fromamong other vendorsme. No! I am afraid I cannot give it

"You see," said my uncle in a slow confidential whisper, with eyes very wide and a creased forehead, "it's

nice because of the" (here he mentioned a flavouring matter and an aromatic spirit), "it's stimulating because

of" (here he mentioned two very vivid tonics, one with a marked action on the kidney.) "And the" (here he

mentioned two other ingredients) "makes it pretty intoxicating. Cocks their tails. Then there's" (but I touch on

the essential secret.) "And there you are. I got it out of an old book of recipesall except the" (here he

mentioned the more virulent substance, the one that assails the kidneys), "which is my idea! Modern touch!

Presently he was leading the way to the loungesumptuous piece in red morocco and yellow glazed

crockery, with incredible vistas of settees and sofas and things, and there I found myself grouped with him in

two excessively upholstered chairs with an earthenware Moorish table between us bearing coffee and

Benedictine, and I was tasting the delights of a tenpenny cigar. My uncle smoked a similar cigar in an

habituated manner, and he looked energetic and knowing and luxurious and most unexpectedly a little

bounder, round the end of it. It was just a trivial flaw upon our swagger, perhaps that we both were clear our

cigars had to be "mild." He got obliquely across the spaces of his great armchair so as to incline

confidentially to my ear, he curled up his little legs, and I, in my longer way, adopted a corresponding

receptive obliquity. I felt that we should strike an unbiased observer as a couple of very deep and wily and

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

His voice grew lower and more cunning. He made explanations that to my inexperience did not completely

explain. I retain an impression of a long credit and a share with a firm of wholesale chemists, of a credit and a

prospective share with some pirate printers, of a third share for a leading magazine and newspaper proprietor.

"I played 'em off one against the other," said my uncle. I took his point in an instant. He had gone to each of

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

For a moment he really was just a little embarrassed. "I DID" he said, "produce capital. You see, there was

that trust affair of yoursI ought, I supposein strict legalityto have put that straight first. Zzzz....

"It was a bold thing to do," said my uncle, shifting the venue from the region of honour to the region of

courage. And then with a characteristic outburst of piety, "Thank God it's all come right!

"And now, I suppose, you ask where do YOU come in? Well, fact is I've always believed in you, George.

You've gotit's a sort of dismal grit. Bark your shins, rouse you, and you'll go! You'd rush any position you

had a mind to rush. I know a bit about character, Georgetrust me. You've got" He clenched his hands

and thrust them out suddenly, and at the same time said, with explosive violence, "Wooosh! Yes. You have!

Woooooosh! Your science and all that! Woooooosh! I know my limitations. There's things I can do,

and" (he spoke in a whisper, as though this was the first hint of his life's secret) "there's things I can't. Well, I

can create this business, but I can't make it go. I'm too voluminousI'm a boilerover, not a simmering

stickatit. You keep on HOTTING UP AND HOTTING UP. Papin's digester. That's you, steady and long

and piling up,then, woooooooosh. Come in and stiffen these niggers. Teach them that

woooooooosh. There you are! That's what I'm after. You! Nobody else believes you're more than a boy.

Come right in with me and be a man. Eh, George? Think of the fun of ita thing on the goa Real Live

Thing! Wooshing it up! Making it buzz and spin! Whoooooo." He made alluring expanding circles in

His proposal, sinking to confidential undertones again, took more definite shape. I was to give all my time

and energy to developing and organising. "You shan't write a single advertisement, or give a single

assurance" he declared. "I can do all that." And the telegram vas no flourish; I was to have three hundred a

year. Three hundred a year. ("That's nothing," said my uncle, "the thing to freeze on to, when the time comes,

Three hundred a year certain, anyhow! It was an enormous income to me. For a moment I was altogether

staggered. Could there be that much money in the whole concern? I looked about me at the sumptuous

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

"Well, for one thing," I said, "why don't you have those girls working in a decently ventilated room? Apart

from any other consideration, they'd work twice as briskly. And they ought to cover the corks before labelling

"Becausethey sometimes make a mucker of the cork job, and then the label's wasted."

"Come and change it, George," said my uncle, with sudden fervour "Come here and make a machine of it.

You can. Make it all slick, and then make it woosh. I know you can. Oh! I know you can."

I seem to remember very quick changes of mind after that lunch. The muzzy exaltation of the unaccustomed

stimulants gave way very rapidly to a model of pellucid and impartial clairvoyance which is one of my

habitual mental states. It is intermittent; it leaves me for weeks together, I know, but back it comes at last like

justice on circuit, and calls up all my impression, all my illusions, all my willful and passionate proceedings.

We came downstairs again into that inner room which pretended to be a scientific laboratory through its high

glass lights, and indeed was a lurking place. My uncle pressed a cigarette on me, and I took it and stood

before the empty fireplace while he propped his umbrella in the corner, deposited the new silk hat that was a

little too big for him on the table, blew copiously and produced a second cigar.

It came into my head that he had shrunken very much in size since the Wimblehurst days, that the cannon ball

he had swallowed was rather more evident and shameless than it had been, his skin less fresh and the nose

between his glasses, which still didn't quite fit, much redder. And just then he seemed much laxer in his

muscles and not quite as alertly quick in his movements. But he evidently wasn't aware of the degenerative

nature of his changes as he sat there, looking suddenly quite little under my eyes.

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

"It's the sort of thing everybody does. After all, there's no harm in the stuffand it may do good. It might do

"I'd like to know what sort of trading isn't a swindle in its way. Everybody who does a large advertised trade

is selling something common on the strength of saying it's uncommon. Look at Chicksonthey made him a

baronet. Look at Lord Radmore, who did it on lying about the alkali in soap! Rippin' ads those were of his

"You don't mean to say you think doing this stuff up in bottles and swearing it's the quintessence of strength

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

"There's Faith. You put Faith in 'em.... I grant our labels are a bit emphatic. Christian Science, really. No

good setting people against the medicine. Tell me a solitary trade nowadays that hasn't to beemphatic. It's

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

"Don't see that, George, at all. 'Mong other things, all our people would be out of work. Unemployed! I grant

you TonoBungay MAY benot QUITE so good a find for the world as Peruvian bark, but the point is,

Georgeit MAKES TRADE! And the world lives on trade. Commerce! A romantic exchange of

commodities and property. Romance. 'Magination. See? You must look at these things in a broad light. Look

at the woodand forget the trees! And hang it, George! we got to do these things! There's no way unless you

"You're a bit stiff, George. There's no fraud in this affair, I'll bet my hat. But what do you propose to do? Go

as chemist to some one who IS running a business, and draw a salary without a share like I offer you. Much

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

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

"And who pays for that? Who put up that big City and Guilds place at South Kensington? Enterprising

business men! They fancy they'll have a bit of science going on, they want a handy Expert ever and again,

and there you are! And what do you get for research when you've done it? Just a bare living and no outlook.

They just keep you to make discoveries, and if they fancy they'll use 'em they do."

"How much a year, George? How much a year? I suppose you must respect Carlyle! Well, you take Carlyle's

testsolvency. (Lord! what a book that French Revolution of his is!) See what the world pays teachers and

discoverers and what it pays business men! That shows the ones it really wants. There's a justice in these big

things, George, over and above the apparent injustice. I tell you it wants trade. It's Trade that makes the world

"You think it over, George. You think it over! And come up on Sunday to the new placewe got rooms in

Gower Street nowand see your aunt. She's often asked for you, George often and often, and thrown it up at

me about that bit of propertythough I've always said and always will, that twentyfive shillings in the

pound is what I'll pay you and interest up to the nail. And think it over. It isn't me I ask you to help. It's

yourself. It's your aunt Susan. It's the whole concern. It's the commerce of your country. And we want you

badly. I tell you straight, I know my limitations. You could take this place, you could make it go! I can see

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

I didn't succumb without a struggle to my uncle's allurements. Indeed, I held out for a week while I

contemplated life and my prospects. It was a crowded and muddled contemplation. It invaded even my sleep.

My interview with the Registrar, my talk with my uncle, my abrupt discovery of the hopeless futility of my

passion for Marion, had combined to bring me to sense of crisis. What was I going to do with life?

I remember going home from our talk. I went down Farringdon Street to the Embankment because I thought

to go home by Holborn and Oxford Street would be too crowded for thinking.... That piece of Embankment

You know, from first to last, I saw the business with my eyes open, I saw its ethical and moral values quite

clearly. Never for a moment do I remember myself faltering from my persuasion that the sale of

TonoBungay was a thoroughly dishonest proceeding. The stuff was, I perceived, a mischievous trash,

slightly stimulating, aromatic and attractive, likely to become a bad habit and train people in the habitual use

of stronger tonics and insidiously dangerous to people with defective kidneys. It would cost about sevenpence

the large bottle to make, including bottling, and we were to sell it at half a crown plus the cost of the patent

medicine stamp. A thing that I will confess deterred me from the outset far more than the sense of dishonesty

in this affair, was the supreme silliness of the whole concern. I still clung to the idea that the world of men

was or should be a sane and just organisation, and the idea that I should set myself gravely, just at the fine

springtime of my life, to developing a monstrous bottling and packing warehouse, bottling rubbish for the

consumption of foolish, credulous and depressed people, had in it a touch of insanity. My early beliefs still

clung to me. I felt assured that somewhere there must be a hitch in the fine prospect of ease and wealth under

such conditions; that somewhere, a little overgrown, perhaps, but still traceable, lay a neglected, wasted path

My inclination to refuse the whole thing increased rather than diminished at first as I went along the

Embankment. In my uncle's presence there had been a sort of glamour that had prevented an outright refusal.

It was a revival of affection for him I felt in his presence, I think, in part, and in part an instinctive feeling that

I must consider him as my host. But much more was it a curious persuasion he had the knack of inspiringa

persuasion not so much of his integrity and capacity as of the reciprocal and yielding foolishness of the

world. One felt that he was silly and wild, but in some way silly and wild after the fashion of the universe.

And as I went along the embankment the first effect was all against my uncle. He shrankfor a little while

he continued to shrinkin perspective until he was only a very small shabby little man in a dirty back street,

sending off a few hundred bottles of rubbish to foolish buyers. The great buildings on the right of us, the Inns

and the School Board placeas it was thenSomerset House, the big hotels, the great bridges,

Westminster's outlines ahead, had an effect of grey largeness that reduced him to the proportions of a busy

And then my eye caught the advertisements on the south side of "Sorber's Food," of "Cracknell's Ferric

Wine," very bright and prosperous signs, illuminated at night, and I realised how astonishingly they looked at

I saw a man come charging out of Palace Yardthe policeman touched his helmet to himwith a hat and a

bearing astonishingly like my uncle's. After all,didn't Cracknell himself sit in the House?

TonoBungay shouted at me from a hoarding near Adelphi Terrace; I saw it afar off near Carfax Street; it

cried out again upon me in Kensington High Street, and burst into a perfect clamour; six or seven times I saw

it as I drew near my diggings. It certainly had an air of being something more than a dream.

Yes, I thought it overthoroughly enough.... Trade rules the world. Wealth rather than trade! The thing was

true, and true too was my uncle's proposition that the quickest way to get wealth is to sell the cheapest thing

possible in the dearest bottle. He was frightfully right after all. Pecunnia non olet,a Roman emperor said

that. Perhaps my great heroes in Plutarch were no more than such men, fine now only because they are

distant; perhaps after all this Socialism to which I had been drawn was only a foolish dream, only the more

foolish because all its promises were conditionally true. Morris and these others played with it wittingly; it

gave a zest, a touch of substance, to their aesthetic pleasures. Never would there be good faith enough to

bring such things about. They knew it; every one, except a few young fools, knew it. As I crossed the corner

of St. James's Park wrapped in thought, I dodged back just in time to escape a prancing pair of greys. A stout,

commonlooking woman, very magnificently dressed, regarded me from the carriage with a scornful eye.

Running through all my thoughts, surging out like a refrain, was my uncle's masterstroke, his admirable

touch of praise: "Make it all slickand then make it go Woosh. I know you can! Oh! I KNOW you can!"

Ewart as a moral influence was unsatisfactory. I had made up my mind to put the whole thing before him,

partly to see how he took it, and partly to hear how it sounded when it was said. I asked him to come and eat

with me in an Italian place near Panton Street where one could get a curious, interesting, glutting sort of

dinner for eighteenpence. He came with a disconcerting blackeye that he wouldn't explain. "Not so much a

blackeye," he said, "as the aftermath of a purple patch.... What's your difficulty?"

But as a matter of fact I didn't tell him. I threw out that I was doubtful whether I ought to go into trade, or

stick to teaching in view of my deepening socialist proclivities; and he, warming with the unaccustomed

generosity of a sixteenpenny Chianti, ran on from that without any further inquiry as to my trouble.

"The reality of life, my dear Ponderevo," I remember him saying very impressively and punctuating with the

nutcrackers as he spoke, "is Chromatic Conflict ... and Form. Get hold of that and let all these other

questions go. The Socialist will tell you one sort of colour and shape is right, the Individualist another. What

does it all amount to? What DOES it all amount to? NOTHING! I have no advice to give anyone,except to

avoid regrets. Be yourself, seek after such beautiful things as your own sense determines to be beautiful. And

don't mind the headache in the morning.... For what, after all, is a morning, Ponderevo? It isn't like the upper

"Isn't it! And it's my bedrock wisdom in the matter! Take it or leave it, my dear George; take it or leave it."...

He put down the nutcrackers out of my reach and lugged a greasylooking notebook from his pocket. "I'm

Wholesale grocer. I'll put it on his corners,four mustard pots. I dare say he'd be glad of a mustard plaster

It came to me in the small hours that the real moral touchstone for this great doubting of mind was Marion. I

lay composing statements of my problem and imagined myself delivering them to herand she,

"You see, it's just to give one's self over to the Capitalistic System," I imagined myself saying in good

Socialist jargon; "it's surrendering all one's beliefs. We MAY succeed, we MAY grow rich, but where would

Then suddenly she would become a goddess. She would turn upon me frankly and nobly, with shining eyes,

with arms held out. "No," she would say, "we love one another. Nothing ignoble shall ever touch us. We love

one another. Why wait to tell each other that, dear? What does it matter that we are poor and may keep

But indeed the conversation didn't go at all in that direction. At the sight of her my nocturnal eloquence

became preposterous and all the moral values altered altogether. I had waited for her outside the door of the

Parsianrobe establishment in Kensington High Street and walked home with her thence. I remember how

she emerged into the warm evening light and that she wore a brown straw hat that made her, for once not

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

The High Street pavement is too narrow and crowded for conversation and we were some way westward

I do not know if the reader will understand how a passionate lover, an immense admiration and desire, can be

shot with a gleam of positive hatred. Such a gleam there was in me at the serene selfcomplacency of that

"NOW!" It vanished almost before I felt it. I found no warning in it of the antagonisms latent between us.

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

"You know I care," she answered. "If I didn't If I didn't like you very much, should I let you come and

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

She suddenly gave way to gloom. "It's no good marrying" she said. "One's only miserable. I've seen other

girls. When one's alone one has a little pocketmoney anyhow, one can go about a little. But think of being

She poured out this concentrated philosophy of her class and type in jerky uncompleted sentences, with

knitted brows, with discontented eyes towards the westward glowforgetful, it seemed, for a moment even

She looked at me for a moment. "That's six pounds a week," she said. "One could manage on that, easily.

Smithie's brotherNo, he only gets two hundred and fifty. He married a typewriting girl."

She hesitated and touched my hand for an instant. "It's silly," she remarked as she did so. "It means really

Then she glanced at me with a smile, halfsweet, halfwistful, that has stuck in my memory for ever.

And, faint on the threshold of hearing, I caught her ventured "dear!" It's odd that in writing this down my

memory passed over all that intervened and I feel it all again, and once again I'm Marion's boyish lover taking

At last I went to the address my uncle had given me in Gower Street, and found my aunt Susan waiting tea

Directly I came into the room I appreciated the change in outlook that the achievement of TonoBungay had

made almost as vividly as when I saw my uncle's new hat. The furniture of the room struck upon my eye as

almost stately. The chairs and sofa were covered with chintz which gave it a dim, remote flavour of

Bladesover; the mantel, the cornice, the gas pendant were larger and finer than the sort of thing I had grown

accustomed to in London. And I was shown in by a real housemaid with real tails to her cap, and great

quantities of reddish hair. There was my aunt too looking bright and pretty, in a bluepatterned teawrap

with bows that seemed to me the quintessence of fashion. She was sitting in a chair by the open window with

quite a pile of yellowlabelled books on the occasional table beside her. Before the large, paperdecorated

fireplace stood a threetiered cakestand displaying assorted cakes, and a tray with all the tea equipage

except the teapot, was on the large centretable. The carpet was thick, and a spice of adventure was given it

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

"Not till Mr. Ponderevo comes, Meggie," said my aunt, and grimaced with extraordinary swiftness and

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

"'Fraid I'd say something AT it George, if I did. So he won't let me. It came on quite suddenly. Brooding he

was and writing letters and sizzling something awfullike a chestnut going to pop. Then he came home one

day saying TonoBungay till I thought he was clean off his onion, and singingwhat was it?"

"The very thing. You've heard him. And saying our fortunes were made. Took me out to the Ho'burm

Restaurant, George,dinner, and we had champagne, stuff that blows up the back of your nose and makes

you go SO, and he said at last he'd got things worthy of meand we moved here next day. It's a swell house,

George. Three pounds a week for the rooms. And he says the Business'll stand it."

We discussed the question for a moment mutely with our eyes. My aunt slapped the pile of books from

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

"It's been a time," she went on. "The flapping about! Me sitting doing nothing and him on the go like a

rocket. He's done wonders. But he wants you, Georgehe wants you. Sometimes he's full of hopetalks of

when we're going to have a carriage and be in societymakes it seem so natural and topsyturvy, I hardly

know whether my old heels aren't up here listening to him, and my old head on the floor.... Then he gets

depressed. Says he wants restraint. Says he can make a splash but can't keep on. Says if you don't come in

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

"There's no law against selling quack medicine that I know of," said my aunt. She thought for a minute and

became unusually grave. "It's our only chance, George," she said. "If it doesn't go..."

There came the slamming of a door, and a loud bellowing from the next apartment through the folding doors.

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

"I've had false ideas about the world," I said. "Oh! they don't matter now! Yes, I'll come, I'll take my chance

So I made my peace with my uncle, and we set out upon this bright enterprise of selling slightly injurious

rubbish at oneandthreehalfpence and twoandnine a bottle, including the Government stamp. We made

TonoBungay hum! It brought us wealth, influence, respect, the confidence of endless people. All that my

uncle promised me proved truth and understatement; TonoBungay carried me to freedoms and powers that

no life of scientific research, no passionate service of humanity could ever have given me....

It was my uncle's genius that did it. No doubt he needed me,I was, I will admit, his indispensable right

hand; but his was the brain to conceive. He wrote every advertisement; some of them even he sketched. You

must remember that his were the days before the Time took to enterprise and the vociferous hawking of that

justtellyouquitesoberlysomethingyououghttoknow style of newspaper advertisement, with

every now and then a convulsive jump of some attractive phrase into capitals, was then almost a novelty.

"Many people who are MODERATELY well think they are QUITE well," was one of his early efforts. The

jerks in capitals were, "DO NOT NEED DRUGS OR MEDICINE," and "SIMPLY A PROPER REGIMEN

TO GET YOU IN TONE." One was warned against the chemist or druggist who pushed "muchadvertised

nostrums" on one's attention. That trash did more harm than good. The thing needed was regimenand

Very early, too, was that bright little quarter column, at least it was usually a quarter column in the evening

papers: "HILARITYTonoBungay. Like Mountain Air in the Veins." The penetrating trio of questions:

"Are you bored with your Business? Are you bored with your Dinner. Are you bored with your Wife?"

that, too, was in our Gower Street days. Both these we had in our first campaign when we worked London

south central, and west; and then, too, we had our first posterthe HEALTH, BEAUTY, AND STRENGTH

one. That was his design; I happen still to have got by me the first sketch he made for it. I have reproduced it

here with one or two others to enable the reader to understand the mental quality that initiated these familiar

(The second one is about eighteen months later, the germ of the wellknown "Fog" poster; the third was

I had to polish them up for the artist and arrange the business of printing and distribution, and after my uncle

had had a violent and needless quarrel with the advertising manager of the Daily Regulator about the amount

of display given to one of his happy thoughts, I also took up the negotiations of advertisements for the press.

We discussed and worked out distribution together first in the drawingroom floor in Gower Street with my

aunt sometimes helping very shrewdly, and then, with a steadily improving type of cigar and older and older

whisky, in his smuggery at their first house, the one in Beckenham. Often we worked far into the night

We really worked infernally hard, and, I recall, we worked with a very decided enthusiasm, not simply on my

uncle's part but mine, It was a game, an absurd but absurdly interesting game, and the points were scored in

cases of bottles. People think a happy notion is enough to make a man rich, that fortunes can be made without

toil. It's a dream, as every millionaire (except one or two lucky gamblers) can testify; I doubt if J.D.

Rockefeller in the early days of Standard Oil, worked harder than we did. We worked far into the nightand

we also worked all day. We made a rule to be always dropping in at the factory unannounced to keep things

rightfor at first we could afford no properly responsible underlingsand we traveled London, pretending

But none of this was my special work, and as soon as we could get other men in, I dropped the traveling,

though my uncle found it particularly interesting and kept it up for years. "Does me good, George, to see the

chaps behind their counters like I was once," he explained. My special and distinctive duty was to give

TonoBungay substance and an outward and visible bottle, to translate my uncle's great imaginings into the

creation of case after case of labelled bottles of nonsense, and the punctual discharge of them by railway,

road and steamer towards their ultimate goal in the Great Stomach of the People. By all modern standards the

business was, as my uncle would say, "absolutely bona fide." We sold our stuff and got the money, and spent

the money honestly in lies and clamour to sell more stuff. Section by section we spread it over the whole of

the British Isles; first working the middleclass London suburbs, then the outer suburbs, then the home

counties, then going (with new bills and a more pious style of "ad") into Wales, a great field always for a new

My uncle had in his inner office a big map of England, and as we took up fresh sections of the local press and

our consignments invaded new areas, flags for advertisements and pink underlines for orders showed our

"The romance of modern commerce, George!" my uncle would say, rubbing his hands together and drawing

in air through his teeth. "The romance of modern commerce, eh? Conquest. Province by province. Like

We subjugated England and Wales; we rolled over the Cheviots with a special adaptation containing eleven

per cent. of absolute alcohol; "TonoBungay: Thistle Brand." We also had the Fog poster adapted to a kilted

Under the shadow of our great leading line we were presently taking subsidiary specialties into action;

"TonoBungay Hair Stimulant" was our first supplement. Then came "Concentrated TonoBungay" for the

eyes. That didn't go, but we had a considerable success with the Hair Stimulant. We broached the subject, I

remember, in a little catechism beginning: "Why does the hair fall out? Because the follicles are fagged.

What are the follicles?..." So it went on to the climax that the Hair Stimulant contained all "The essential

principles of that most reviving tonic, TonoBungay, together with an emollient and nutritious oil derived

from crude Neat's Foot Oil by a process of refinement, separation and deodorization.... It will be manifest to

any one of scientific attainments that in Neat's Foot Oil derived from the hoofs and horns of beasts, we must

And we also did admirable things with our next subsidiaries, "TonoBungay Lozenges," and "TonoBungay

Chocolate." These we urged upon the public for their extraordinary nutritive and recuperative value in cases

of fatigue and strain. We gave them posters and illustrated advertisements showing climbers hanging from

marvelously vertical cliffs, cyclist champions upon the track, mounted messengers engaged in AixtoGhent

rides, soldiers lying out in action under a hot sun. "You can GO for twentyfour hours," we declared, "on

TonoBungay Chocolate." We didn't say whether you could return on the same commodity. We also showed

a dreadfully barristerish barrister, wig, sidewhiskers, teeth, a horribly lifelike portrait of all existing

barristers, talking at a table, and beneath, this legend: "A Four Hours' Speech on TonoBungay Lozenges,

and as fresh as when he began." Then brought in regiments of schoolteachers, revivalist ministers,

politicians and the like. I really do believe there was an element of "kick" in the strychnine in these lozenges,

especially in those made according to our earlier formula. For we altered all our formulaeinvariably

In a little whileso it seems to me nowwe were employing travelers and opening up Great Britain at the

rate of a hundred square miles a day. All the organisation throughout was sketched in a crude, entangled,

halfinspired fashion by my uncle, and all of it had to be worked out into a practicable scheme of quantities

and expenditure by me. We had a lot of trouble finding our travelers; in the end at least half of them were

IrishAmericans, a wonderful breed for selling medicine. We had still more trouble over our factory

manager, because of the secrets of the inner room, and in the end we got a very capable woman, Mrs.

Hampton Diggs, who had formerly managed a large millinery workroom, whom we could trust to keep

everything in good working order without finding out anything that wasn't put exactly under her loyal and

energetic nose. She conceived a high opinion of TonoBungay and took it in all forms and large quantities so

long as I knew her. It didn't seem to do her any harm. And she kept the girls going quite wonderfully.

My uncle's last addition to the TonoBungay group was the TonoBungay Mouthwash. The reader has

probably read a hundred times that inspiring inquiry of his, "You are Young Yet, but are you Sure Nothing

And after that we took over the agency for three or four good American lines that worked in with our own,

and could be handled with it; Texan Embrocation, and "23to clear the system" were the chief....

I set down these bare facts. To me they are all linked with the figure of my uncle. In some of the old

seventeenth and early eighteenth century prayerbooks at Bladesover there used to be illustrations with long

scrolls coming out of the mouths of the woodcut figures. I wish I could write all this last chapter on a scroll

coming out of the head of my uncle, show it all the time as unfolding and pouring out from a short, fattening,

smalllegged man with stiff cropped hair, disobedient glasses on a perky little nose, and a round stare behind

them. I wish I could show you him breathing hard and a little through his nose as his pen scrabbled out some

absurd inspiration for a poster or a picture page, and make you hear his voice, charged with solemn import

like the voice of a squeaky prophet, saying, "George! list'n! I got an ideer. I got a notion! George!"

I should put myself into the same picture. Best setting for us, I think, would be the Beckenham snuggery,

because there we worked hardest. It would be the lamplit room of the early nineties, and the clock upon the

mantel would indicate midnight or later. We would be sitting on either side of the fire, I with a pipe, my uncle

with a cigar or cigarette. There would be glasses standing inside the brass fender. Our expressions would be

very grave. My uncle used to sit right back in his armchair; his toes always turned in when he was sitting

down and his legs had a way of looking curved, as though they hadn't bones or joints but were stuffed with

I would suck my pipe. "Hard to get at. Unless we sold our stuff specially at the docks. Might do a special at

I never really determined whether my uncle regarded TonoBungay as a fraud, or whether he didn't come to

believe in it in a kind of way by the mere reiteration of his own assertions. I think that his average attitude

was one of kindly, almost parental, toleration. I remember saying on one occasion, "But you don't suppose

this stuff ever did a human being the slightest good all?" and how his face assumed a look of protest, as of

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

I suppose any creative and developing game would have interested me in those years. At any rate, I know I

put as much zeal into this TonoBungay as any young lieutenant could have done who suddenly found

himself in command of a ship. It was extraordinarily interesting to me to figure out the advantage accruing

from this shortening of the process or that, and to weigh it against the capital cost of the alteration. I made a

sort of machine for sticking on the labels, that I patented; to this day there is a little trickle of royalties to me

from that. I also contrived to have our mixture made concentrated, got the bottles, which all came sliding

down a guarded slantway, nearly filled with distilled water at one tap, and dripped our magic ingredients in

at the next. This was an immense economy of space for the inner sanctum. For the bottling we needed special

We had a sort of endless band of bottles sliding along an inclined glass trough made slippery with running

water. At one end a girl held them up to the light, put aside any that were imperfect and placed the others in

the trough; the filling was automatic; at the other end a girl slipped in the cork and drove it home with a little

mallet. Each tank, the little one for the vivifying ingredients and the big one for distilled water, had a level

indicator, and inside I had a float arrangement that stopped the slide whenever either had sunk too low.

Another girl stood ready with my machine to label the corked bottles and hand them to the three packers, who

slipped them into their outer papers and put them, with a pad of corrugated paper between each pair, into a

little groove from which they could be made to slide neatly into position in our standard packingcase. It

sounds wild, I know, but I believe I was the first man in the city of London to pack patent medicines through

the side of the packingcase, to discover there was a better way in than by the lid. Our cases packed

themselves, practically; had only to be put into position on a little wheeled tray and when full pulled to the

lift that dropped them to the men downstairs, who padded up the free space and nailed on top and side. Our

girls, moreover, packed with corrugated paper and matchbookwood box partitions when everybody else was

using expensive young men to pack through the top of the box with straw, many breakages and much waste

As I look back at them now, those energetic years seem all compacted to a year or so; from the days of our

first hazardous beginning in Farringdon Street with barely a thousand pounds' worth of stuff or credit all

toldand that got by something perilously like snatchingto the days when my uncle went to the public on

behalf of himself and me (onetenth share) and our silent partners, the drug wholesalers and the printing

people and the owner of that group of magazines and newspapers, to ask with honest confidence for

L150,000. Those silent partners were remarkably sorry, I know, that they had not taken larger shares and

given us longer credit when the subscriptions came pouring in. My uncle had a clear half to play with

L150,000think of it!for the goodwill in a string of lies and a trade in bottles of mitigated water! Do you

realise the madness of the world that sanctions such a thing? Perhaps you don't. At times use and wont

certainly blinded me. If it had not been for Ewart, I don't think I should have had an inkling of the

wonderfulness of this development of my fortunes; I should have grown accustomed to it, fallen in with all its

delusions as completely as my uncle presently did. He was immensely proud of the flotation. "They've never

been given such value," he said, "for a dozen years." But Ewart, with his gesticulating hairy hands and bony

wrists, his singlehanded chorus to all this as it played itself over again in my memory, and he kept my

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

I remember one disquisition very distinctly. It was just after Ewart had been to Paris on a mysterious

expedition to "rough in" some work for a rising American sculptor. This young man had a commission for an

allegorical figure of Truth (draped, of course) for his State Capitol, and he needed help. Ewart had returned

with his hair cut en brosse and with his costume completely translated into French. He wore, I remember, a

bicycling suit of purplishbrown, baggy beyond ageingthe only creditable thing about it was that it had

evidently not been made for hima voluminous black tie, a decadent soft felt hat and several French

expletives of a sinister description. "Silly clothes, aren't they?" he said at the sight of my startled eye. "I don't

He had come down to our Raggett Street place to discuss a benevolent project of mine for a poster by him,

and he scattered remarkable discourse over the heads (I hope it was over the heads) of our bottlers.

"What I like about it all, Ponderevo, is its poetry.... That's where we get the pull of the animals. No animal

would ever run a factory like this. Think!... One remembers the Beaver, of course. He might very possibly

bottle things, but would he stick a label round 'em and sell 'em? The Beaver is a dreamy fool, I'll admit, him

and his dams, but after all there's a sort of protection about 'em, a kind of muddy practicality! They prevent

things getting at him. And it's not your poetry only. It's the poetry of the customer too. Poet answering to

poetsoul to soul. Health, Strength and Beautyin a bottlethe magic philtre! Like a fairy tale....

"Think of the people to whom your bottles of footle go! (I'm calling it footle, Ponderevo, out of praise," he

"Think of the little clerks and jaded women and overworked people. People overstrained with wanting to do,

people overstrained with wanting to be.... People, in fact, overstrained.... The real trouble of life, Ponderevo,

isn't that we existthat's a vulgar error; the real trouble is that we DON'T really exist and we want to. That's

what thisin the highest sensejust stands for! The hunger to befor oncereally aliveto the finger

"Nobody wants to do and be the things people arenobody. YOU don't want to preside over thisthis

bottling; I don't want to wear these beastly clothes and be led about by you; nobody wants to keep on sticking

labels on silly bottles at so many farthings a gross. That isn't existing! That'ssussubstratum. None of us

want to be what we are, or to do what we do. Except as a sort of basis. What do we want? You know. I know.

Nobody confesses. What we all want to be is something perpetually young and beautifulyoung

Jovesyoung Joves, Ponderevo" his voice became loud, harsh and declamatory"pursuing coy

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

In the little sanctum below, my uncle was taking a digestive pause after his lunch and by no means alert. His

presence sent Ewart back to the theme of modern commerce, over the excellent cigar my uncle gave him. He

behaved with the elaborate deference due to a business magnate from an unknown man.

"What I was pointing out to your nephew, sir," said Ewart, putting both elbows on the table, "was the poetry

"We are artists. You and I, sir, can talk, if you will permit me, as one artist to another. It's advertisement

hasdone it. Advertisement has revolutionised trade and industry; it is going to revolutionise the world. The

old merchant used to tote about commodities; the new one creates values. Doesn't need to tote. He takes

something that isn't worth anythingor something that isn't particularly worth anythingand he makes it

worth something. He takes mustard that is just like anybody else's mustard, and he goes about saying,

shouting, singing, chalking on walls, writing inside people's books, putting it everywhere, 'Smith's Mustard is

"It's just like an artist; he takes a lump of white marble on the verge of a limekiln, he chips it about, he

makeshe makes a monument to himselfand othersa monument the world will not willingly let die.

Talking of mustard, sir, I was at Clapham Junction the other day, and all the banks are overgrown with horse

radish that's got loose from a garden somewhere. You know what horseradish isgrows like

wildfirespreads spreads. I stood at the end of the platform looking at the stuff and thinking about it.

'Like fame,' I thought, 'rank and wild where it isn't wanted. Why don't the really good things in life grow like

horseradish?' I thought. My mind went off in a peculiar way it does from that to the idea that mustard costs a

penny a tinI bought some the other day for a ham I had. It came into my head that it would be ripping good

business to use horseradish to adulterate mustard. I had a sort of idea that I could plunge into business on that,

get rich and come back to my own proper monumental art again. And then I said, 'But why adulterate? I don't

"And totally unnecessary, too! Why not do up a mixturethreequarters pounded horseradish and a quarter

mustardgive it a fancy nameand sell it at twice the mustard price. See? I very nearly started the business

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

"Take shavin's, again! You know that poem of Longfellow's, sir, that sounds exactly like the first declension.

"Well, it's about a carpenter and a poetic Victorian child, you know, and some shavin's. The child made no

end out of the shavin's. So might you. Powder 'em. They might be anything. Soak 'em in

jipper,Xylotobacco! Powder'em and get a little tar and turpentinous smell in,woodpacking for hot

bathsa Certain Cure for the scourge of Influenza! There's all these patent grain foods,what Americans

"No!" said my uncle, removing his cigar; "as far as I can find out it's really grain,spoilt grain.... I've been

"Well, there you are!" said Ewart. "Say it's spoilt grain. It carried out my case just as well. Your modern

commerce is no more buying and selling than sculpture. It's mercyit's salvation. It's rescue work! It takes

all sorts of fallen commodities by the hand and raises them. Cana isn't in it. You turn waterinto

"TonoBungay's all right," said my uncle, suddenly grave. "We aren't talking of TonoBungay."

"Your nephew, sir, is hard; he wants everything to go to a sort of predestinated end; he's a Calvinist of

Commerce. Offer him a dustbin full of stuff; he calls it refusepasses by on the other side. Now YOU, sir

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

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

"Or a friable biscuit. Why NOT? You might advertise: 'Why are Birds so Bright? Because they digest their

food perfectly! Why do they digest their food so perfectly? Because they have a gizzard! Why hasn't man a

gizzard? Because he can buy Ponderevo's Asphalt Triturating, Friable BiscuitWhich is Better.'"

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

"Damn clever fellow," said my uncle, after he had one. "I know a man when I see one. He'd do. But drunk, I

should say. But that only makes some chap brighter . If he WANTS to do that poster, he can. Zzzz. That ideer

of his about the horseradish. There's something in that, George. I'm going to think over that...."

I may say at once that my poster project came to nothing in the end, though Ewart devoted an interesting

week to the matter. He let his unfortunate disposition to irony run away with him. He produced a picture of

two beavers with a subtle likeness, he said, to myself and my unclethe likeness to my uncle certainly

wasn't half badand they were bottling rows and rows of TonoBungay, with the legend "Modern

commerce." It certainly wouldn't have sold a case, though he urged it on me one cheerful evening on the

ground that it would "arouse curiosity." In addition he produced a quite shocking study of my uncle,

excessively and needlessly nude, but, so far as I was able to judge, an admirable likeness, engaged in feats of

strength of a Gargantuan type before an audience of deboshed and shattered ladies. The legend, "Health,

Beauty, Strength," below, gave a needed point to his parody. This he hung up in the studio over the oil shop,

with a flap of brown paper; by way of a curtain over it to accentuate its libellous offence.

As I look back on those days in which we built up the great TonoBungay property out of human hope and

credit for bottles and rent and printing, I see my life as it were arranged in two parallel columns of unequal

width, a wider, more diffused, eventful and various one which continually broadens out, the business side of

my life, and a narrow, darker and darkling one shot ever and again with a gleam of happiness, my homelife

I didn't, as a matter of fact, marry her until a year after TonoBungay was thoroughly afloat, and then only

after conflicts and discussions of a quite strenuous sort. By that time I was twentyfour. It seems the next

thing to childhood now. We were both in certain directions unusually ignorant and simple; we were

temperamentally antagonistic, and we hadn'tI don't think we were capable ofan idea in common. She

was young and extraordinarily conventionalshe seemed never to have an idea of her own but always the

idea of her classand I was young and sceptical, enterprising and passionate; the two links that held us

together were the intense appeal her physical beauty had for me, and her appreciation of her importance in

my thoughts. There can be no doubt of my passion for her. In her I had discovered woman desired. The nights

I have lain awake on account of her, writhing, biting my wrists in a fever of longing! ...

I have told how I got myself a silk hat and black coat to please her on Sundayto the derision of some of my

fellowstudents who charged to meet me, and how we became engaged. But that was only the beginning of

our difference. To her that meant the beginning of a not unpleasant little secrecy, an occasional use of verbal

endearments, perhaps even kisses. It was something to go on indefinitely, interfering in no way with her

gossiping spells of work at Smithie's. To me it was a pledge to come together into the utmost intimacy of soul

I don't know if it will strike the reader that I am setting out to discuss the queer, unwise love relationship and

my bungle of a marriage with excessive solemnity. But to me it seems to reach out to vastly wider issues than

our little personal affair. I've thought over my life. In these last few years I've tried to get at least a little

wisdom out of it. And in particular I've thought over this part of my life. I'm enormously impressed by the

ignorant, unguided way in which we two entangled ourselves with each other. It seems to me the queerest

thing in all this network of misunderstandings and misstatements and faulty and ramshackle conventions

which makes up our social order as the individual meets it, that we should have come together so accidentally

and so blindly. Because we were no more than samples of the common fate. Love is not only the cardinal fact

in the individual life, but the most important concern of the community; after all, the way in which the young

people of this generation pair off determines the fate of the nation; all the other affairs of the State are

subsidiary to that. And we leave it to flushed and blundering youth to stumble on its own significance, with

nothing to guide in but shocked looks and sentimental twaddle and base whisperings and cantsmeared

I have tried to indicate something of my own sexual development in the preceding chapter. Nobody was ever

frank and decent with me in this relation; nobody, no book, ever came and said to me thus and thus is the

world made, and so and so is necessary. Everything came obscurely, indefinitely, perplexingly; and all I

knew of law or convention in the matter had the form of threatenings and prohibitions. Except through the

furtive, shameful talk of my coevals at Goudhurst and Wimblehurst, I was not even warned against quite

horrible dangers. My ideas were made partly of instinct, partly of a romantic imagination, partly woven out of

a medley of scraps of suggestion that came to me haphazard. I had read widely and confusedly "Vathek,"

Shelley, Tom Paine, Plutarch, Carlyle, Haeckel, William Morris, the Bible, the Freethinker, the Clarion, "The

Woman Who Did,"I mention the ingredients that come first to mind. All sorts of ideas were jumbled up in

me and never a lucid explanation. But it was evident to me that the world regarded Shelley, for example, as a

very heroic as well as beautiful person; and that to defy convention and succumb magnificently to passion

was the proper thing to do to gain the respect and affection of all decent people.

And the makeup of Marion's mind in the matter was an equally irrational affair. Her training had been one,

not simply of silences, but suppressions. An enormous force of suggestion had so shaped her that the intense

natural fastidiousness of girlhood had developed into an absolute perversion of instinct. For all that is

cardinal in this essential business of life she had one inseparable epithet"horrid." Without any such training

she would have been a shy lover, but now she was an impossible one. For the rest she had derived, I suppose,

partly from the sort of fiction she got from the Public Library, and partly from the workroom talk at

Smithie's. So far as the former origin went, she had an idea of love as a state of worship and service on the

part of the man and of condescension on the part of the woman. There was nothing "horrid" about it in any

fiction she had read. The man gave presents, did services, sought to be in every way delightful. The woman

"went out" with him, smiled at him, was kissed by him in decorous secrecy, and if he chanced to offend,

denied her countenance and presence. Usually she did something "for his good" to him, made him go to

church, made him give up smoking or gambling, smartened him up. Quite at the end of the story came a

That was the tenor of Marion's fiction; but I think the worktable conversation at Smithie's did something to

modify that. At Smithie's it was recognised, I think, that a "fellow" was a possession to be desired; that it was

better to be engaged to a fellow than not; that fellows had to be keptthey might be mislaid, they might even

Smithie I met before we were married, and afterwards she became a frequent visitor to our house at Ealing.

She was a thin, brighteyed, hawknosed girl of thirtyodd, with prominent teeth, a highpitched, eager voice

and a disposition to be urgently smart in her dress. Her hats were startling and various, but invariably

disconcerting, and she talked in a rapid, nervous flow that was hilarious rather than witty, and broken by little

screams of "Oh, my dear!" and "you never did!" She was the first woman I ever met who used scent. Poor old

Smithie! What a harmless, kindly soul she really was, and how heartily I detested her! Out of the profits on

the Persian robes she supported a sister's family of three children, she "helped" a worthless brother, and

overflowed in help even to her workgirls, but that didn't weigh with me in those youthfullynarrow times. It

was one of the intense minor irritations of my married life that Smithie's whirlwind chatter seemed to me to

have far more influence with Marion than anything I had to say. Before all things I coveted her grip upon

In the workroom at Smithie's, I gathered, they always spoke of me demurely as "A Certain Person." I was

rumoured to be dreadfully "clever," and there were doubtsnot altogether without justificationof the

Well, these general explanations will enable the reader to understand the distressful times we two had

together when presently I began to feel on a footing with Marion and to fumble conversationally for the mind

and the wonderful passion I felt, obstinately and stupidity, must be in her. I think she thought me the maddest

of sane men; "clever," in fact, which at Smithie's was, I suppose, the next thing to insanity, a word intimating

incomprehensible and incalculable motives.... She could be shocked at anything, she misunderstood

everything, and her weapon was a sulky silence that knitted her brows, spoilt her mouth and robbed her face

of beauty. "Well, if we can't agree, I don't see why you should go on talking," she used to say. That would

always enrage me beyond measure. Or, "I'm afraid I'm not clever enough to understand that."

Silly little people! I see it all now, but then I was no older than she and I couldn't see anything but that

We would contrive semisurreptitious walks on Sunday, and part speechless with the anger of indefinable

offences. Poor Marion! The things I tried to put before her, my fermenting ideas about theology, about

Socialism, about aestheticsthe very words appalled her, gave her the faint chill of approaching

impropriety, the terror of a very present intellectual impossibility. Then by an enormous effort I would

suppress myself for a time and continue a talk that made her happy, about Smithie's brother, about the new

girl who had come to the workroom, about the house we would presently live in. But there we differed a

little. I wanted to be accessible to St. Paul's or Cannon Street Station, and she had set her mind quite

resolutely upon Eating.... It wasn't by any means quarreling all the time, you understand. She liked me to play

the lover "nicely"; she liked the effect of going aboutwe had lunches, we went to Earl's Court, to Kew, to

theatres and concerts, but not often to concerts, because, though Marion "liked" music, she didn't like "too

much of it," to picture showsand there was a nonsensical sort of babytalk I picked upI forget where

Her worst offence for me was an occasional excursion into the Smithie style of dressing, debased West

Kensington. For she had no sense at all of her own beauty. She had no comprehension whatever of beauty of

the body, and she could slash her beautiful lines to rags with hatbrims and trimmings. Thank Heaven! a

natural refinement, a natural timidity, and her extremely slender purse kept her from the real Smithie

efflorescence! Poor, simple, beautiful, kindly limited Marion! Now that I am fortyfive, I can look back at

her with all my old admiration and none of my old bitterness with a new affection and not a scrap of passion,

and take her part against the equally stupid, drivinglyenergetic, sensuous, intellectual sprawl I used to be. I

was a young beast for her to have marrieda hound beast. With her it was my business to understand and

We became engaged, as I have told; we broke it off and joined again. We went through a succession of such

phases. We had no sort of idea what was wrong with us. Presently we were formally engaged. I had a

wonderful interview with her father, in which he was stupendously grave and Hless, wanted to know about

my origins and was tolerant (exasperatingly tolerant) because my mother was a servant, and afterwards her

mother took to kissing me, and I bought a ring. But the speechless aunt, I gathered, didn't approvehaving

doubts of my religiosity. Whenever we were estranged we could keep apart for days; and to begin with, every

such separation was a relief. And then I would want her; a restless longing would come upon me. I would

think of the flow of her arms, of the soft, gracious bend of her body. I would lie awake or dream of a

transfigured Marion of light and fire. It was indeed Dame Nature driving me on to womankind in her stupid,

inexorable way; but I thought it was the need of Marion that troubled me. So I always went back to Marion at

last and made it up and more or less conceded or ignored whatever thing had parted us, and more and more I

In the long run that became a fixed idea. It entangled my will and my pride; I told myself I was not going to

be beaten. I hardened to the business. I think, as a matter of fact, my real passion for Marion had waned

enormously long before we were married, that she had lived it down by sheer irresponsiveness. When I felt

sure of my three hundred a year she stipulated for delay, twelve months' delay, "to see how things would turn

out." There were times when she seemed simply an antagonist holding out irritatingly against something I

had to settle. Moreover, I began to be greatly distracted by the interest and excitement of TonoBungay's

success, by the change and movement in things, the going to and fro. I would forget her for days together,

and then desire her with an irritating intensity at last, one Saturday afternoon, after a brooding morning, I

I went off to the little home at Walham Green, and made Marion come with me to Putney Common. Marion

wasn't at home when I got there and I had to fret for a time and talk to her father, who was just back from his

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

"I don't approve of long engagements either," said her father. "But Marion will have her own way about it,

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

I and Marion sat down together on a little seat under some trees at the top of Putney Hill, and I came to my

She was silent for a space. "Can't we go on for a time as we are? We COULD marry on three hundred a year.

But it means a very little house. There's Smithie's brother. They manage on two hundred and fifty, but that's

very little. She says they have a semidetached house almost on the road, and hardly a bit of garden. And the

wall to nextdoor is so thin they hear everything. When her baby criesthey rap. And people stand against

An extraordinary bitterness possessed me at this invasion of the stupendous beautiful business of love by

"If," I said, "we could have a doublefronted, detached houseat Ealing, saywith a square patch of lawn

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

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

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

She was so pleased that I forgot absolutely my disgust of a moment before. I forgot that she had raised her

"Come!" I said, standing up; "let's go towards the sunset, dear, and talk about it all. Do you knowthis is a

most beautiful world, an amazingly beautiful world, and when the sunset falls upon you it makes you into

shining gold. No, not goldinto golden glass.... Into something better that either glass or gold."...

And for all that evening I wooed her and kept her glad. She made me repeat my assurances over again and

We furnished that doublefronted house from atticit ran to an atticto cellar, and created a garden.

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

"You shall have Pampas Grass," I declared. And there were moments as we went in imagination about that

house together, when my whole being cried out to take her in my armsnow. But I refrained. On that aspect

of life I touched very lightly in that talk, very lightly because I had had my lessons. She promised to marry

me within two months' time. Shyly, reluctantly, she named a day, and next afternoon, in heat and wrath, we

"broke it off" again for the last time. We split upon procedure. I refused flatly to have a normal wedding with

wedding cake, in white favours, carriages and the rest of it. It dawned upon me suddenly in conversation with

her and her mother, that this was implied. I blurted out my objection forthwith, and this time it wasn't any

ordinary difference of opinion; it was a "row." I don't remember a quarter of the things we flung out in that

dispute. I remember her mother reiterating in tones of gentle remonstrance: "But, George dear, you must have

a caketo send home." I think we all reiterated things. I seem to remember a refrain of my own: "A

marriage is too sacred a thing, too private a thing, for this display. Her father came in and stood behind me

against the wall, and her aunt appeared beside the sideboard and stood with arms, looking from speaker to

speaker, a sternly gratified prophetess. It didn't occur to me then! How painful it was to Marion for these

"But, George," said her father, "what sort of marriage do you want? You don't want to go to one of those

"Look here, Marion," I said; "we are going to be married at a registry office. I don't believe in all these

fripperies and superstitions, and I won't submit to them. I've agreed to all sorts of things to please you."

"Very well," I said, standing up, white and tense and it amazed me, but I was also exultant; "then we won't

She leant forward over the table, staring blankly. But presently her halfaverted face began to haunt me as

The next day I did an unexampled thing. I sent a telegram to my uncle, "Bad temper not coming to business,"

and set off for Highgate and Ewart. He was actually at workon a bust of Millie, and seemed very glad for

"Ewart, you old Fool," I said, "knock off and come for a day's gossip. I'm rotten. There's a sympathetic sort of

We got a jar of shandygaff, some food, and, on Ewart's suggestion, two Japanese sunshades in Staines; we

demanded extra cushions at the boathouse and we spent an enormously soothing day in discourse and

meditation, our boat moored in a shady place this side of Windsor. I seem to remember Ewart with a cushion

forward, only his heels and sunshade and some black ends of hair showing, a voice and no more, against the

"It's not worth it," was the burthen of the voice. "You'd better get yourself a Millie, Ponderevo, and then you

"Everything's a muddle, and you think it isn't. Nobody knows where we arebecause, as a matter of fact we

aren't anywhere. Are women propertyor are they fellowcreatures? Or a sort of proprietary goddesses?

"My idea," I said, "is to meet one person who will belong to meto whom I shall belongbody and soul.

No halfgods! Wait till she comes. If she comes at all.... We must come to each other young and pure."

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

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

"No! Practically not. I've just thought all that business out. She's merely an instrument, Ponderevo. She's

borne the blame. Grundy's a man. Grundy unmasked. Rather lean and out of sorts. Early middle age. With

bunchy black whiskers and a worried eye. Been good so far, and it's fretting him! Moods! There's Grundy in

a state of sexual panic, for example,'For God's sake cover it up! They get togetherthey get together! It's

too exciting! The most dreadful things are happening!' Rushing aboutlong arms going like a windmill.

'They must be kept apart!' Starts out for an absolute obliteration of everything absolute separations. One side

of the road for men, and the other for women, and a hoardingwithout posters between them. Every boy and

girl to be sewed up in a sack and sealed, just the head and hands and feet out until twentyone. Music

abolished, calico garments for the lower animals! Sparrows to be suppressedabsolutely."

"Well, that's Mr. Grundy in one moodand it puts Mrs. GrundyShe's a muchmaligned person,

Ponderevoa rake at heartand it puts her in a most painful state of flustermost painful! She's an

amenable creature. When Grundy tells her things are shocking, she's shockedpink and breathless. She goes

about trying to conceal her profound sense of guilt behind a haughty expression....

"Grundy, meanwhile, is in a state of complete whirlabout. Long lean knuckly hands pointing and

gesticulating! 'They're still thinking of thingsthinking of things! It's dreadful. They get it out of books. I

can't imagine where they get it! I must watch! There're people over there whispering! Nobody ought to

whisper!There's something suggestive in the mere act! Then, pictures! In the museumthings too

dreadful for words. Why can't we have pure artwith the anatomy all wrong and pure and niceand pure

fiction pure poetry, instead of all this stuff with allusionsallusions?... Excuse me! There's something up

behind that locked door! The keyhole! In the interests of public moralityyes, Sir, as a pure good manI

"That's Grundy in one mood, Ponderevo. It isn't Mrs. Grundy. That's one of the lies we tell about women.

They're too simple. Simple! Woman ARE simple! They take on just what men tell 'em."

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

"Then you get old Grundy in another mood. Ever caught him nosing, Ponderevo? Mad with the idea of

mysterious, unknown, wicked, delicious things. Things that aren't respectable. Wow! Things he mustn't do!...

Any one who knows about these things, knows there's just as much mystery and deliciousness about Grundy's

forbidden things as there is about eating ham. Jolly nice if it's a bright morning and you're well and hungry

and having breakfast in the open air. Jolly unattractive if you're off colour. But Grundy's covered it all up and

hidden it and put mucky shades and covers over it until he's forgotten it. Begins to fester round it in his mind.

Has dreadful struggleswith himself about impure thoughts.... Then you set Grundy with hot ears,curious

in undertones. Grundy on the loose, Grundy in a hoarse whisper and with furtive eyes and convulsive

"Grundy sins. Oh, yes, he's a hypocrite. Sneaks round a corner and sins ugly. It's Grundy and his dark corners

"And then he's frantic with repentance. And wants to be cruel to fallen women and decent harmless sculptors

"No? I'm not so sure.... But, bless her heart she's a woman.... She's a woman. Then again you get Grundy with

a large greasy smilelike an accident to a butter tuball over his face, being Liberal MindedGrundy in

his AntiPuritan moments, 'trying not to see Harm in it'Grundy the friend of innocent pleasure. He makes

"And that's why everything's wrong, Ponderevo. Grundy, damn him! stands in the light, and we young people

can't see. His moods affect us. We catch his gusts of panic, his disease of nosing, his greasiness. We don't

know what we may think, what we may say, he does his silly utmost to prevent our reading and seeing the

one thing, the one sort of discussion we findquite naturally and properlysupremely interesting. So we

don't adolescence; we blunder up to sex. Daredare to lookand he may dirt you for ever! The girls are

terrorstricken to silence by his significant whiskers, by the bleary something in his eyes."

"He's about us everywhere, Ponderevo," he said, very solemnly. "Sometimessometimes I think he isin

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

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

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

"There are complications, I admit. We've grown up under the terror of Grundy and that innocent but docile

andyesformidable lady, his wife. I don't know how far the complications aren't a disease, a sort of

bleaching under the Grundy shadow.... It is possible there are things I have still to learn about women.... Man

has eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. His innocence is gone. You can't have your cake and eat it. We're in for

knowledge; let's have it plain and straight. I should begin, I think, by abolishing the ideas of decency and

"Grundy, Ponderevo, would have cold douchespubliclyif the sight was not too painfulthree times a

day.... But I don't think, mind you, that I should let the sexes run about together. No. The fact behind the

sexesis sex. It's no good humbugging. It trails abouteven in the best mixed company. Tugs at your

ankle. The men get showing off and quarrellingand the women. Or they're bored. I suppose the ancestral

males have competed for the ancestral females ever since they were both some sort of grubby little reptile.

You aren't going to alter that in a thousand years or so.... Never should you have a mixed company,

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

"I seem to seeI seem to seea sort of City of Women, Ponderevo. Yes.... A walled enclosuregood

stonemason's worka city wall, high as the walls of Rome, going about a garden. Dozens of square miles

of gardentreesfountains arbourslakes. Lawns on which the women play, avenues in which they

gossip, boats.... Women like that sort of thing. Any woman who's been to a good eventful girls' school lives

on the memory of it for the rest of her life. It's one of the pathetic things about womenthe superiority of

school and collegeto anything they get afterwards. And this citygarden of women will have beautiful

places for music, places for beautiful dresses, places for beautiful work. Everything a woman can want.

Nurseries. Kindergartens. Schools. And no manexcept to do rough work, perhapsever comes in. The

men live in a world where they can hunt and engineer, invent and mine and manufacture, sail ships, drink

"I'm coming to that. The homes of the women, Ponderevo, will be set in the wall of their city; each woman

will have her own particular house and home, furnished after her own heart in her own mannerwith a little

balcony on the outside wall. Built into the walland a little balcony. And there she will go and look out,

when the mood takes her, and all round the city there will be a broad road and seats and great shady trees.

And men will stroll up and down there when they feel the need of feminine company; when, for instance,

they want to talk about their souls or their characters or any of the things that only women will stand.... The

women will lean over and look at the men and smile and talk to them as they fancy. And each woman will

have this; she will have a little silken ladder she can let down if she choosesif she "wants to talk closer..."

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

"Move him on," said Ewart, "by a special regulation. As one does organgrinders. No difficulty about that.

And you could forbid itmake it against the etiquette. No life is decent without etiquette.... And people obey

"H'm," I said, and was struck by an idea that is remote in the world of a young man. "How about children?" I

"Ah!" said Ewart. "Yes. I forgot. They mustn't grow up inside.... They'd turn out the boys when they were

seven. The father must come with a little pony and a little gun and manly wear, and take the boy away. Then

one could come afterwards to one's mother's balcony.... It must be fine to have a mother. The father and the

"This is all very pretty in its way," I said at last, "but it's a dream. Let's come back to reality. What I want to

know is, what are you going to do in Brompton, let us say, or Walham Green NOW?"

"Oh! damn it!" he remarked, "Walham Green! What a chap you are, Ponderevo!" and he made an abrupt end

"For a masterpiece. A series. Like the busts of the Caesars. Only not heads, you know. We don't see the

"Handsa series of hands! The hands of the Twentieth Century. I'll do it. Some day some one will discover

"On the tombs. Why not? The Unknown Master of the Highgate Slope! All the little, soft feminine hands, the

nervous ugly males, the hands of the flops, and the hands of the snatchers! And Grundy's loose, lean, knuckly

affairGrundy the terror!the little wrinkles and the thumb! Only it ought to hold all the others

togetherin a slightly disturbing squeeze....Like Rodin's great Handyou know the thing!"

I forget how many days intervened between that last breaking off of our engagement and Marion's surrender.

But I recall now the sharpness of my emotion, the concentrated spirit of tears and laughter in my throat as I

read the words of her unexpected letter"I have thought over everything, and I was selfish...." I rushed off to

Walham Green that evening to give back all she had given me, to beat her altogether at giving. She was

extraordinarily gentle and generous that time, I remember, and when at last I left her, she kissed me very

We were married with all the customary incongruity. I gaveperhaps after a while not altogether

ungrudginglyand what I gave, Marion took, with a manifest satisfaction. After all, I was being sensible. So

that we had three livery carriages to the church (one of the pairs of horses matched) and coachmenwith

improvised flavour and very shabby silk hatsbearing white favours on their whips, and my uncle

intervened with splendour and insisted upon having a wedding breakfast sent in from a caterer's in

Hammersmith. The table had a great display of chrysanthemums, and there was orange blossom in the

significant place and a wonderful cake. We also circulated upwards of a score of wedges of that accompanied

by silverprinted cards in which Marion's name of Ramboat was stricken out by an arrow in favour of

Ponderevo. We had a little rally of Marion's relations, and several friends and friends' friends from Smithie's

appeared in the church and drifted vestryward. I produced my aunt and uncle a select group of two. The

effect in that shabby little house was one of exhilarating congestion. The sideboard, in which lived the

tablecloth and the "Apartments" card, was used for a display of the presents, eked out by the unused balance

Marion wore the white raiment of a bride, white silk and satin, that did not suit her, that made her seem large

and strange to me; she obtruded bows and unfamiliar contours. She went through all this strange ritual of an

English wedding with a sacramental gravity that I was altogether too young and egotistical to comprehend. It

was all extraordinarily central and important to her; it was no more than an offensive, complicated, and

disconcerting intrusion of a world I was already beginning to criticise very bitterly, to me. What was all this

fuss for? The mere indecent advertisement that I had been passionately in love with Marion! I think, however,

that Marion was only very remotely aware of my smouldering exasperation at having in the end behaved

"nicely." I had playedup to the extent of dressing my part; I had an admirably cut frockcoat, a new silk

hat, trousers as light as I could endure themlighter, in facta white waistcoat, night tie, light gloves.

Marion, seeing me despondent had the unusual enterprise to whisper to me that I looked lovely; I knew too

well I didn't look myself. I looked like a special coloured supplement to Men's Wear, or The Tailor and

Cutter, Full Dress For Ceremonial Occasions. I had even the disconcerting sensations of an unfamiliar collar.

I felt lostin a strange body, and when I glanced down myself for reassurance, the straight white abdomen,

My uncle was my best man, and looked like a bankera little bankerin flower. He wore a white rose in

his buttonhole. He wasn't, I think, particularly talkative. At least I recall very little from him.

"George" he said once or twice, "this is a great occasion for youa very great occasion." He spoke a little

You see I had told him nothing about Marion until about a week before the wedding; both he and my aunt

had been taken altogether by surprise. They couldn't, as people say, "make it out." My aunt was intensely

interested, much more than my uncle; it was then, I think, for the first time that I really saw that she cared for

me. She got me alone, I remember, after I had made my announcement. "Now, George," she said, "tell me

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

And while I don't remember anything my uncle said or did at the wedding, I do remember very distinctly

certain little things, scrutiny, solicitude, a curious rare flash of intimacy in my aunt's eyes. It dawned on me

that I wasn't hiding anything from her at all. She was dressed very smartly, wearing a bigplumed hat that

made her neck seem longer and slenderer than ever, and when she walked up the aisle with that rolling stride

of hers and her eye all on Marion, perplexed into selfforgetfulness, it wasn't somehow funny. She was, I do

believe, giving my marriage more thought than I had done, she was concerned beyond measure at my black

rage and Marion's blindness, she was looking with eyes that knew what loving isfor love.

In the vestry she turned away as we signed, and I verily believe she was crying, though to this day I can't say

why she should have cried, and she was near crying too when she squeezed my hand at partingand she

If I had not been so grim in spirit, I think I should have found much of my wedding amusing. I remember a

lot of ridiculous detail that still declines to be funny in my memory. The officiating clergyman had a cold,

and turned his "n's" to "d's," and he made the most mechanical compliment conceivable about the bride's age

when the register was signed. Every bride he had ever married had had it, one knew. And two middleaged

spinsters, cousins of Marion's and dressmakers at Barking, stand out. They wore marvellously bright and gay

blouses and dim old skirts, and had an immense respect for Mr. Ramboat. They threw rice; they brought a

whole bag with them and gave handfuls away to unknown little boys at the church door and so created a

Lilliputian riot; and one had meant to throw a slipper. It was a very warm old silk slipper, I know, because

she dropped it out of a pocket in the aislethere was a sort of jumble in the aisleand I picked it up for her.

I don't think she actually threw it, for as we drove away from the church I saw her in a dreadful, and, it

seemed to me, hopeless, struggle with her pocket; and afterwards my eye caught the missile of good fortune

lying, it or its fellow, most obviously mislaid, behind the umbrellastand in the hall....

The whole business was much more absurd, more incoherent, more human than I had anticipated, but I was

far too young and serious to let the latter quality atone for its shortcomings. I am so remote from this phase of

my youth that I can look back at it all as dispassionately as one looks at a pictureat some wonderful,

perfect sort of picture that is inexhaustible; but at the time these things filled me with unspeakable

resentment. Now I go round it all, look into its details, generalise about its aspects. I'm interested, for

example, to square it with my Bladesover theory of the British social scheme. Under stress of tradition we

were all of us trying in the fermenting chaos of London to carry out the marriage ceremonies of a Bladesover

tenant or one of the chubby middling sort of people in some dependent country town. There a marriage is a

public function with a public significance. There the church is to a large extent the gatheringplace of the

community, and your going to be married a thing of importance to every one you pass on the road. It is a

change of status that quite legitimately interests the whole neighbourhood. But in London there are no

neighbours, nobody knows, nobody cares. An absolute stranger in an office took my notice, and our banns

were proclaimed to ears that had never previously heard our names. The clergyman, even, who married us

had never seen us before, and didn't in any degree intimate that he wanted to see us again.

Neighbours in London! The Ramboats did not know the names of the people on either side of them. As I

waited for Marion before we started off upon our honeymoon flight, Mr. Ramboat, I remember, came and

"There was a funeral over there yesterday," he said, by way of making conversation, and moved his head at

And our little procession of three carriages with whitefavouradorned horses and drivers, went through all

the huge, noisy, indifferent traffic like a lost china image in the coalchute of an ironclad. Nobody made way

for us, nobody cared for us; the driver of an omnibus jeered; for a long time we crawled behind an unamiable

dustcart. The irrelevant clatter and tumult gave a queer flavour of indecency to this public coming together

shamelessly. The crowd that gathered outside the church would have gathered in the same spirit and with

At Charing Crosswe were going to Hastingsthe experienced eye of the guard detected the significance

"Well," said I, as the train moved out of the station, "That's all over!" And I turned to Mariona little

"My dear Marion!" said I, and by way of answer took and kissed her whitegloved, leatherscented hand....

I don't remember much else about the journey, an hour or so it was of undistinguished timefor we were

both confused and a little fatigued and Marion had a slight headache and did not want caresses. I fell into a

reverie about my aunt, and realised as if it were a new discovery, that I cared for her very greatly. I was

But you will not want to hear the history of my honeymoon. I have told all that was needed to serve my

present purpose. Thus and thus it was the Will in things had its way with me. Driven by forces I did not

understand, diverted altogether from the science, the curiosities and work to which I had once given myself, I

fought my way through a tangle of traditions, customs, obstacles and absurdities, enraged myself, limited

myself, gave myself to occupations I saw with the clearest vision were dishonourable and vain, and at last

achieved the end of purblind Nature, the relentless immediacy of her desire, and held, far short of happiness,

Who can tell the story of the slow estrangement of two married people, the weakening of first this bond and

then that of that complex contact? Least of all can one of the two participants. Even now, with an interval of

fifteen years to clear it up for me, I still find a mass of impressions of Marion as confused, as discordant, as

unsystematic and selfcontradictory as life. I think of this thing and love her, of that and hate herof a

hundred aspects in which I can now see her with an unimpassioned sympathy. As I sit here trying to render

some vision of this infinitely confused process, I recall moments of hard and fierce estrangement, moments of

clouded intimacy, the passage of transition all forgotten. We talked a little language together whence were

"friends," and I was "Mutney" and she was "Ming," and we kept up such an outward show that till the very

I cannot tell to the full how Marion thwarted me and failed in that life of intimate emotions which is the

kernel of love. That life of intimate emotions is made up of little things. A beautiful face differs from an ugly

one by a difference of surfaces and proportions that are sometimes almost infinitesimally small. I find myself

setting down little things and little things; none of them do more than demonstrate those essential

temperamental discords I have already sought to make clear. Some readers will understandto others I shall

seem no more than an unfeeling brute who couldn't make allowances.... It's easy to make allowances now; but

to be young and ardent and to make allowances, to see one's married life open before one, the life that seemed

in its dawn a glory, a garden of roses, a place of deep sweet mysteries and heart throbs and wonderful

silences, and to see it a vista of tolerations and babytalk; a compromise, the least effectual thing in all one's

Every love romance I read seemed to mock our dull intercourse, every poem, every beautiful picture reflected

upon the uneventful succession of grey hours we had together. I think our real difference was one of aesthetic

I do still recall as the worst and most disastrous aspect of all that time, her absolute disregard of her own

beauty. It's the pettiest thing to record, I know, but she could wear curlpapers in my presence. It was her

idea, too, to "wear out" her old clothes and her failures at home when "no one was likely to see her""no

one" being myself. She allowed me to accumulate a store of ungracious and slovenly memories....

All our conceptions of life differed. I remember how we differed about furniture. We spent three or four days

in Tottenham Court Road, and she chose the things she fancied with an inexorable resolution,sweeping

aside my suggestions with"Oh, YOU want such queer things." She pursued some limited, clearly seen and

experienced idealthat excluded all other possibilities. Over every mantel was a mirror that was draped, our

sideboard was wonderfully good and splendid with beveled glass, we had lamps on long metal stalks and

cozy corners and plants in grogtubs. Smithie approved it all. There wasn't a place where one could sit and

read in the whole house. My books went upon shelves in the diningroom recess. And we had a piano though

You know, it was the cruelest luck for Marion that I, with my restlessness, my scepticism, my constantly

developing ideas, had insisted on marriage with her. She had no faculty of growth or change; she had taken

her mould, she had set in the limited ideas of her peculiar class. She preserved her conception of what was

right in drawingroom chairs and in marriage ceremonial and in every relation of life with a simple and

luminous honesty and conviction, with an immense unimaginative inflexibilityas a tailorbird builds its

Let me hasten over this history of disappointments and separation. I might tell of waxings and waning of love

between us, but the whole was waning. Sometimes she would do things for me, make me a tie or a pair of

slippers, and fill me with none the less gratitude because the things were absurd. She ran our home and our

one servant with a hard, bright efficiency. She was inordinately proud of house and garden. Always, by her

Presently the rapid development of TonoBungay began to take me into the provinces, and I would be away

sometimes for a week together. This she did not like; it left her "dull," she said, but after a time she began to

go to Smithie's again and to develop an independence of me. At Smithie's she was now a woman with a

position; she had money to spend. She would take Smithie to theatres and out to lunch and talk interminably

of the business, and Smithie became a sort of permanent weekender with us. Also Marion got a spaniel and

began to dabble with the minor arts, with pokerwork and a Kodak and hyacinths in glasses. She called once

on a neighbour. Her parents left Walham Greenher father severed his connection with the

gasworksand came to live in a small house I took for them near us, and they were much with us.

Odd the littleness of the things that exasperate when the fountains of life are embittered! My fatherinlaw

was perpetually catching me in moody moments and urging me to take to gardening. He irritated me beyond

"You think too much," he would say. "If you was to let in a bit with a spade, you might soon 'ave that garden

Or in a torrent of exasperation, "I CARN'T think, George, why you don't get a bit of glass 'ere. This sunny

And in the summer time he never came in without performing a sort of conjuring trick in the hall, and taking

cucumbers and tomatoes from unexpected points of his person. "All out o' MY little bit," he'd say in

exemplary tones. He left a trail of vegetable produce in the most unusual places, on mantel boards,

sideboards, the tops of pictures. Heavens! how the sudden unexpected tomato could annoy me!...

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

My aunt, to begin with, called rather frequently, for she was really anxious to know Marion. At first she

would arrive like a whirlwind and pervade the house with an atmosphere of hello! She dressed already with

that cheerfully extravagant abandon that signalised her accession to fortune, and dressed her best for these

She wanted to play the mother to me, I fancy, to tell Marion occult secrets about the way I wore out my boots

and how I never could think to put on thicker things in cold weather. But Marion received her with that

defensive suspiciousness of the shy person, thinking only of the possible criticism of herself; and my aunt,

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

The queer things my aunt said were nothing to the queer things she didn't say. I remember her in our

drawingroom one day, and how she cocked her eyeit's the only expressionat the Indiarubber plant in

She was on the very verge of speech. Then suddenly she caught my expression, and shrank up like a cat that

I smiled. "You're a dear," I said, "not to," as Marion came lowering into the room to welcome her. But I felt

extraordinarily like a traitorto the Indiarubber plant, I supposefor all that nothing had been said...

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

Several times we went to the house in Beckenham for lunch, and once or twice to dinner. My aunt did her

peculiar best to be friends, but Marion was implacable. She was also, I know, intensely uncomfortable, and

she adopted as her social method, an exhausting silence, replying compactly and without giving openings to

My married existence became at last like a narrow deep groove in the broad expanse of interests in which I

was living. I went about the world; I met a great number of varied personalities; I read endless books in trains

as I went to and fro. I developed social relationships at my uncle's house that Marion did not share. The seeds

of new ideas poured in upon me and grew in me. Those early and middle years of one's third decade are, I

suppose, for a man the years of greatest mental growth. They are restless years and full of vague enterprise.

Each time I returned to Ealing, life there seemed more alien, narrow, and unattractiveand Marion less

beautiful and more limited and difficultuntil at last she was robbed of every particle of her magic. She

gave me always a cooler welcome, I think, until she seemed entirely apathetic. I never asked myself then

This was my fated life, and I had chosen it. I became more sensitive to the defects I had once disregarded

altogether; I began to associate her sallow complexion with her temperamental insufficiency, and the heavier

lines of her mouth and nostril with her moods of discontent. We drifted apart; wider and wider the gap

opened. I tired of babytalk and stereotyped little fondlings; I tired of the latest intelligence from those

wonderful workrooms, and showed it all too plainly; we hardly spoke when we were alone together. The

mere unreciprocated physical residue of my passion remainedan exasperation between us.

No children came to save us. Marion had acquired at Smithie's a disgust and dread of maternity. All that was

the fruition and quintessence of the "horrid" elements in life, a disgusting thing, a last indignity that overtook

unwary women. I doubt indeed a little if children would have saved us; we should have differed so fatally

Altogether, I remember my life with Marion as a long distress, now hard, now tender. It was in those days

that I first became critical of my life and burdened with a sense of error and maladjustment. I would lie awake

in the night, asking myself the purpose of things, reviewing my unsatisfying, ungainly homelife, my days

spent in rascal enterprise and rubbishselling, contrasting all I was being and doing with my adolescent

ambitions, my Wimblehurst dreams. My circumstances had an air of finality, and I asked myself in vain why

The end of our intolerable situation came suddenly and unexpectedly, but in a way that I suppose was almost

I won't pretend to extenuate the quality of my conduct. I was a young and fairly vigorous male; all my

appetite for love had been roused and whetted and none of it had been satisfied by my love affair and my

marriage. I had pursued an elusive gleam of beauty to the disregard of all else, and it had failed me. It had

faded when I had hoped it would grow brighter. I despaired of life and was embittered. And things happened

as I am telling. I don't draw any moral at all in the matter, and as for social remedies, I leave them to the

social reformer. I've got to a time of life when the only theories that interest me are generalisations about

To go to our inner office in Raggett Street I had to walk through a room in which the typists worked. They

were the correspondence typists; our books and invoicing had long since overflowed into the premises we

had had the luck to secure on either side of us. I was, I must confess, always in a faintly cloudilyemotional

way aware of that collection of for the most part roundshouldered femininity, but presently one of the girls

detached herself from the others and got a real hold upon my attention. I appreciated her at first as a straight

little back, a neater back than any of the others; as a softly rounded neck with a smiling necklace of sham

pearls; as chestnut hair very neatly doneand as a sidelong glance; presently as a quickly turned face that

My eye would seek her as I went through on business thingsI dictated some letters to her and so

discovered she had pretty, softlooking hands with pink nails. Once or twice, meeting casually, we looked

That was all. But it was enough in the mysterious freemasonry of sex to say essential things. We had a

One day I came into Raggett Street at lunch time and she was alone, sitting at her desk. She glanced up as I

entered, and then became very still, with a downcast face and her hands clenched on the table. I walked right

She looked up at me without a word, with her face flushed and her eyes alight, and I bent down and kissed

her lips. She leant back to put an arm about me, drew my face to her and kissed me again and again. I lifted

her and held her in my arms. She gave a little smothered cry to feel herself so held.

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

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

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

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

I went into the inner office and routed out the paysheet in order to find her nameEffie Rink. And did no

work at all that afternoon. I fretted about that dingy little den like a beast in a cage.

When presently I went out, Effie was working with an extraordinary appearance of calmand there was no

We met and had our talk that evening, a talk in whispers when there was none to overhear; we came to an

understanding. It was strangely unlike any dream of romance I had ever entertained.

I came back after a week's absence to my home againa changed man. I had lived out my first rush of

passion for Effie, had come to a contemplation of my position. I had gauged Effie's place in the scheme of

things, and parted from her for a time. She was back in her place at Raggett Street after a temporary

indisposition. I did not feel in any way penitent or ashamed, I know, as I opened the little castiron gate that

kept Marion's front grader and Pampas Grass from the wandering dog. Indeed, if anything, I felt as if I had

vindicated some right that had been in question. I came back to Marion with no sense of wrongdoing at all

with, indeed, a new friendliness towards her. I don't know how it may be proper to feel on such occasions;

I followed her in our drawingroom, standing beside the tall lampstand that half filled the bay as though she

had just turned from watching for me at the window. There was something in her pale face that arrested me.

She looked as if she had not been sleeping. She did not come forward to greet me.

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

Marion spoke in dry, broken fragments of sentences. "You... I'd always thought that anyhow you couldn't

"It doesn't strike me as horrid. It seems to me the most necessary consequenceand natural thing in the

I became aware of some one moving about in the passage, and went and shut the door of the room, then I

"It's rough on you," I said. "But I didn't mean you to know. You've never cared for me. I've had the devil of a

"Oh! does it matter to you?... Look here, Marion! Thisthis I didn't anticipate. I didn't mean this thing to

smash down on you like this. But, you know, something had to happen. I'm sorrysorry to the bottom of my

heart that things have come to this between us. But indeed, I'm taken by surprise. I don't know where I amI

don't know how we got here. Things took me by surprise. I found myself alone with her one day. I kissed her.

I went on. It seemed stupid to go back. And besideswhy should I have gone back? Why should I? From

She scrutinised my face, and pulled at the ballfringe of the little table beside her.

We kept a long silence. I was only beginning to realise in the most superficial way the immense catastrophe

that had happened between us. Enormous issues had rushed upon us. I felt unprepared and altogether

inadequate. I was unreasonably angry. There came a rush of stupid expressions to my mind that my rising

sense of the supreme importance of the moment saved me from saying. The gap of silence widened until it

threatened to become the vast memorable margin of some one among a thousand trivial possibilities of

Our little general servant tapped at the doorMarion always liked the servant to tapand appeared.

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

"Mother is having tea with us today," Marion remarked at last, and dropped the worried end of ballfringe

And so, with this immense discussion of our changed relations hanging over us, we presently had tea with the

unsuspecting Mrs. Ramboat and the spaniel. Mrs. Ramboat was too well trained in her position to remark

upon our somber preoccupation. She kept a thin trickle of talk going, and told us, I remember, that Mr.

"They don't come up and they won't come up. He's been round and had an explanation with the man who sold

The spaniel was a great bore, begging and doing small tricks first at one and then at the other of us. Neither of

us used his name. You see we had called him Miggles, and made a sort of trio in the babytalk of Mutney

Then presently we resumed our monstrous, momentous dialogue. I can't now make out how long that

dialogue went on. It spread itself, I know, in heavy fragments over either three days or four. I remember

myself grouped with Marion, talking sitting on our bed in her room, talking standing in our diningroom,

saving this thing or that. Twice we went for long walks. And we had a long evening alone together, with

jaded nerves and hearts that fluctuated between a hard and dreary recognition of facts and, on my part at least,

a strange unwonted tenderness; because in some extraordinary way this crisis had destroyed our mutual

It was a dialogue that had discrepant parts that fell into lumps of talk that failed to join on to their

predecessors, that began again at a different level, higher or lower, that assumed new aspects in the intervals

and assimilated new considerations. We discussed the fact that we two were no longer lovers; never before

had we faced that. It seems a strange thing to write, but as I look back, I see clearly that those several days

were the time when Marion and I were closest together, looked for the first and last time faithfully and

steadfastly into each other's soul. For those days only, there were no pretences, I made no concessions to her

nor she to me; we concealed nothing, exaggerated nothing. We had done with pretending. We had it out

plainly and soberly with each other. Mood followed mood and got its stark expression.

Of course there was quarreling between us, bitter quarreling, and we said things to one anotherlong

pentup things that bruised and crushed and cut. But over it all in my memory now is an effect of deliberate

confrontation, and the figure of Marion stands up, pale, melancholy, tearstained, injured, implacable and

I struggled with tangled ideas and emotions. "I don't know what love is. It's all sorts of thingsit's made of a

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

As I look back upon all that timeacross a gulf of fifteen active yearsI find I see it with an understanding

judgment. I see it as if it were the business of some one elseindeed of two other peopleintimately known

yet judged without passion. I see now that this shock, this sudden immense disillusionment, did in real fact

bring out a mind and soul in Marion; that for the first time she emerged from habits, timidities, imitations,

Her ruling motive at first was, I think, an indignant and outraged pride. This situation must end. She asked

me categorically to give up Effie, and I, full of fresh and glowing memories, absolutely refused.

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

"I don't know anything of divorce," I said"if you mean that. I don't know how it is done. I shall have to ask

somebodyor look it up.... Perhaps, after all, it is the thing to do. We may as well face it."

We began to talk ourselves into a realisation of what our divergent futures might be. I came back on the

"We can't as a matter of fact," I said, "get divorced as things are. Apparently, so far as the law goes you've got

to stand this sort of thing. It's silly but that is the law. However, it's easy to arrange a divorce. In addition to

adultery there must be desertion or cruelty. To establish cruelty I should have to strike you, or something of

that sort, before witnesses. That's impossiblebut it's simple to desert you legally. I have to go away from

you; that's all. I can go on sending you moneyand you bring a suit, what is it?for Restitution of Conjugal

Rights. The Court orders me to return. I disobey. Then you can go on to divorce me. You get a Decree Nisi,

and once more the Court tries to make me come back. If we don't make it up within six months and if you

don't behave scandalously the Decree is made absolute. That's the end of the fuss. That's how one gets

"You'll have an income. They call it alimony. From a third to a half of my present incomemore if you

likeI don't mindthree hundred a year, say. You've got your old people to keep and you'll need all that."

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

The perplexing thing about life is the irresolvable complexity of reality, of things and relations alike. Nothing

is simple. Every wrong done has a certain justice in it, and every good deed has dregs of evil. As for us,

young still, and still without selfknowledge, resounded a hundred discordant notes in the harsh angle of that

shock. We were furiously angry with each other, tender with each other, callously selfish, generously

I remember Marion saying innumerable detached things that didn't hang together one with another, that

contradicted one another, that were, nevertheless, all in their places profoundly true and sincere. I see them

now as so many vain experiments in her effort to apprehend the crumpled confusions of our complex moral

landslide. Some I found irritating beyond measure. I answered hersometimes quite abominably.

"I've besieged you for three years," I would retort "asking it not to be. You've done as you pleased. If I've

"How you must hate me! I made you wait. Well nowI suppose you have your revenge."

"I want to be quite independent. I've always hated London. Perhaps I shall try a poultry farm and bees. You

There were times when she seemed to regard our separation with absolute complacency, when she would

And once she said an ugly thing that I did indeed hate her for. that I cannot even now quite forgive her.

Into my memory of these pains and stresses comes the figure of Smithie, fullcharged with emotion, so

breathless in the presence of the horrid villain of the piece that she could make no articulate sounds. She had

long tearful confidences with Marion, I know, sympathetic close clingings. There were moments when only

absolute speechlessness prevented her giving me a stupendous "talkingto"I could see it in her eye. The

wrong things she would have said! And I recall, too, Mrs. Ramboat's slow awakening to something in, the air,

the growing expression of solicitude in her eye, only her welltrained fear of Marion keeping her from

And at last through all this welter, like a thing fated and altogether beyond our control, parting came to

I hardened my heart, or I could not have gone. For at the last it came to Marion that she was parting from me

for ever. That overbore all other things, had turned our last hour to anguish. She forgot for a time the prospect

of moving into a new house, she forgot the outrage on her proprietorship and pride. For the first time in her

life she really showed strong emotions in regard to me, for the first time, perhaps, they really came to her.

She began to weep slow, reluctant tears. I came into her room, and found her asprawl on the bed, weeping.

"I shall be alone!...MUTNEY! Mutney, don't leave me! Oh! Mutney! I didn't understand."

I had to harden my heart indeed, for it seemed to me at moments in those last hours together that at last, too

late, the longedfor thing had happened and Marion had come alive. A newborn hunger for me lit her eyes.

"Don't leave me!" she said, "don't leave me!" She clung to me; she kissed me with tearsalt lips.

I was promised now and pledged, and I hardened my heart against this impossible dawn. Yet it seems to me

that there were moments when it needed but a cry, but one word to have united us again for all our lives.

Could we have united again? Would that passage have enlightened us for ever or should we have fallen back

Of that there is now no telling. Our own resolve carried us on our predestined way. We behaved more and

more like separating lovers, parting inexorably, but all the preparations we had set going worked on like a

machine, and we made no attempt to stop them. My trunks and boxes went to the station. I packed my bag

with Marion standing before me. We were like children who had hurt each other horribly in sheer stupidity,

who didn't know now how to remedy it. We belonged to each other immenselyimmensely. The cab came

For a moment we held one another in each other's arms and kissedincredibly without malice. We heard our

little servant in the passage going to open the door. For the last time we pressed ourselves to one another. We

were not lovers nor enemies, but two human souls in a frank community of pain. I tore myself from her.

I got into the cab, resolutely not looking back, and then as it started jumped up, craned out and looked at the

So I parted from Marion at an extremity of perturbation and regret, and went, as I had promised and arranged,

to Effie, who was waiting for me in apartments near Orpington. I remember her upon the station platform, a

bright, flitting figure looking along the train for me, and our walk over the fields in the twilight. I had

expected an immense sense of relief where at last the stresses of separation were over, but now I found I was

beyond measure wretched and perplexed, full of the profoundest persuasion of irreparable error. The dusk

and somber Marion were so alike, her sorrow seemed to be all about me. I had to hold myself to my own

plans, to remember that I must keep faith with Effie, with Effie who had made no terms, exacted no

We went across the evening fields in silence, towards a sky of deepening gold and purple, and Effie was close

Certainly she knew I grieved for Marion, that ours was now no joyful reunion. But she showed no resentment

and no jealousy. Extraordinarily, she did not compete against Marion. Never once in all our time together did

She set herself presently to dispel the shadow that brooded over me with the same instinctive skill that some

women will show with the trouble of a child. She made herself my glad and pretty slave and handmaid; she

forced me at last to rejoice in her. Yet at the back of it all Marion remained, stupid and tearful and infinitely

distressful, so that I was almost intolerably unhappy for herfor her and the dead body of my married love.

It is all, as I tell it now, unaccountable to me. I go back into these remote parts, these rarely visited uplands

and lonely tares of memory, and it seems to me still a strange country. I had thought I might be going to some

sensuous paradise with Effie, but desire which fills the universe before its satisfaction, vanishes utterly like

the going of daylightwith achievement. All the facts and forms of life remain darkling and cold. It was an

upland of melancholy questionings, a region from which I saw all the world at new angles and in new

I had come into a condition of vast perplexities. For the first time in my life, at least so it seems to me now in

I was going to and fro about TonoBungaythe business I had taken up to secure Marion and which held

me now in spite of our intimate separationand snatching odd weekends and nights for Orpington, and all

the while I struggled with these obstinate interrogations. I used to fall into musing in the trains, I became

even a little inaccurate and forgetful about business things. I have the clearest memory of myself sitting

thoughtful in the evening sunlight on a grassy hillside that looked toward Seven Oaks and commanded a wide

sweep of country, and that I was thinking out my destiny. I could almost write my thought down now, I

believe, as they came to me that afternoon. Effie, restless little cockney that she was, rustled and struggled in

a hedgerow below, gathering flowers, discovering flowers she had never seen before. I had. I remember, a

letter from Marion in my pocket. I had even made some tentatives for return, for a reconciliation; Heaven

knows now how I had put it! but her cold, illwritten letter repelled me. I perceived I could never face that

old inconclusive dullness of life again, that stagnant disappointment. That, anyhow, wasn't possible. But what

I wondered if all the world was even as I, urged to this by one motive and to that by another, creatures of

chance and impulse and unmeaning traditions. Had I indeed to abide by what I had said and done and

chosen? Was there nothing for me in honour but to provide for Effie, go back penitent to Marion and keep to

my trade in rubbishor find some fresh oneand so work out the residue of my days? I didn't accept that

for a moment. But what else was I to do? I wondered if my case was the case of many men, whether in

former ages, too, men had been so guideless, so uncharted, so haphazard in their journey into life. In the

Middle Ages, in the old Catholic days, one went to a priest, and he said with all the finality of natural law,

this you are and this you must do. I wondered whether even in the Middle Ages I should have accepted that

I remember too very distinctly how Effie came and sat beside me on a little box: that was before the casement

"Oh!" I cried, recalled again; "I don't know. I don't understand these things. Life is a thing that hurts, my

dear! It hurts without logic or reason. I've blundered! I didn't understand. Anyhowthere is no need to go

Yes, I had a very bad timeI still recall. I suffered, I suppose, from a sort of ennui of the imagination. I

found myself without an object to hold my will together. I sought. I read restlessly and discursively. I tried

Ewart and got no help from him. As I regard it all now in this retrospect, it seems to me as if in those days of

disgust and abandoned aims I discovered myself for the first time. Before that I had seen only the world and

things in it, had sought them selfforgetful of all but my impulse. Now I found myself GROUPED with a

system of appetites and satisfactions, with much work to doand no desire, it seemed, left in me.

There were moments when I thought of suicide. At times my life appeared before me in bleak, relentless

light, a series of ignorances, crude blunderings, degradation and cruelty. I had what the old theologians call a

"conviction of sin." I sought salvationnot perhaps in the formula a Methodist preacher would recognise but

Men find their salvation nowadays in many ways. Names and forms don't, I think, matter very much; the real

need is something that we can hold and that holds one. I have known a man find that determining factor in a

dryplate factory, and another in writing a history of the Manor. So long as it holds one, it does not matter.

Many men and women nowadays take up some concrete aspect of Socialism or social reform. But Socialism

for me has always been a little bit too human, too set about with personalities and foolishness. It isn't my line.

I don't like things so human. I don't think I'm blind to the fun, the surprises, the jolly little coarsenesses and

insufficiency of life, to the "humour of it," as people say, and to adventure, but that isn't the root of the matter

with me. There's no humour in my blood. I'm in earnest in warp and woof. I stumble and flounder, but I know

that over all these merry immediate things, there are other things that are great and serene, very high,

beautiful thingsthe reality. I haven't got it, but it's there nevertheless. I'm a spiritual guttersnipe in love with

unimaginable goddesses. I've never seen the goddesses nor ever shallbut it takes all the fun out of the

But I'm talking of things I can't expect the reader to understand, because I don't half understand them myself.

There is something links things for me, a sunset or so, a mood or so, the high air, something there was in

Marion's form and colour, something I find and lose in Mantegna's pictures, something in the lines of these

I can't explain myself, I perceive. Perhaps it all comes to this, that I am a hard and morally limited cad with a

mind beyond my merits. Naturally I resist that as a complete solution. Anyhow, I had a sense of inexorable

need, of distress and insufficiency that was unendurable, and for a time this aeronautical engineering allayed

In the end of this particular crisis of which I tell so badly, I idealised Science. I decided that in power and

knowledge lay the salvation of my life, the secret that would fill my need; that to these things I would give

I emerged at last like a man who has been diving in darkness, clutching at a new resolve for which he had

I came into the inner office suddenly one dayit must have been just before the time of Marion's suit for

"She's been a stupid girl, George," he said; "I partly understand. But you're quit of her now, practically, and

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

"Oh, YOU know. I want some STUFF, man. I want something to hold on to. I shall go amok if I don't get it.

I'm a different sort of beast from you. You float in all this bunkum. _I_ feel like a man floundering in a

universe of soapsuds, up and downs, east and west. I can't stand it. I must get my foot on something solid

"I mean it," I said. "I've been thinking it over. I've made up my mind. It's no good arguing. I shall go in for

workreal work. No! this isn't work; it's only laborious cheating. But I've got an idea! It's an old ideaI

thought of years ago, but it came back to me. Look here! Why should I fence about with you? I believe the

I stuck to that, and it helped me through the worst time in my life. My uncle, after some halfhearted

resistance and a talk with my aunt, behaved like the father of a spoilt son. He fixed up an arrangement that

gave me capital to play with, released me from too constant a solicitude for the newer business

developmentsthis was in what I may call the later Moggs period of our enterprisesand I went to work at

But I will tell of my soaring and flying machines in the proper place. I've been leaving the story of my uncle

altogether too long. I wanted merely to tell how it was I took to this work. I took to these experiments after I

had sought something that Marion in some indefinable way had seemed to promise. I toiled and forgot myself

for a time, and did many things. Science too has been something of an irresponsive mistress since, though

I've served her better than I served Marion. But at the time Science, with her order, her inhuman distance, yet

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

I am trying to tell of all the things that happened to me. It's hard enough simply to get it put down in the

remotest degree right. But this is a novel, not a treatise. Don't imagine that I am coming presently to any sort

of solution of my difficulties. Here among my drawings and hammerings NOW, I still question unanswering

problems. All my life has been at bottom, SEEKING, disbelieving always, dissatisfied always with the thing

seen and the thing believed, seeking something in toil, in force, in danger, something whose name and nature

I do not clearly understand, something beautiful, worshipful, enduring, mine profoundly and fundamentally,

and the utter redemption of myself; I don't knowall I can tell is that it is something I have ever failed to

But before I finish this chapter and book altogether and go on with the great adventure of my uncle's career. I

may perhaps tell what else remains to tell of Marion and Effie, and then for a time set my private life behind

For a time Marion and I corresponded with some regularity, writing friendly but rather uninforming letters

She left the house at Ealing and went into the country with her aunt and parents, taking a small farm near

Lewes in Sussex. She put up glass, she put in heat for her father, happy man! and spoke of figs and peaches.

The thing seemed to promise well throughout a spring and summer, but the Sussex winter after London was

too much for the Ramboats. They got very muddy and dull; Mr. Ramboat killed a cow by improper feeding,

and that disheartened them all. A twelvemonth saw the enterprise in difficulties. I had to help her out of this,

and then they returned to London and she went into partnership with Smithie at Streatham, and ran a business

that was intimated on the firm's stationery as "Robes." The parents and aunt were stowed away in a cottage

somewhere. After that the letters became infrequent. But in one I remember a postscript that had a little stab

Nearly eight years slipped by. I grew up. I grew in experience, in capacity, until I was fully a man, but with

many new interests, living on a larger scale in a wider world than I could have dreamt of in my Marion days.

Her letters become rare and insignificant. At last came a gap of silence that made me curious. For eighteen

months or more I had nothing from Marion save her quarterly receipts through the bank. Then I damned at

She astonished me tremendously by telling me she had married again"a Mr. Wachorn, a leading agent in

the paperpattern trade." But she still wrote on the Ponderevo and Smith (Robes) notepaper, from the

And that, except for a little difference of opinion about the continuance of alimony which gave me some

passages of anger, and the use of my name by the firm, which also annoyed me, is the end of Marion's history

for me, and she vanishes out of this story. I do not know where she is or what she is doing. I do not know

whether she is alive or dead. It seems to me utterly grotesque that two people who have stood so close to one

Effie, too, I have parted from, though I still see her at times. Between us there was never any intention of

marriage nor intimacy of soul. She had a sudden, fierce, hotblooded passion for me and I for her, but I was

not her first lover nor her last. She was in another world from Marion. She had a queer, delightful nature; I've

no memory of ever seeing her sullen or malicious. She wasindeed she was magnificentlyeupeptic. That,

I think, was the central secret of her agreeableness, and, moreover, that she was infinitely kindhearted. I

helped her at last into an opening she coveted, and she amazed me by a sudden display of business capacity.

She has now a typewriting bureau in Riffle's Inn, and she runs it with a brisk vigour and considerable success,

albeit a certain plumpness has overtaken her. And she still loves her kind. She married a year or so ago a boy

half her agea wretch of a poet, a wretched poet, and given to drugs, a thing with lank fair hair always

getting into his blue eyes, and limp legs. She did it, she said, because he needed nursing....

But enough of this disaster of my marriage and of my early love affairs; I have told all that is needed for my

picture to explain how I came to take up aeroplane experiments and engineering science; let me get back to

my essential story, to TonoBungay and my uncle's promotions and to the vision of the world these things

But now that I resume the main line of my story it may be well to describe the personal appearance of my

uncle as I remember him during those magnificent years that followed his passage from trade to finance. The

little man plumped up very considerably during the creation of the TonoBungay property, but with the

increasing excitements that followed that first flotation came dyspepsia and a certain flabbiness and falling

away. His abdomenif the reader will pardon my taking his features in the order of their valuehad at first

a nice full roundness, but afterwards it lost tone without, however, losing size. He always went as though he

was proud of it and would make as much of it as possible. To the last his movements remained quick and

sudden, his short firm legs, as he walked, seemed to twinkle rather than display the scissorsstride of

common humanity, and he never seemed to have knees, but instead, a dispersed flexibility of limb.

There was, I seem to remember, a secular intensification of his features; his nose developed character,

became aggressive, stuck out at the world more and more; the obliquity of his mouth, I think, increased. From

the face that returns to my memory projects a long cigar that is sometimes cocked jauntily up from the higher

corner, that sometimes droops from the lower;it was as eloquent as a dog's tail, and he removed it only for

the more emphatic modes of speech. He assumed a broad black ribbon for his glasses, and wore them more

and more askew as time went on. His hair seemed to stiffen with success, but towards the climax it thinned

greatly over the crown, and he brushed it hard back over his ears where, however, it stuck out fiercely. It

He adopted an urban style of dressing with the onset of TonoBungay and rarely abandoned it. He preferred

silk hats with ample rich brims, often a trifle large for him by modern ideas, and he wore them at various

angles to his axis; his taste in trouserings was towards fairly emphatic stripes and his trouser cut was neat; he

liked his frockcoat long and full, although that seemed to shorten him. He displayed a number of valuable

rings, and I remember one upon his left little finger with a large red stone bearing Gnostic symbols. "Clever

chaps, those Gnostics, George," he told me. "Means a lot. Lucky!" He never had any but a black mohair

watchchair. In the country he affected grey and a large grey cloth tophat, except when motoring; then he

would have a brown deerstalker cap and a fur suit of esquimaux cut with a sort of bootend to the trousers.

Of an evening he would wear white waistcoats and plain gold studs. He hated diamonds. "Flashy," he said

they were. "Might as well wearan income taxreceipt. All very well for Park Lane. Unsold stock. Not my

So much for his visible presence. For a time it was very familiar to the world, for at the crest of the boom he

allowed quite a number of photographs and at least one pencil sketch to be published in the sixpenny papers.

His voice declined during those years from his early tenor to a flat rich quality of sound that my knowledge

of music is inadequate to describe. His Zzzing inrush of air became less frequent as he ripened, but returned

in moments of excitement. Throughout his career, in spite of his increasing and at last astounding opulence,

his more intimate habits remained as simple as they had been at Wimblehurst. He would never avail himself

of the services of a valet; at the very climax of his greatness his trousers were folded by a housemaid and his

shoulders brushed as he left his house or hotel. He became wary about breakfast as life advanced, and at one

time talked much of Dr. Haig and uric acid. But for other meals he remained reasonably omnivorous. He was

something of a gastronome, and would eat anything he particularly liked in an audible manner, and perspire

upon his forehead. He was a studiously moderate drinkerexcept when the spirit of some public banquet or

some great occasion caught him and bore him beyond his warinessthere he would, as it were, drink

inadvertently and become flushed and talkativeabout everything but his business projects.

To make the portrait complete one wants to convey an effect of sudden, quick bursts of movement like the

jumps of a Chinesecracker to indicate that his pose whatever it is, has been preceded and will be followed

by a rush. If I were painting him, I should certainly give him for a background that distressed, uneasy sky that

was popular in the eighteenth century, and at a convenient distance a throbbing motorcar, very big and

Such was the figure that created and directed the great property of TonoBungay, and from the successful

reconstruction of that company passed on to a slow crescendo of magnificent creations and promotions until

the whole world of investors marveled. I have already I think, mentioned how, long before we offered Tono

Bungay to the public, we took over the English agency of certain American specialties. To this was presently

added our exploitation of Moggs' Domestic Soap, and so he took up the Domestic Convenience Campaign

that, coupled with his equatorial rotundity and a certain resolute convexity in his bearings won my uncle his

It illustrates the romantic element in modern commerce that my uncle met young Moggs at a city dinnerI

think it was the Bottlemakers' Companywhen both were some way advanced beyond the initial sobriety

of the occasion. This was the grandson of the original Moggs, and a very typical instance of an educated,

cultivated, degenerate plutocrat. His people had taken him about in his youth as the Ruskins took their John

and fostered a passion for history in him, and the actual management of the Moggs' industry had devolved

Mr. Moggs, being of a studious and refined disposition, had just decidedafter a careful search for a

congenial subject in which he would not be constant]y reminded of soapto devote himself to the History of

the Thebaid, when this cousin died suddenly and precipitated responsibilities upon him. In the frankness of

conviviality, Moggs bewailed the uncongenial task thus thrust into his hands, and my uncle offered to lighten

his burden by a partnership then and there. They even got to termsextremely muzzy terms, but terms

Each gentleman wrote the name and address of the other on his cuff, and they separated in a mood of

brotherly carelessness, and next morning neither seems to have thought to rescue his shirt from the wash until

it was too late. My uncle made a painful struggleit was one of my business morningsto recall name and

"He was an aquariumfaced, long, blond sort of chap, George, with glasses and a genteel accent," he said.

"You know how they look at you. His stuff was soap, I'm pretty nearly certain. And he had a nameAnd the

thing was the straightest BitofAllright you ever. I was clear enough to spot that..."

We went out at last with knitted brows, and wandered up into Finsbury seeking a good, wellstocked looking

grocer. We called first on a chemist for a pickmeup for my uncle, and then we found the shop we needed.

"I want," said my uncle, "half a pound of every sort of soap you got. Yes, I want to take them now. Wait a

"Right," said my uncle. "You needn't guess again. Come along, George, let's go to a telephone and get on to

Moggs. Ohthe order? Certainly. I confirm it. Send it allsend it all to the Bishop of London; he'll have

some good use for it(Firstrate man, George, he ischarities and all that)and put it down to me, here's

Then we went on to Moggs and found him in a camelhair dressingjacket in a luxurious bed, drinking

Young Moggs enlarged my mind considerably; he was a sort of thing I hadn't met before; he seemed quite

clean and wellinformed and he assured me to never read newspapers nor used soap in any form at all,

"I draw the line at railway stations," said Moggs, "southcoast cliffs, theatre programmes, books by me and

"So long as you don't annoy me," said Moggs, lighting a cigarette, "you can make me as rich as you like."

We certainly made him no poorer. His was the first firm that was advertised by a circumstantial history; we

even got to illustrated magazine articles telling of the quaint past of Moggs. We concocted Moggsiana.

Trusting to our partner's preoccupation with the uncommercial aspects of life, we gave graceful historyof

Moggs the First, Moggs the Second, Moggs the Third, and Moggs the Fourth. You must, unless you are very

young, remember some of them and our admirable block of a Georgian shop window. My uncle brought early

nineteenthcentury memoirs, soaked himself in the style, and devised stories about old Moggs the First and

the Duke of Wellington, George the Third and the soap dealer ("almost certainly old Moggs"). Very soon we

had added to the original Moggs' Primrose several varieties of scented and superfatted, a "special nurseries

used in the household of the Duke of Kent and for the old Queen in Infancy," a plate powder, "the Paragon,"

and a knife powder. We roped in a good little secondrate blacklead firm, and carried their origins back into

the mists of antiquity. It was my uncle's own unaided idea that we should associate that commodity with the

Black Prince. He became industriously curious about the past of blacklead. I remember his buttonholing

"I say, is there any blacklead in Pepys? You know blackleadfor grates! OR DOES HE PASS IT

He became in those days the terror of eminent historians. "Don't want your drum and trumpet historyno

fear," he used to say. "Don't want to know who was who's mistress, and why soandso devastated such a

province; that's bound to be all lies and upsydown anyhow. Not my affair. Nobody's affair now. Chaps who

did it didn't clearly know.... What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for

Housemaid's Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting, and was the Black Princeyou know

the Black Princewas he enameled or painted, or what? I think myself, blackleadedvery likelylike

So it came about that in designing and writing those Moggs' Soap Advertisements, that wrought a revolution

in that department of literature, my uncle was brought to realise not only the lost history, but also the

enormous field for invention and enterprise that lurked among the little articles, the dustpans and mincers, the

mousetraps and carpetsweepers that fringe the shops of the oilman and domestic ironmonger. He was

recalled to one of the dreams of his youth, to his conception of the Ponderevo Patent Flat that had been in his

mind so early as the days before I went to serve him at Wimblehurst. "The Home, George," he said, "wants

straightening up. Silly muddle! Things that get in the way. Got to organise it."

For a time he displayed something like the zeal of a genuine social reformer in relation to these matters.

"We've got to bring the Home Up to Date? That's my idee, George. We got to make a civilised domestic

machine out of these relics of barbarism. I'm going to hunt up inventors, make a corner in d'mestic ideas.

Everything. Balls of string that won't dissolve into a tangle, and gum that won't dry into horn. See? Then after

conveniencesbeauty. Beauty, George! All these few things ought to be made fit to look at; it's your aunt's

idea, that. Beautiful jampots! Get one of those new art chaps to design all the things they make ugly now.

Patent carpetsweepers by these greenwood chaps, housemaid's boxes it'll be a pleasure to fall overrich

coloured houseflannels. Zzzz. Pails, f'rinstance. Hang 'em up on the walls like warmingpans. All the

polishes and things in such tinsyou'll want to cuddle 'em, George! See the notion? 'Sted of all the silly ugly

We had some magnificent visions; they so affected me that when I passed ironmongers and oilshops they

seemed to me as full of promise as trees in late winter, flushed with the effort to burst into leaf and flower....

And really we did do much towards that very brightness these shops display. They were dingy things in the

Well, I don't intend to write down here the tortuous financial history of Moggs' Limited, which was our first

development of Moggs and Sons; nor will I tell very much of how from that we spread ourselves with a

larger and larger conception throughout the chandlery and minor ironmongery, how we became agents for

this little commodity, partners in that, got a tentacle round the neck of a specialised manufacturer or so,

secured a pull upon this or that supply of raw material, and so prepared the way for our second flotation,

Domestic Utilities; "Do it," they reordered it in the city. And then came the reconstruction of TonoBungay,

That sort of development is not to he told in detail in a novel. I have, indeed, told much of it elsewhere. It is

to be found set out at length, painfully at length, in my uncle's examination and mine in the bankruptcy

proceedings, and in my own various statements after his death. Some people know everything in that story,

some know it all too well, most do not want the details. it is the story of a man of imagination among figures,

and unless you are prepared to collate columns of pounds, shillings and pence, compare dates and check

additions, you will find it very unmeaning and perplexing. And after all, you wouldn't find the early figures

so much wrong as STRAINED. In the matter of Moggs and Do Ut, as in the first TonoBungay promotion

and in its reconstruction, we left the court by city standards without a stain on our characters. The great

amalgamation of Household Services was my uncle's first really bigscale enterprise and his first display of

bolder methods: for this we bought back Do Ut, Moggs (going strong with a seven per cent. dividend) and

acquired Skinnerton's polishes, the Riffleshaw properties and the Runcorn's mincer and coffeemill business.

To that Amalgamation I was really not a party; I left it to my uncle because I was then beginning to get keen

upon the soaring experiments I had taken on from the results then to hand of Lilienthal, Pilcher and the

Wright brothers. I was developing a glider into a flyer. I meant to apply power to this glider as soon as I

could work out one or two residual problems affecting the longitudinal stability. I knew that I had a

sufficiently light motor in my own modification of Bridger's light turbine, but I knew too that until I had

cured my aeroplane of a tendency demanding constant alertness from me, a tendency to jerk up its nose at

unexpected moments and slide back upon me, the application of an engine would be little short of suicide.

But that I will tell about later. The point I was coming to was that I did not realise until after the crash how

recklessly my uncle had kept his promise of paying a dividend of over eight per cent. on the ordinary shares

I drifted out of business affairs into my research much more than either I or my uncle had contemplated.

Finance was much less to my taste than the organisation of the TonoBungay factory. In the new field of

enterprise there was a great deal of bluffing and gambling, of taking chances and concealing material

factsand these are hateful things to the scientific type of mind. It wasn't fear I felt so much as an uneasy

inaccuracy. I didn't realise dangers, I simply disliked the sloppy, relaxing quality of this new sort of work. I

was at last constantly making excuses not to come up to him in London. The latter part of his business career

recedes therefore beyond the circle of any particular life. I lived more or less with him; I talked, I advised, I

helped him at times to fight his Sunday crowd at Crest Hill, but I did not follow nor guide him. From the Do

Ut time onward he rushed up the financial world like a bubble in water and left me like some busy

Anyhow, he was an immense success. The public was, I think, particularly attracted by the homely familiarity

of his field of workyou never lost sight of your investment they felt, with the name on the houseflannel

and shavingstropand its allegiance was secured by the Egyptian solidity of his apparent results.

TonoBungay, after its reconstruction, paid thirteen, Moggs seven, Domestic Utilities had been a

safelooking nine; here was Household Services with eight; on such a showing he had merely to buy and sell

Roeburn's Antiseptic fluid, Razor soaks and Bath crystals in three weeks to clear twenty thousand pounds.

I do think that as a matter of fact Roeburn's was good value at the price at which he gave it to the public, at

least until it was strained by illconserved advertisement. It was a period of expansion and confidence; much

money was seeking investment and "Industrials" were the fashion. Prices were rising all round. There

remained little more for my uncle to do therefore, in his climb to the high unstable crest of Financial

Greatness but, as he said, to "grasp the cosmic oyster, George, while it gaped," which, being translated, meant

for him to buy respectable businesses confidently and courageously at the vendor's estimate, add thirty or

forty thousand to the price and sell them again. His sole difficulty indeed was the tactful management of the

load of shares that each of these transactions left upon his hands. But I thought so little of these later things

that I never fully appreciated the peculiar inconveniences of that until it was too late to help him.

When I think of my uncle near the days of his Great Boom and in connection with the actualities of his

enterprises, I think of him as I used to see him in the suite of rooms he occupied in the Hardingham Hotel,

seated at a great old oak writingtable, smoking, drinking, and incoherently busy; that was his typical

financial aspectour evenings, our mornings, our holidays, our motorcar expeditions, Lady Grove and

These rooms in the Hardingham were a string of apartments along one handsome thickcarpeted corridor. All

the doors upon the corridor were locked except the first; and my uncle's bedroom, breakfastroom and

private sanctum were the least accessible and served by an entrance from the adjacent passage, which he also

used at times as a means of escape from importunate callers. The most eternal room was a general

waitingroom and very businesslike in quality; it had one or two uneasy sofas, a number of chairs, a green

baize table, and a collection of the very best Moggs and Tone posters: and the plush carpets normal to the

Hardingham had been replaced by a greygreen cork linoleum; Here I would always find a remarkable

miscellany of people presided over by a peculiarly faithful and ferocious looking commissioner, Ropper, who

guarded the door that led a step nearer my uncle. Usually there would be a parson or so, and one or two

widows; hairy, eyeglassy, middleaged gentlemen, some of them looking singularly like Edward Ponderevos

who hadn't come off, a variety of young and youngish men more or less attractively dressed, some with

papers protruding from their pockets, others with their papers decently concealed. And wonderful, incidental,

All these persons maintained a practically hopeless siegesometimes for weeks together; they had better

have stayed at home. Next came a room full of people who had some sort of appointment, and here one

would find smartlooking people, brilliantly dressed, nervous women hiding behind magazines,

nonconformist divines, clergy in gaiters, real business men, these latter for the most part gentlemen in

admirable morning dress who stood up and scrutinised my uncle's taste in water colours manfully and

sometimes by the hour together. Young men again were here of various social origins, young Americans,

treasonable clerks from other concerns, university young men, keenlooking, most of them, resolute,

reserved, but on a sort of hair trigger, ready at any moment to be most voluble, most persuasive.

This room had a window, too, looking out into the hotel courtyard with its fernset fountains and mosaic

pavement, and the young men would stand against this and sometimes even mutter. One day I heard one

repeating in all urgent whisper as I passed "But you don't quite see, Mr. Ponderevo, the full advantages, the

Then came a room with a couple of secretariesno typewriters, because my uncle hated the clatterand a

casual person or two sitting about, projectors whose projects were being entertained. Here and in a further

room nearer the private apartments, my uncle's correspondence underwent an exhaustive process of pruning

and digestion before it reached him. Then the two little rooms in which my uncle talked; my magic uncle who

had got the investing publicto whom all things were possible. As one came in we would find him squatting

with his cigar up and an expression of dubious beatitude upon his face, while some one urged him to grow

"That'ju, George?" he used to say. "Come in. Here's a thing. Tell himMisterover again. Have a drink,

I was always ready to listen. All sorts of financial marvels came out of the Hardingham, more particularly

during my uncle's last great flurry, but they were nothing to the projects that passed in. It was the little brown

and gold room he sat in usually. He had had it redecorated by Bordingly and half a dozen Sussex pictures by

Webster hung about it. Latterly he wore a velveteen jacket of a goldenbrown colour in this apartment that I

think overemphasised its esthetic intention, and he also added some gross Chinese bronzes.

He was, on the whole, a very happy man throughout all that wildly enterprising time. He made and, as I shall

tell in its place, spent great sums of money. He was constantly in violent motion, constantly stimulated

mentally and physically and rarely tired. About him was an atmosphere of immense deference much of his

waking life was triumphal and all his dreams. I doubt if he had any dissatisfaction with himself at all until the

crash bore him down. Things must have gone very rapidly with him.... I think he must have been very happy.

As I sit here writing about all these things, jerking down notes and throwing them aside in my attempt to give

some literary form to the tale of our promotions, the marvel of it all comes to me as if it came for the first

time the supreme unreason of it. At the climax of his Boom, my uncle at the most sparing estimate must have

possessed in substance and credit about two million pounds'worth of property to set off against his vague

colossal liabilities, and from first to last he must have had a controlling influence in the direction of nearly

This irrational muddle of a community in which we live gave him that, paid him at that rate for sitting in a

room and scheming and telling it lies. For he created nothing, he invented nothing, he economised nothing. I

cannot claim that a single one of the great businesses we organised added any real value to human life at all.

Several like TonoBungay were unmitigated frauds by any honest standard, the giving of nothing coated in

advertisements for money. And the things the Hardingham gave out, I repeat, were nothing to the things that

came in. I think of the long procession of people who sat down before us and propounded this and that. Now

it was a device for selling bread under a fancy name and so escaping the laws as to weightthis was

afterwards floated as the Decorticated HealthBread Company and bumped against the lawnow it was a

new scheme for still more strident advertisement, now it was a story of unsuspected deposits of minerals, now

a cheap and nasty substitute for this or that common necessity, now the treachery of a too wellinformed

employee, anxious to become our partner. It was all put to us tentatively, persuasively. Sometimes one had a

large pink blusterous person trying to carry us off our feet by his pseudoboyish frankness, now some

dyspeptically yellow whisperer, now some earnest, specially dressed youth with an eyeglass and a

buttonhole, now some homelyspeaking, shrewd Manchester man or some Scotchman eager to be very clear

Many came in couples or trios, often in tow of an explanatory solicitor. Some were white and earnest, some

flustered beyond measure at their opportunity. Some of them begged and prayed to be taken up. My uncle

chose what he wanted and left the rest. He became very autocratic to these applicants.

He felt he could make them, and they felt so too. He had but to say "No!" and they faded out of existence....

He had become a sort of vortex to which wealth flowed of its own accord. His possessions increased by

Behind his firstline things he found it necessary at last, and sanctioned by all the precincts, to set up three

general trading companies, the London and African Investment Company, the British Traders' Loan

Company, and Business Organisations Limited. This was in the culminating time when I had least to do with

affairs. I don't say that with any desire to exculpate myself; I admit I was a director of all three, and I will

confess I was willfully incurious in that capacity. Each of these companies ended its financial year solvent by

selling great holdings of shares to one or other of its sisters, and paying a dividend out of the proceeds. I sat at

the table and agreed. That was our method of equilibrium at the iridescent climax of the bubble.

You perceive now, however, the nature of the services for which this fantastic community have him

unmanageable wealth and power and real respect. It was all a monstrous payment for courageous fiction, a

gratuity in return for the one reality of human lifeillusion. We gave them a feeling of hope and profit; we

sent a tidal wave of water and confidence into their stranded affairs. "We mint Faith, George," said my uncle

one day. "That's what we do. And by Jove we got to keep minting! We been making human confidence ever

"Coining" would have been a better word than minting! And yet, you know, in a sense he was right.

Civilisation is possible only through confidence, so that we can bank our money and go unarmed about the

streets. The bank reserve or a policeman keeping order in a jostling multitude of people, are only slightly less

impudent bluffs than my uncle's prospectuses. They couldn't for a moment "make good" if the quarter of what

they guarantee was demanded of them. The whole of this modern mercantile investing civilisation is indeed

such stuff as dreams are made of. A mass of people swelters and toils, great railway systems grow, cities arise

to the skies and spread wide and far, mines are opened, factories hum, foundries roar, ships plough the seas,

countries are settled; about this busy striving world the rich owners go, controlling all, enjoying all, confident

and creating the confidence that draws us all together into a reluctant, nearly unconscious brotherhood. I

wonder and plan my engines. The flags flutter, the crowds cheer, the legislatures meet. Yet it seems to me

indeed at times that all this present commercial civilisation is no more than my poor uncle's career writ large,

a swelling, thinning bubble of assurances; that its arithmetic is just as unsound, its dividends as illadvised,

its ultimate aim as vague and forgotten; that it all drifts on perhaps to some tremendous parallel to his

Well, so it was we Boomed, and for four years and a half we lived a life of mingled substance and

moonshine. Until our particular unsoundness overtook us we went about in the most magnificent of

motorcars upon tangible high roads, made ourselves conspicuous and stately in splendid houses, ate

sumptuously and had a perpetual stream of notes and money trickling into our pockets; hundreds of

thousands of men and women respected us, saluted us and gave us toil and honour; I asked, and my

worksheets rose, my aeroplanes swooped out of nothingness to scare the downland pewits; my uncle waved

his hand and Lady Grove and all its associations of chivalry and ancient peace were his; waved again, and

architects were busy planning the great palace he never finished at Crest Hill and an army of folkmen

gathered to do his bidding, blue marble came from Canada, and timber from New Zealand; and beneath it all,

you know, there was nothing but fictitious values as evanescent as rainbow gold.

I pass the Hardingham ever and again and glance aside through the great archway at the fountain and the

ferns, and think of those receding days when I was so near the centre of our eddy of greed and enterprise. I

see again my uncle's face, white and intent, and hear him discourse, hear him make consciously Napoleonic

decisions, "grip" his nettles, put his "finger on the spot," "bluff," say "snap." He became particularly addicted

to the last idiom. Towards the end every conceivable act took the form of saying "snap!"

The odd fish that came to us! And among others came GordonNasmyth, that queer blend of romance and

illegality who was destined to drag me into the most irrelevant adventure in my life the Mordet Island affair;

and leave me, as they say, with blood upon my hands. It is remarkable how little it troubles my conscience

and how much it stirs my imagination, that particular memory of the life I took. The story of Mordet Island

has been told in a government report and told all wrong; there are still excellent reasons for leaving it wrong

in places, but the liveliest appeals of discretion forbid my leaving it out altogether.

I've still the vividest memory of GordonNasmyth's appearance in the inner sanctum, a lank, sunburnt person

in tweeds with a yellowbrown hatchet face and one faded blue eyethe other was a closed and sunken

lidand how he told us with a stiff affectation of ease his incredible story of this great heap of quap that lay

abandoned or undiscovered on the beach behind Mordet's Island among white dead mangroves and the black

"They call it quap, or quab, or quabb," said GordonNasmyth; "but our relations weren't friendly enough to

Nobody knows about it. I got down to the damned place in a canoe alone. The boys wouldn't come. I

"Look here," he said when he first came in, shutting the door rather carefully behind him as he spoke, "do you

two menyes or nowant to put up six thousandfora clear good chance of fifteen hundred per cent.

"We're always getting chances like that," said my uncle, cocking his cigar offensively, wiping his glasses and

"Don't you believe him," said I, getting up before he could reply. "You're different, and I know your books.

We're very glad you've come to us. Confound it, uncle! Its GordonNasmyth! Sit down. What is it?

"You're only fit for the grocery," said GordonNasmyth scornfully, sitting down and helping himself to one

of my uncle's cigars. "I'm sorry I came. But, still, now I'm here.... And first as to quap; quap, sir, is the most

radioactive stuff in the world. That's quap! It's a festering mass of earths and heavy metals, polonium,

radium, ythorium, thorium, carium, and new things, too. There's a stuff called Xkprovisionally. There they

are, mucked up together in a sort of rotting sand. What it is, how it got made, I don't know. It's like as if some

young creator had been playing about there. There it lies in two heaps, one small, one great, and the world for

miles about it is blasted and scorched and dead. You can have it for the getting. You've got to take itthat's

His blue eye smiled at me and scrutinised me. He smoked and was fragmentary for a time, fending off my

questions; then his story began to piece itself together. He conjured up a vision of this strange forgotten kink

in the world's littoral, of the long meandering channels that spread and divaricate and spend their burden of

mud and silt within the thunderbelt of Atlantic surf, of the dense tangled vegetation that creeps into the

shimmering water with root and sucker. He gave a sense of heat and a perpetual reek of vegetable decay, and

told how at last comes a break among these things, an arena fringed with bonewhite dead trees, a sight of

the hardblue sea line beyond the dazzling surf and a wide desolation of dirty shingle and mud, bleached and

scarred.... A little way off among charred dead weeds stands the abandoned station,abandoned because

every man who stayed two months at that station stayed to die, eaten up mysteriously like a leper with its

dismantled sheds and its decaying pier of wormrotten and oblique piles and planks, still insecurely possible.

And in the midst, two clumsy heaps shaped like the backs of hogs, one small, one great, sticking out under a

"There it is," said GordonNasmyth, "worth three pounds an ounce, if it's worth a penny; two great heaps of

it, rotten stuff and soft, ready to shovel and wheel, and you may get it by the ton!"

"God knows! ... There it isfor the taking! In a country where you mustn't trade. In a country where the

company waits for good kind men to find it riches and then take 'em away from 'em. There you have

We went into the particulars of that difficulty. "They wouldn't catch me, because I'd sink first. Give me a

I am inclined to think GordonNasmyth imagined we would give him a cheque for six thousand pounds on

the strength of his talk. It was very good talk, but we didn't do that. I stipulated for samples of his stuff for

I think, on the whole, he would rather I didn't examine samples. He made a motion pocketwards, that gave us

an invincible persuasion that he had a sample upon him, and that at the last instant he decided not to produce

There was evidently a curious strain of secretiveness in him. He didn't like to give us samples, and he

wouldn't indicate within three hundred miles the position of this Mordet Island of his. He had it clear in his

mind that he had a secret of immense value, and he had no idea at all of just how far he ought to go with

business people. And so presently, to gain time for these hesitations of his, he began to talk of other things.

He talked very well. He talked of the Dutch East Indies and of the Congo, of Portuguese East Africa and

Paraguay, of Malays and rich Chinese merchants, Dyaks and negroes and the spread of the Mahometan world

in Africa today. And all this time he was trying to judge if we were good enough to trust with his adventure.

Our cosy inner office became a little place, and all our business cold and lifeless exploits beside his glimpses

of strange minglings of men, of slayings unavenged and curious customs, of trade where no writs run, and the

We had neither of us gone abroad except for a few vulgar raids on Paris; our world was England, are the

places of origin of half the raw material of the goods we sold had seemed to us as remote as fairyland or the

forest of Arden. But GordonNasmyth made it so real and intimate for us that afternoonfor me, at any

And in the end he produced his sample, a little lump of muddy clay speckled with brownish grains, in a glass

bottle wrapped about with lead and flannelred flannel it was, I remembera hue which is, I know,

I took the stuff to Thorold, and Thorold had the exquisite agony of discovering two new elements in what

was then a confidential analysis. He has christened them and published since, but at the time

GordonNasmyth wouldn't hear for a moment of our publication of any facts at all; indeed, he flew into a

violent passion and abused me mercilessly even for showing the stuff to Thorold. "I thought you were going

to analyse it yourself," he said with the touching persuasion of the layman that a scientific man knows and

I made some commercial inquiries, and there seemed even then much truth in GordonNasmyth's estimate of

the value of the stuff. It was before the days of Capern's discovery of the value of canadium and his use of it

in the Capern filament, but the cerium and thorium alone were worth the money he extracted for the

gasmantles then in vogue. There were, however, doubts. Indeed, there were numerous doubts. What were

the limits of the gasmantle trade? How much thorium, not to speak of cerium, could they take at a

maximum. Suppose that quantity was high enough to justify our shipload, came doubts in another quarter.

Were the heaps up to sample? Were they as big as he said? Was GordonNasmythimaginative? And if

these values held, could we after all get the stuff? It wasn't ours. It was on forbidden ground. You see, there

We went some way, nevertheless, in the discussion of his project, though I think we tried his patience. Then

suddenly he vanished from London, and I saw no more of him for a year and a half.

My uncle said that was what he had expected, and when at last GordonNasmyth reappeared and mentioned

in an incidental way that he had been to Paraguay on private (and we guessed passionate) affairs, the business

of the "quap" expedition had to be begun again at the beginning. My uncle was disposed to be altogether

sceptical, but I wasn't so decided. I think I was drawn by its picturesque aspects. But we neither of us dreamt

Nasmyth's story had laid hold of my imagination like one small, intense picture of tropical sunshine hung on

a wall of grey business affairs. I kept it going during GordonNasmyth's intermittent appearances in England.

Every now and then he and I would meet and reinforce its effect. We would lunch in London, or he would

cone to see my gliders at Crest Hill, and make new projects for getting at those heaps again now with me,

At times they became a sort of fairystory with us, an imaginative exercise. And there came Capern's

discovery of what he called the ideal filament and with it an altogether less problematical quality about the

business side of quap. For the ideal filament needed five per cent. of canadium, and canadium was known to

the world only as a newly separated constituent of a variety of the rare mineral rutile. But to Thorold it was

better known as an element in a mysterious sample brought to him by me, and to me it was known as one of

the elements in quap. I told my uncle, and we jumped on to the process at once. We found that

GordonNasmyth, still unaware of the altered value of the stuff, and still thinking of the experimental prices

of radium and the rarity value of cerium, had got hold of a cousin named Pollack, made some extraordinary

transaction about his life insurance policy, and was buying a brig. We put in, put down three thousand

pounds, and forthwith the life insurance transaction and the Pollack side of this finance vanished into thin air,

leaving Pollack, I regret to say, in the brig and in the secretexcept so far as canadium and the filament

wentas residuum. We discussed earnestly whether we should charter a steamer or go on with the brig, but

we decided on the brig as a less conspicuous instrument for an enterprise that was after all, to put it plainly,

But that was one of our last enterprises before our great crisis, and I will tell of it in its place.

So it was quap came into our affairs, came in as a fairytale and became real. More and more real it grew

until at last it was real, until at last I saw with my eyes the heaps my imagination had seen for so long, and

felt between my fingers again that halfgritty, half soft texture of quap, like sanded moistsugar mixed with

All sorts of things came to the Hardingham and offered themselves to my uncle. GordonNasmyth stands but

only because he played a part at last in the crisis of our fortunes. So much came to us that it seemed to me at

times as though the whole world of human affairs was ready to prostitute itself to our real and imaginary

millions. As I look back, I am still dazzled and incredulous to think of the quality of our opportunities.

We did the most extraordinary things; things that it seems absurd to me to leave to any casual man of wealth

and enterprise who cares to do them. I had some amazing perceptions of just how modern thought and the

supply of fact to the general mind may be controlled by money. Among other things that my uncle offered

for, he tried very hard to buy the British Medical Journal and the Lancet, and run them on what he called

modern lines, and when they resisted him he talked very vigorously for a time of organising a rival enterprise.

That was a very magnificent idea indeed in its way; it would have given a tremendous advantage in the

handling of innumerable specialties and indeed I scarcely know how far it would not have put the medical

profession in our grip. It still amazes meI shall die amazedthat such a thing can be possible in the

modern state. If my uncle failed to bring the thing off, some one else may succeed. But I doubt, even if he

had got both these weeklies, whether his peculiar style would have suited them. The change of purpose would

He certainly did not keep up the dignity of the Sacred Grove, an important critical organ which he acquired

one dayby saying "snap"for eight hundred pounds. He got it "lock, stock and barrel"under one or

other of which three aspects the editor was included. Even at that price it didn't pay. If you are a literary

person you will remember the bright new cover he gave that representative organ of British intellectual

culture, and how his sound business instincts jarred with the exalted pretensions of a vanishing age. One old

A Hitherto Unpublished Letter from Walter Pater. Charlotte Bronte's Maternal Great Aunt. A New Catholic

History of England. The Genius of Shakespeare. Correspondence:The Mendelian Hypothesis; The Split

Individual; The Dignity of Letters. Folklore Gossip. The Stage; the Paradox of Acting. Travel Biography,

I suppose it is some lingering traces of the Bladesover tradition to me that makes this combination of letters

and pills seem so incongruous, just as I suppose it is a lingering trace of Plutarch and my ineradicable boyish

imagination that at bottom our State should be wise, sane and dignified, that makes me think a country which

leaves its medical and literary criticism, or indeed any such vitally important criticism, entirely to private

enterprise and open to the advances of any purchaser must be in a frankly hopeless condition. These are ideal

As a matter of fact, nothing would be more entirely natural and representative of the relations of learning,

thought and the economic situation in the world at the present time than this cover of the Sacred Grovethe

quiet conservatism of the one element embedded in the aggressive brilliance of the other; the contrasted notes

There comes back, too, among these Hardingham memories, an impression of a drizzling November day, and

It was like looking down a well into some momentarily revealed nether world. Some thousands of needy

ineffectual men had been raked together to trail their spiritless misery through the West Eire with an appeal

that was also in its way a weak and insubstantial threat: "It is Work we need, not Charity."

There they were, halfphantom through the fog, a silent, footdragging, interminable, grey procession. They

carried wet, dirty banners, they rattled boxes for pence; these men who had not said "snap" in the right place,

the men who had "snapped" too eagerly, the men who had never said "snap," the men who had never had a

chance of saying "snap." A shambling, shameful stream they made, oozing along the street, the gutter waste

of competitive civilisation. And we stood high out of it all, as high as if we looked godlike from another

world, standing in a room beautifully lit and furnished, skillfully warmed, filled with costly things.

But my uncle's thoughts ran in a different channel, and he made that vision the test of a spirited but

So far my history of my aunt and uncle has dealt chiefly with his industrial and financial exploits. But side by

side with that history of inflation from the infinitesimal to the immense is another development, the change

year by year from the shabby impecuniosity of the Camden Town lodging to the lavish munificence of the

Crest Hill marble staircase and my aunt's golden bed, the bed that was facsimiled from Fontainebleau. And

the odd thing is that as I come to this nearer part of my story I find it much more difficult to tell than the clear

little perspective memories of the earlier days. Impressions crowd upon one another and overlap one another;

I was presently to fall in love again, to be seized by a passion to which I still faintly respond, a passion that

still clouds my mind. I came and went between Ealing and my aunt and uncle, and presently between Effie

and clubland, and then between business and a life of research that became far more continuous, infinitely

more consecutive and memorable than any of these other sets of experiences. I didn't witness a regular social

progress therefore; my aunt and uncle went up in the world, so far as I was concerned, as if they were

As I recall this side of our life, the figure of my roundeyes, buttonnosed, pinkandwhite Aunt Susan

tends always to the central position. We drove the car and sustained the car, she sat in it with a magnificent

variety of headgear poised upon her delicate neck, and always with that faint ghost of a lisp no misspelling

I've already sketched the little home behind the Wimblehurst chemist's shop, the lodging near the Cobden

statue, and the apartments in Gower Street. Thence my aunt and uncle went into a flat in Redgauntlet

Mansions. There they lived when I married. It was a compact flat, with very little for a woman to do in it In

those days my aunt, I think, used to find the time heavy upon her hands, and so she took to books and

reading, and after a time even to going to lectures in the afternoon. I began to find unexpected books upon her

table: sociological books, travels, Shaw's plays. "Hullo!" I said, at the sight of some volume of the latter.

"Keeping a mind. Dogs I never cared for. It's been a tossup between setting up a mind and setting up a soul.

It's jolly lucky for Him and you it's a mind. I've joined the London Library, and I'm going in for the Royal

Institution and every blessed lecture that comes along next winter. You'd better look out."...

"BirkbeckPhysiology. I'm getting on." She sat down and took off her gloves. "You're just glass to me," she

sighed, and then in a note of grave reproach: "You old PACKAGE! I had no idea! The Things you've kept

Presently they were setting; up the house at Beckengham, and my aunt intermitted her intellectual activities.

The house at Beckengham was something of an enterprise for them at that time, a reasonably large place by

the standards of the early years of TonoBungay. It was a big, rather gaunt villa, with a conservatory and a

shrubbery, a tennislawn, a quite considerable vegetable garden, and a small disused coachhouse. I had

some glimpses of the excitements of its inauguration, but not many because of the estrangement between my

My aunt went into that house with considerable zest, and my uncle distinguished himself by the thoroughness

with which he did the repainting and replumbing. He had all the drains up and most of the garden with them,

and stood administrative on heapsadministrating whisky to the workmen. I found him there one day, most

Napoleonic, on a little Elba of dirt, in an atmosphere that defies print. He also, I remember, chose what he

considered cheerful contrasts of colours for the painting of the woodwork. This exasperated my aunt

extremelyshe called him a "Pestilential old Splosher" with an unusual note of earnestnessand he also

enraged her into novelties of abuse by giving each bedroom the name of some favourite heroCliff,

Napoleon, Caesar, and so forthand having it painted on the door in gilt letters on a black label. "Martin

Luther" was kept for me. Only her respect for domestic discipline, she said, prevented her retaliating with

Also he went and ordered one of the completest sets of garden requisites I have ever seenand had them all

painted a hard clear blue. My aunt got herself large tins of a kindlier hued enamel and had everything secretly

recoated, and this done, she found great joy in the garden and became an ardent rose grower and herbaceous

borderer, leaving her Mind, indeed, to damp evenings and the winter months. When I think of her at

Beckenham, I always think first of her as dressed in that blue cotton stuff she affected, with her arms in huge

gauntleted gardening gloves, a trowel in one hand and a small but no doubt hardy and promising annual, limp

Beckenham, in the persons of a vicar, a doctor's wife, and a large proud lady called Hogberry, "called" on my

uncle and aunt almost at once, so soon in fact as the lawn was down again, and afterwards my aunt made

friends with a quiet gentlewoman next door, a propos of an overhanging cherry tree and the need of repairing

the party fence. So she resumed her place in society from which she had fallen with the disaster of

Wimblehurst. She made a partially facetious study of the etiquette of her position, had cards engraved and

retaliated calls. And then she received a card for one of Mrs. Hogberry's At Homes, gave an old garden party

herself, participated in a bazaar and sale of work, and was really becoming quite cheerfully entangled in

Beckenham society when she was suddenly taken up by the roots again by my uncle and transplanted to

"Old Trek, George," she said compactly, "Onward and Up," when I found her superintending the loading of

two big furniture vans. "Go up and say goodbye to 'Martin Luther,' and then I'll see what you can do to help

I look into the jumbled stores of the middle distance of memory, and Beckenham seems to me a quite

transitory phase. But really they were there several years; through nearly all my married life, in fact, and far

longer than the year and odd months we lived together at Wimblehurst. But the Wimblehurst time with them

is fuller in my memory by far then the Beckenham period. There comes back to me with a quite considerable

amount of detail the effect of that garden party of my aunt's and of a little social misbehaviour of which I was

guilty on that occasion. It's like a scrap from another life. It's all set in what is for me a kind of cutaneous

feeling, the feeling of rather illcut city clothes, frock coat and grey trousers, and of a high collar and tie

worn in sunshine among flowers. I have still a quite vivid memory of the little trapezoidal lawn, of the

gathering, and particularly of the hats and feathers of the gathering, of the parlourmaid and the blue

teacups, and of the magnificent presence of Mrs. Hogberry and of her clear, resonant voice. It was a voice

that would have gone with a garden party on a larger scale; it went into adjacent premises; it included the

gardener who was far up the vegetable patch and technically out of play. The only other men were my aunt's

doctor, two of the clergy, amiable contrasted men, and Mrs. Hogberry's imperfectly grownup son, a youth

just bursting into collar. The rest were women, except for a young girl or so in a state of speechless good

Marion and I had arrived a little estranged, and I remember her as a silent presence, a shadow across all that

sunlit emptiness of intercourse. We had embittered each other with one of those miserable little disputes that

seemed so unavoidable between us. She had, with the help of Smithie, dressed rather elaborately for the

occasion, and when she saw me prepared to accompany her in, I think it was a grey suit, she protested that

silk hat and frock coat were imperative. I was recalcitrant, she quoted an illustrated paper showing a garden

party with the King present, and finally I capitulatedbut after my evil habit, resentfully.... Eh, dear! those

old quarrels, how pitiful they were, how trivial! And how sorrowful they are to recall! I think they grow more

sorrowful as I grow older, and all the small passionate reasons for our mutual anger fade and fade out of

The impression that Beckenham company has left on my mind is one of a modest unreality; they were all

maintaining a front of unspecified social pretension, and evading the display of the economic facts of the

case. Most of the husbands were "in business" off stage, it would have been outrageous to ask what the

business wasand the wives were giving their energies to produce, with the assistance of novels and the

illustrated magazines, a moralised version of the afternoon life of the aristocratic class. They hadn't the

intellectual or moral enterprise of the upperclass woman, they had no political interests, they had no views

about anything, and consequently they were, I remember, extremely difficult to talk to. They all sat about in

the summerhouse and in gardenchairs, and were very hatty and ruffley and sunshady. Three ladies and the

curate played croquet with a general immense gravity, broken by occasional loud cries of feigned distress

The dominant social fact that afternoon was Mrs. Hogberry; she took up a certain position commanding the

croquet and went on, as my aunt said to me in an incidental aside, "like an old Roundabout." She talked of the

way in which Beckenham society was getting mixed, and turned on to a touching letter she had recently

received from her former nurse at Little Gossdean. Followed a loud account of Little Gossdean and how

much she and her eight sisters had been looked up to there. "My poor mother was quite a little Queen there,

"she said. "And such NICE Common people! People say the country labourers are getting disrespectful

nowadays. It isn't sonot if they're properly treated. Here of course in Beckenham it's different. I won't call

the people we get here a Poorthey're certainly not a proper Poor. They're Masses. I always tell Mr.

I was whirled on this roundabout for a bit, and then had the fortune to fall off into a teteatete with a lady

whom my aunt introduced as Mrs. Mumblebut then she introduced everybody to me as Mumble that

That must have been one of my earliest essays in the art of polite conversation, and I remember that I began

by criticising the local railway service, and that at the third sentence or thereabouts Mrs. Mumble said in a

distinctly bright and encouraging way that she feared I was a very "frivolous" person.

I don't know what happened to end that conversation, or if it had an end. I remember talking to one of the

clergy for a time rather awkwardly, and being given a sort of topographical history of Beckenham, which he

assured me time after time was "Quite an old place. Quite an old place." As though I had treated it as new and

he meant to be very patient but very convincing. Then we hung up in a distinct pause, and my aunt rescued

me. "George," she said in a confidential undertone, "keep the pot aboiling." And then audibly, "I say, will

"Only too delighted to TROT for you, Mrs. Ponderevo," said the clergyman, becoming fearfully expert and in

I found we were near a rustic table, and that the housemaid was behind us in a suitable position to catch us on

"Trot!" repeated the clergyman to me, much amused; "excellent expression!" And I just saved him from the

"Give 'em cakes," said my aunt, flushed, but well in hand. "Helps 'em to talk, George. Always talk best after a

She surveyed the gathering with a predominant blue eye and helped herself to tea.

"That boy has had his legs crossed in that position and hasn't spoken for ten minutes. Stiffer and stiffer.

Brittle. He's beginning a dry coughalways a bad sign, George.... Walk 'em about, shall I?rub their noses

Happily she didn't. I got myself involved with the gentlewoman from next door, a pensive, languidlooking

little woman with a low voice, and fell talking; our topic, Cats and Dogs, and which it was we liked best.

"I always feel," said the pensive little woman, "that there's something about a dog A cat hasn't got it."

"Yes," I found myself admitting with great enthusiasm, "there is something. And yet again"

The thing seemed to me to amount to a stalemate. Fear came into my heart and much perplexity.

"TheerRoses," I said. I felt like a drowning man. "Those rosesdon't you think they arevery

"Aren't they!" she agreed gently. "There seems to be something in rosessomethingI don't know how to

There was another long pause. I looked at her and she was thinking dreamily. The drowning sensation

returned, the fear and enfeeblement. I perceived by a sort of inspiration that her teacup was empty.

"Let me take your cup," I said abruptly, and, that secured, made for the table by the summerhouse. I had no

intention then of deserting my aunt. But close at hand the big French window of the drawingroom yawned

inviting and suggestive. I can feel all that temptation now, and particularly the provocation of my collar. In an

I dashed in, put down the cup on the keys of the grand piano and fled upstairs, softly, swiftly, three steps at a

time, to the sanctuary of my uncle's study, his snuggery. I arrived there breathless, convinced there was no

return for me. I was very glad and ashamed of myself, and desperate. By means of a penknife I contrived to

break open his cabinet of cigars, drew a chair to the window, took off my coat, collar and tie, and remained

smoking guiltily and rebelliously, and peeping through the blind at the assembly on the lawn until it was

A few such pictures of those early days at Beckenham stand out, and then I find myself among the

Chiselhurst memories. The Chiselhurst mansion had "grounds" rather than a mere garden, and there was a

gardener's cottage and a little lodge at the gate. The ascendant movement was always far more in evidence

One night picks itself out as typical, as, in its way, marking an epoch. I was there, I think, about some

advertisement stuff, on some sort of business anyhow, and my uncle and aunt had come back in a fly from a

dinner at the Runcorns. (Even there he was nibbling at Runcorn with the idea of our great Amalgamation

budding in his mind.) I got down there, I suppose, about eleven. I found the two of them sitting in the study,

my aunt on a chairarm with a whimsical pensiveness on her face, regarding my uncle, and he, much

"Look here, George," said my uncle, after my first greetings. "I just been saying: We aren't Oh Fay!"

"Oh! Didn't think of French. One never knows where to have him. What's gone wrong tonight?"

"I been thinking. It isn't any particular thing. I ate too much of that fishy stuff at first, like salt frog spawn,

and was a bit confused by olives; andwell, I didn't know which wine was which. Had to say THAT each

time. It puts your talk all wrong. And she wasn't in evening dress, not like the others. We can't go on in that

"We got to do it all better," said my uncle, "we got to do it in Style. Smart business, smart men. She tries to

pass it off as humorous"my aunt pulled a grimace "it isn't humorous! See! We're on the upgrade now,

fair and square. We're going to be big. We aren't going to be laughed at as Poovenoos, see!"

"Nobody isn't going to laugh at me," said my uncle, glancing at his contours and suddenly sitting up.

"We aren't keeping pace with our own progress, George. We got to. We're bumping against new people, and

they set up to be gentlefolksetiquette dinners and all the rest of it. They give themselves airs and expect us

to be fishoutofwater. We aren't going to be. They think we've no Style. Well, we give them Style for our

advertisements, and we're going to give 'em Style all through.... You needn't be born to it to dance well on the

"Runcorn hadn't cigars like these," he said, truncating one lovingly. "We beat him at cigars. We'll beat him all

"We got to learn all the rotten little game first. See, F'rinstance, we got to get samples of all the blessed wines

there areand learn 'em up. Stern, Smoor, Burgundy, all of 'em! She took Stern tonightand when she

tasted it firstyou pulled a face, Susan, you did. I saw you. It surprised you. You bunched your nose. We got

to get used to wine and not do that. We got to get used to wearing evening dressYOU, Susan, too."

"Always have had a tendency to stick out of my clothes," said my aunt. "HoweverWho cares?" She

"Got to get the hang of etiquette," he went on to the fire. "Horses even. Practise everything. Dine every night

in evening dress.... Get a brougham or something. Learn up golf and tennis and things. Country gentleman.

"French, George," said my aunt. "But I'M not ol' Gooch. I made that face for fun."

"It isn't only freedom from Gawshery. We got to have Style. See! Style! Just all right and one better. That's

He mumbled his cigar and smoked for a space, leaning forward and looking into the fire.

"What is it," he asked, "after all? What is it? Tips about eating; tips about drinking. Clothes. How to hold

yourself, and not say jes' the few little things they know for certain are wrongjes' the shibboleth things."

He was silent again, and the cigar crept up from the horizontal towards the zenith as the confidence of his

"Learn the whole bag of tricks in six months." he said, becoming more cheerful. "Ah, Susan? Beat it out!

George, you in particular ought to get hold of it. Ought to get into a good club, and all that."

"Always ready to learn!" I said. "Ever since you gave me the chance of Latin. So far we don't seem to have

"It's a very useful language," said my uncle. "Put a point on things. Zzzz. As for accent, no Englishman has

an accent. No Englishman pronounces French properly. Don't you tell ME. It's a Bluff.It's all a Bluff.

Life's a Bluffpractically. That's why it's so important, Susan, for us to attend to Style. Le Steel Say Lum.

The Style it's the man. Whad you laughing at, Susan? George, you're not smoking. These cigars are good for

the mind.... What do YOU think of it all? We got to adapt ourselves. We haveso far.... Not going to be beat

What I said I thought of it I don't now recall. Only I have very distinctly the impression of meeting for a

moment my aunt's impenetrable eye. And anyhow he started in with his accustomed energy to rape the

mysteries of the Costly Life, and become the calmest of its lords. On the whole, I think he did

itthoroughly. I have crowded memories, a little difficult to disentangle, of his experimental stages, his

experimental proceedings. It's hard at times to say which memory comes in front of which. I recall him as

presenting on the whole a series of small surprises, as being again and again, unexpectedly, a little more

selfconfident, a little more polished, a little richer and finer, a little more aware of the positions and values

There was a timeit must have been very earlywhen I saw him deeply impressed by the splendours of the

diningroom of the National Liberal Club. Heaven knows who our host was or what that particular little

"feed" was about now!all that sticks is the impression of our straggling entry, a string of six or seven

guests, and my uncle looking about him at the numerous bright redshaded tables, at the exotics in great

Majolica jars, at the shining ceramic columns and pilasters, at the impressive portraits of Liberal statesmen

and heroes, and all that contributes to the ensemble of that palatial spectacle. He was betrayed into a whisper

to me, "This is all Right, George!" he said. That artless comment seems almost incredible as I set it down;

there came a time so speedily when not even the clubs of New York could have overawed my uncle, and

when he could walk through the bowing magnificence of the Royal Grand Hotel to his chosen table in that

aggressively exquisite gallery upon the river, with all the easy calm of one of earth's legitimate kings.

The two of them learnt the new game rapidly and well; they experimented abroad, they experimented at

home. At Chiselhurst, with the aid of a new, very costly, but highly instructive cook, they tried over

everything they heard of that roused their curiosity and had any reputation for difficulty, from asparagus to

plover's eggs. They afterwards got a gardener who could wait at tableand he brought the soil home to one.

I remember my aunt's first dinnergown very brightly, and how she stood before the fire in the

drawingroom confessing once unsuspected pretty arms with all the courage she possessed, and looking over

My uncle appeared at the door in a white waistcoat and with his hands in his trouser pockets; he halted and

"Couldn't tell you from a duchess, Susan," he remarked. "I'd like to have you painted, standin' at the fire like

that. Sargent! You lookspirited, somehow. Lord!I wish some of those damned tradesmen at

They did a lot of weekending at hotels, and sometimes I went down with them. We seemed to fall into a

vast drifting crowd of social learners. I don't know whether it is due simply to my changed circumstances, but

it seems to me there have been immensely disproportionate developments of the hotelfrequenting and

restaurantusing population during the last twenty years. It is not only, I think, that there are crowds of

people who, like we were, are in the economically ascendant phase, but whole masses of the prosperous

section of the population must be altering its habits, giving up hightea for dinner and taking to evening

dress, using the weekend hotels as a practiseground for these new social arts. A swift and systematic

conversion to gentility has been going on, I am convinced, throughout the whole commercial uppermiddle

class since I was twentyone. Curiously mixed was the personal quality of the people one saw in these raids.

There were conscientiously refined and lowvoiced people reeking with proud bashfulness; there were

aggressively smart people using pet diminutives for each other loudly and seeking fresh occasions for

brilliant rudeness; there were awkward husbands and wives quarrelling furtively about their manners and ill

at ease under the eye of the winter; cheerfully amiable and often discrepant couples with a disposition to

inconspicuous corners, and the jolly sort, affecting an unaffected ease; plump happy ladies who laughed too

loud, and gentlemen in evening dress who subsequently "got their pipes." And nobody, you knew, was

I look back now with a curious remoteness of spirit to those crowded diningrooms with their dispersed

tables and their inevitable redshaded lights and the unsympathetic, unskillful waiters, and the choice of

"Thig or Glear, Sir?" I've not dined in that way, in that sort of place, now for five yearsit must be quite five

My uncle's earlier motorcar phases work in with these associations, and there stands out a little bright

vignette of the hall of the Magnificent, BexhillonSea, and people dressed for dinner and sitting about

amidst the scarlet furnituresatin and whiteenameled woodwork until the gong should gather them; and

my aunt is there, very marvelously wrapped about in a dust cloak and a cagelike veil, and there are hotel

porters and underporters very alert, and an obsequious manager; and the tall young lady in black from the

office is surprised into admiration, and in the middle of the picture is my uncle, making his first appearance in

that Esquimaux costume I have already mentioned, a short figure, compactly immense, hugely goggled,

wearing a sort of brown rubber proboscis, and surmounted by a tableland of motoring cap.

So it was we recognised our new needs as fresh invaders of the upper levels of the social system, and set

ourselves quite consciously to the acquisition of Style and Savoir Faire. We became part of what is nowadays

quite an important element in the confusion of our world, that multitude of economically ascendant people

who are learning how to spend money. It is made up of financial people, the owners of the businesses that are

eating up their competitors, inventors of new sources of wealth, such as ourselves; it includes nearly all

America as one sees it on the European stage. It is a various multitude having only this in common: they are

all moving, and particularly their womankind are moving, from conditions in which means were insistently

finite, things were few, and customs simple, towards a limitless expenditure and the sphere of attraction of

Bond Street, Fifth Avenue, and Paris. Their general effect is one of progressive revolution, of limitless rope.

They discover suddenly indulgences their moral code never foresaw and has no provision for, elaborations,

ornaments, possessions beyond their wildest dreams. With an immense astonished zest they begin shopping

begin a systematic adaptation to a new life crowded and brilliant with things shopped, with jewels, maids,

butlers, coachmen, electric broughams, hired town and country houses. They plunge into it as one plunges

into a career; as a class, they talk, think, and dream possessions. Their literature, their Press, turns all on that;

immense illustrated weeklies of unsurpassed magnificence guide them in domestic architecture, in the art of

owning a garden, in the achievement of the sumptuous in motorcars, in an elaborate sporting equipment, in

the purchase and control of their estates, in travel and stupendous hotels. Once they begin to move they go far

and fast. Acquisition becomes the substance of their lives. They find a world organised to gratify that passion.

In a brief year or so they are connoisseurs. They join in the plunder of the eighteenth century, buy rare old

books, fine old pictures, good old furniture. Their first crude conception of dazzling suites of the newly

perfect is replaced almost from the outset by a jackdaw dream of accumulating costly discrepant old things.

I seem to remember my uncle taking to shopping quite suddenly. In the Beckenham days and in the early

Chiselhurst days he was chiefly interested in getting money, and except for his onslaught on the Beckenham

house, bothered very little about his personal surroundings and possessions. I forget now when the change

came and he began to spend. Some accident must have revealed to him this new source of power, or some

subtle shifting occurred in the tissues of his brain. He began to spend and "shop." So soon as he began to

shop, he began to shop violently. He began buying pictures, and then, oddly enough, old clocks. For the

Chiselhurst house he bought nearly a dozen grandfather clocks and three copper warming pans. After that he

bought much furniture. Then he plunged into art patronage, and began to commission pictures and to make

presents to churches and institutions. His buying increased with a regular acceleration. Its development was a

part of the mental changes that came to him in the wild excitements of the last four years of his ascent.

Towards the climax he was a furious spender; he shopped with large unexpected purchases, he shopped like a

mind seeking expression, he shopped to astonish and dismay; shopped crescendo, shopped fortissimo, con

molto espressione until the magnificent smash of Crest Hill eroded his shopping for ever. Always it was he

who shopped. My aunt did not shine as a purchaser. It is a curious thing, due to I know not what fine strain in

her composition, that my aunt never set any great store upon possessions. She plunged through that crowded

bazaar of Vanity Fair during those feverish years, spending no doubt freely and largely, but spending with

detachment and a touch of humorous contempt for the things, even the "old" things, that money can buy. It

came to me suddenly one afternoon just how detached she was, as I saw her going towards the Hardingham,

sitting up, as she always did, rather stiffly in her electric brougham, regarding the glittering world with

interested and ironically innocent blue eyes from under the brim of a hat that defied comment. "No one," I

And I remember, too, an outburst of scornful description after she had lunched with a party of women at the

Imperial Cosmic Club. She came round to my rooms on the chance of finding me there, and I gave her tea.

"Oh! Like a burst hareem!... Bragging of possessions.... They feel you. They feel your clothes, George, to see

"It's the old pawnshop in their blood," she said, drinking tea; and then in infinite disgust, "They run their

I had a moment of doubt whether perhaps she had not been discovered in possession of unsuspected

forgeries. I don't know. After that my eyes were quickened, and I began to see for myself women running

their hands over other women's furs, scrutinising their lace, even demanding to handle jewelry, appraising,

envying, testing. They have a kind of etiquette. The woman who feels says, "What beautiful sables?" "What

lovely lace?" The woman felt admits proudly: "It's Real, you know," or disavows pretension modestly and

hastily, "It's Rot Good." In each other's houses they peer at the pictures, handle the selvage of hangings, look

I doubt if Lady Drew and the Olympians did that sort of thing, but here I may be only clinging to another of

my former illusions about aristocracy and the State. Perhaps always possessions have been Booty, and never

anywhere has there been such a thing as house and furnishings native and natural to the women and men who

For me, at least, it marked an epoch in my uncle's career when I learnt one day that he had "shopped" Lady

Grove. I realised a fresh, wide, unpreluded step. He took me by surprise with the sudden change of scale from

such portable possessions as jewels and motorcars to a stretch of countryside. The transaction was

Napoleonic; he was told of the place; he said "snap"; there were no preliminary desirings or searchings. Then

he came home and said what he had done. Even my aunt was for a day or so measurably awestricken by this

exploit in purchase, and we both went down with him to see the house in a mood near consternation. It struck

us then as a very lordly place indeed. I remember the three of us standing on the terrace that looked

westward, surveying the skyreflecting windows of the house, and a feeling of unwarrantable intrusion

Lady Grove, you know, is a very beautiful house indeed, a still and gracious place, whose agelong seclusion

was only effectively broken with the toot of the coming of the motorcar. An old Catholic family had died

out in it, century by century, and was now altogether dead. Portions of the fabric are thirteenth century, and

its last architectural revision was Tudor; within, it is for the most part dark and chilly, save for two or three

favoured rooms and its tallwindowed, oakgalleried hall. Its terrace is its noblest feature; a very wide, broad

lawn it is, bordered by a low stone battlement, and there is a great cedar in one corner under whose level

branches one looks out across the blue distances of the Weald, blue distances that are made extraordinarily

Italian in quality by virtue of the dark masses of that single tree. It is a very high terrace; southward one looks

down upon the tops of wayfaring trees and spruces, and westward on a steep slope of beechwood, through

which the road comes. One turns back to the still old house, and sees a grey and lichenous facade with a very

finely arched entrance. It was warmed by the afternoon light and touched with the colour of a few neglected

roses and a pyracanthus. It seemed to me that the most modern owner conceivable in this serene fine place

was some bearded scholarly man in a black cassock, gentlevoiced and whitehanded, or some very

softrobed, grey gentlewoman. And there was my uncle holding his goggles in a sealskin glove, wiping the

glass with a pockethandkerchief, and asking my aunt if Lady Grove wasn't a "Bit of all Right."

We went inside. An old woman with very white hair was in charge of the place and cringed rather obviously

to the new master. She evidently found him a very strange and frightful apparition indeed, and was dreadfully

afraid of him. But if the surviving present bowed down to us, the past did not. We stood up to the dark, long

portraits of the extinguished raceone was a Holbeinand looked them in their sidelong eyes. They looked

back at us. We all, I know, felt the enigmatical quality in them. Even my uncle was momentarily

embarrassed, I think, by that invincibly selfcomplacent expression. It was just as though, after all, he had

not bought them up and replaced them altogether; as though that, secretly, they knew better and could smile

The spirit of the place was akin to Bladesover, but touched with something older and remoter. That armour

that stood about had once served in tiltyards, if indeed it had not served in battle, and this family had sent its

blood and treasure, time after time, upon the most romantic quest in history, to Palestine. Dreams, loyalties,

place and honour, how utterly had it all evaporated, leaving, at last, the final expression of its spirit, these

quaint painted smiles, these smiles of triumphant completion! It had evaporated, indeed, long before the

ultimate Durgan had died, and in his old age he had cumbered the place with Early Victorian cushions and

carpets and tapestry tablecloths and invalid appliances of a type even more extinct, it seemed to us, than the

"Bit stuffy, George," said my uncle. "They hadn't much idea of ventilation when this was built."

One of the panelled rooms was halffilled with presses and a fourposter bed. "Might be the ghost room,"

said my uncle; but it did not seem to me that so retiring a family as the Durgans, so old and completely

exhausted a family as the Durgans, was likely to haunt anybody. What living thing now had any concern with

their honour and judgments and good and evil deeds? Ghosts and witchcraft were a later innovationthat

Afterwards, prying for epitaphs, we found a marble crusader with a broken nose, under a battered canopy of

fretted stone, outside the restricted limits of the present Duffield church, and half buried in nettles. "Ichabod,"

said my uncle. "Eh? We shall be like that, Susan, some day.... I'm going to clean him up a bit and put a railing

"Old saved at the eleventh hour," said my aunt, quoting one of the less successful advertisements of

It was by our captured crusader that the vicar found us. He came round the corner at us briskly, a little out of

breath. He had an air of having been running after us since the first toot of our horn had warned the village of

our presence. He was an Oxford man, cleanshaven, with a cadaverous complexion and a guardedly

respectful manner, a cultivated intonation, and a general air of accommodation to the new order of things.

These Oxford men are the Greeks of our plutocratic empire. He was a Tory in spirit, and what one may call

an adapted Tory by stress of circumstances; that is to say, he was no longer a legitimist; he was prepared for

the substitution of new lords for old. We were pill vendors he knew, and no doubt horribly vulgar in soul; but

then it might have been some polygamous Indian rajah, a great strain on a good man's tact, or some Jew with

an inherited expression of contempt. Anyhow, we were English, and neither Dissenters nor Socialists, and he

was cheerfully prepared to do what he could to make gentlemen of both of us. He might have preferred

Americans for some reasons; they are not so obviously taken from one part of the social system and dumped

down in another, and they are more teachable; but in this world we cannot always be choosers. So he was

very bright and pleasant with us, showed us the church, gossiped informingly about our neighbours on the

countrysideTux, the banker; Lord Boom, the magazine and newspaper proprietor; Lord Carnaby, that great

sportsman, and old Lady Osprey. And finally he took us by way of a village lanethree children bobbed

convulsively with eyes of terror for my unclethrough a meticulous garden to a big, slovenly Vicarage with

faded Victorian furniture and a faded Victorian wife, who gave us tea and introduced us to a confusing family

dispersed among a lot of disintegrating basket chairs upon the edge of a wellused tennis lawn.

These people interested me. They were a common type, no doubt, but they were new to me. There were two

lank sons who had been playing singles at tennis, redeared youths growing black moustaches, and dressed in

conscientiously untidy tweeds and unbuttoned and ungirt Norfolk jackets. There were a number of

illnourishedlooking daughters, sensible and economical in their costume, the younger still with long,

brownstockinged legs, and the eldest presentthere were, we discovered, one or two hidden

awaydisplaying a large gold cross and other aggressive ecclesiastical symbols; there were two or three

foxterriers, a retrieverish mongrel, and an old, bloodyeyed and very evilsmelling St. Bernard. There was

a jackdaw. There was, moreover, an ambiguous, silent lady that my aunt subsequently decided must be a very

deaf paying guest. Two or three other people had concealed themselves at our coming and left unfinished teas

behind them. Rugs and cushions lay among the chairs, and two of the latter were, I noted, covered with Union

The vicar introduced us sketchily, and the faded Victorian wife regarded my aunt with a mixture of

conventional scorn and abject respect, and talked to her in a languid, persistent voice about people in the

My aunt received these personalia cheerfully, with her blue eyes flitting from point to point, and coming back

again and again to the pinched faces of the daughters and the cross upon the eldest's breast. Encouraged by

my aunt's manner, the vicar's wife grew patronising and kindly, and made it evident that she could do much

I had just snatches of that conversation. "Mrs. Merridew brought him quite a lot of money. Her father, I

believe, had been in the Spanish wine tradequite a lady though. And after that he fell off his horse and

cracked his brain pan and took to fishing and farming. I'm sure you'll like to know them. He's most

amusing.... The daughter had a disappointment and went to China as a missionary and got mixed up in a

"Yes, they gave them to propitiate her. You see, they didn't understand the difference, and they thought that

as they'd been massacring people, THEY'D be massacred. They didn't understand the difference Christianity

"Had to have a large piece of silver tube let into his throat, and if he wants to talk he puts his finger on it. It

makes him so interesting, I think. You feel he's sincere somehow. A most charming man in every way."

"Preserved them both in spirits very luckily, and there they are in his study, though of course he doesn't show

The silent lady, unperturbed by these apparently exciting topics, scrutinised my aunt's costume with a

singular intensity, and was visibly moved when she unbuttoned her dust cloak and flung it wide. Meanwhile

we men conversed, one of the more spirited daughters listened brightly, and the youths lay on the grass at our

feet. My uncle offered them cigars, but they both declined,out of bashfulness, it seemed to me, whereas the

vicar, I think, accepted out of tact. When we were not looking at them directly, these young men would kick

Under the influence of my uncle's cigar, the vicar's mind had soared beyond the limits of the district. "This

My uncle shook his head. "We're too individualistic in this country for that sort of nonsense," he said

"They have some intelligent people in their ranks, I am told," said the vicar, "writers and so forth. Quite a

Milly, dear! Oh! she's not here. Painters, too, they have. This Socialist, it seems to me, is part of the Unrest of

the Age.... But, as you say, the spirit of the people is against it. In the country, at any rate. The people down

here are too sturdily independent in their small wayand too sensible altogether."...

"It's a great thing for Duffield to have Lady Grove occupied again," he was saying when my wandering

attention came back from some attractive casualty in his wife's discourse. "People have always looked up to

the house and considering all things, old Mr. Durgan really was extraordinarily goodextraordinarily good.

"I'm sincerely glad to hear itsincerely. We've missedthe house influence. An English village isn't

completePeople get out of hand. Life grows dull. The young people drift away to London."

He did not wait for an answer. "I been thinking while you been talkingthings one might do. Cricketa

good English gamesports. Build the chaps a pavilion perhaps. Then every village ought to have a miniature

"Yeees," said the vicar. "Provided, of course, there isn't a constant popping."...

"Manage that all right," said my uncle. "Thing'd be a sort of long shed. Paint it red. British colour. Then

there's a Union Jack for the church and the village school. Paint the school red, too, p'raps. Not enough colour

"I'm all for getting that good old English spirit back again," said my uncle. "Merrymakings. Lads and lasses

dancing on the village green. Harvest home. Fairings. Yule Logall the rest of it."

"How would old Sally Glue do for a May Queen?" asked one of the sons in the slight pause that followed.

"Or Annie Glassbound?" said the other, with the huge virile guffaw of a young man whose voice has only

"Sally Glue is eightyfive," explained the vicar, "and Annie Glassbound is wella young lady of extremely

generous proportions. And not quite right, you know. Not quite righthere." He tapped his brow.

"You see," said the vicar, "all the brisker girls go into service in or near London. The life of excitement

attracts them. And no doubt the higher wages have something to do with it. And the liberty to wear finery.

And generallyfreedom from restraint. So that there might be a little diffculty perhaps to find a May Queen

here just at present who was really young and er pretty.... Of course I couldn't think of any of my girlsor

"We got to attract 'em back," said my uncle. "That's what I feel about it. We got to BuckUp the country. The

English country is a going concern still; just as the Established Churchif you'll excuse me saying it, is a

going concern. Just as Oxford isor Cambridge. Or any of those old, fine old things. Only it wants fresh

capital, fresh idees and fresh methods. Light railways, f'rinstancescientific use of drainage. Wire fencing

The vicar's face for one moment betrayed dismay. Perhaps he was thinking of his country walks amids the

"There's great things," said my uncle, "to be done on Mod'un lines with Village Jam and Picklesboiled in

It was the reverberation of this last sentence in my mind, I think, that sharpened my sentimental sympathy as

we went through the straggling village street and across the trim green on our way back to London. It seemed

that afternoon the most tranquil and idyllic collection of creepersheltered homes you can imagine; thatch

still lingered on a whitewashed cottage or two, pyracanthus, wallflowers, and daffodils abounded, and an

unsystematic orchard or so was white with blossom above and gay with bulbs below. I noted a row of straw

beehives, beehiveshaped, beehives of the type long since condemned as inefficient by all progressive minds,

and in the doctor's acre of grass a flock of two whole sheep was grazing,no doubt he'd taken them on

account. Two men and one old woman made gestures of abject vassalage, and my uncle replied with a lordly

"England's full of Bits like this," said my uncle, leaning over the front seat and looking back with great

satisfaction. The black glare of his goggles rested for a time on the receding turrets of Lady Grove just

"I shall have a flagstaff, I think," he considered. "Then one could show when one is in residence. The

My aunt had been unusually silent. Suddenly she spoke. "He says Snap," she remarked; "he buys that place.

And a nice old job of Housekeeping he gives me! He sails through the village swelling like an old turkey.

And who'll have to scoot the butler? Me! Who's got to forget all she ever knew and start again? Me! Who's

got to trek from Chiselhurst and be a great lady? Me! ... You old Bother! Just when I was settling down and

My uncle turned his goggles to her. "Ah! THIS time it is home, Susan.... We got there."

It seems to me now but a step from the buying of Lady Grove to the beginning of Crest Hill, from the days

when the former was a stupendous achievement to the days when it was too small and dark and inconvenient

altogether for a great financier's use. For me that was a period of increasing detachment from our business

and the great world of London; I saw it more and more in broken glimpses, and sometimes I was working in

my little pavilion above Lady Grove for a fortnight together; even when I came up it was often solely for a

meeting of the aeronautical society or for one of the learned societies or to consult literature or employ

searchers or some such special business. For my uncle it was a period of stupendous inflation. Each time I

met him I found him more confident, more comprehensive, more consciously a factor in great affairs. Soon

he was no longer an associate of merely business men; he was big enough for the attentions of greater

I grew used to discovering some item of personal news about him in my evening paper, or to the sight of a

fullpage portrait of him in a sixpenny magazine. Usually the news was of some munificent act, some

romantic piece of buying or giving or some fresh rumour of reconstruction. He saved, you will remember, the

Parbury Reynolds for the country. Or at times, it would be an interview or my uncle's contribution to some

symposium on the "Secret of Success," or suchlike topic. Or wonderful tales of his power of work, of his

wonderful organisation to get things done, of his instant decisions and remarkable power of judging his

fellowmen. They repeated his great mot: "Eight hour working dayI want eighty hours!"

He became modestly but resolutely "public." They cartooned him in Vanity Fair. One year my aunt, looking

indeed a very gracious, slender lady, faced the portrait of the King in the great room at Burlington House, and

the next year saw a medallion of my uncle by Ewart, looking out upon the world, proud and imperial, but on

I shared only intermittently in his social experiences. People knew of me, it is true, and many of them sought

to make through me a sort of flank attack upon him, and there was a legend, owing, very unreasonably, partly

to my growing scientific reputation and partly to an element of reserve in my manner, that I played a much

larger share in planning his operations than was actually the case. This led to one or two very intimate private

dinners, to my inclusion in one or two house parties and various odd offers of introductions and services that

I didn't for the most part accept. Among other people who sought me in this way was Archie Garvell, now a

smart, impecunious soldier of no particular distinction, who would, I think, have been quite prepared to

develop any sporting instincts I possessed, and who was beautifully unaware of our former contact. He was

always offering me winners; no doubt in a spirit of anticipatory exchange for some really good thing in our

In spite of my preoccupation with my experiments, work, I did, I find now that I come to ransack my

impressions, see a great deal of the great world during those eventful years; I had a near view of the

machinery by which an astounding Empire is run, rubbed shoulders and exchanged experiences with bishops

and statesmen, political women and women who were not political, physicians and soldiers, artists and

authors, the directors of great journals, philanthropists and all sorts of eminent, significant people. I saw the

statesmen without their orders and the bishops with but a little purple silk left over from their canonicals,

inhaling, not incensen but cigar smoke. I could look at them all the better because, for the most part, they

were not looking at me but at my uncle, and calculating consciously or unconsciously how they might use

him and assimilate him to their system, the most unpremeditated, subtle, successful and aimless plutocracy

that ever encumbered the destinies of mankind. Not one of them, so far as I could see, until disaster overtook

him, resented his lies, his almost naked dishonesty of method, the disorderly disturbance of this trade and

that, caused by his spasmodic operations. I can see them now about him, see them polite, watchful, various;

his stiff compact little figure always a centre of attention, his wiry hair, his brief nose, his underlip, electric

with selfconfidence. Wandering marginally through distinguished gatherings, I would catch the whispers:

Or I would see him on some parterre of a platform beside my aunt's hurraying hat, amidst titles and costumes,

"holding his end up," as he would say, subscribing heavily to obvious charities, even at times making brief

convulsive speeches in some good cause before the most exalted audiences. "Mr. Chairman, your Royal

Highness, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen,"`he would begin amidst subsiding applause and adjust those

obstinate glasses and thrust back the wings of his frockcoat and rest his hands upon his hips and speak his

fragment with ever and again an incidental Zzzz. His hands would fret about him as he spoke, fiddle his

glasses, feel in his waistcoat pockets; ever and again he would rise slowly to his toes as a sentence unwound

jerkily like a clockwork snake, and drop back on his heels at the end. They were the very gestures of our first

encounter when he had stood before the empty fireplace in his minute draped parlour and talked of my future

In those measurelessly long hot afternoons in the little shop at Wimblehurst he had talked and dreamt of the

People say that my uncle lost his head at the crest of his fortunes, but if one may tell so much truth of a man

one has in a manner loved, he never had very much head to lose. He was always imaginative, erratic,

inconsistent, recklessly inexact, and his inundation of wealth merely gave him scope for these qualities. It is

true, indeed, that towards the climax he became intensely irritable at times and impatient of contradiction, but

that, I think, was rather the gnawing uneasiness of sanity than any mental disturbance. But I find it hard either

to judge him or convey the full development of him to the reader. I saw too much of him; my memory is

choked with disarranged moods and aspects. Now he is distended with megalomania, now he is deflated, now

he is quarrelsome, now impenetrably selfsatisfied, but always he is sudden, jerky, fragmentary, energetic,

There stands outbecause of the tranquil beauty of its setting perhapsa talk we had in the veranda of the

little pavilion near my worksheds behind Crest Hill in which my aeroplanes and navigable balloons were

housed. It was one of many similar conversations, and I do not know why it in particular should survive its

fellows. It happens so. He had come up to me after his coffee to consult me about a certain chalice which in a

moment of splendour and under the importunity of a countess he had determined to give to a deserving

church in the eastend. I, in a moment of even rasher generosity, had suggested Ewart as a possible artist.

Ewart had produced at once an admirable sketch for the sacred vessel surrounded by a sort of wreath of

Millies with open arms and wings and had drawn fifty pounds on the strength of it. After that came a series of

vexatious delays. The chalice became less and less of a commercial man's chalice, acquired more and more

My uncle grew restive...."You see, George, they'll begin to want the blasted thing!"

"That chalice, damn it! They're beginning to ask questions. It isn't Business, George."

"That's all very well. But it's not a good ad for us, George, to make a promise and not deliver the goods.... I'll

have to write off your friend Ewart as a bad debt, that's what it comes to, and go to a decent firm."...

We sat outside on deck chairs in the veranda of the pavilion, smoked, drank whisky, and, the chalice disposed

of, meditated. His temporary annoyance passed. It was an altogether splendid summer night, following a

blazing, indolent day. Full moonlight brought out dimly the lines of the receding hills, one wave beyond

another; far beyond were the pinpoint lights of Leatherhead, and in the foreground the little stage from

which I used to start upon my gliders gleamed like wet steel. The season must have been high June, for down

in the woods that hid the lights of the Lady Grove windows, I remember the nightingales thrilled and

"In that hole in the To'nem Court Road, eh? It's been a Straight Square Fight, and here we are!"

"'Member me telling youTonoBungay?.... Well.... I'd just that afternoon thought of it!"

"It's a great world, George, nowadays, with a fair chance for every one who lays hold of things. The career

ouvert to the Talonseh? TonoBungay. Think of it! It's a great world and a growing world, and I'm glad

we're in itand getting a pull. We're getting big people, George. Things come to us. Eh? This Palestine

His theme was taken up by a cricket in the grass until he himself was ready to resume it. The cricket too

seemed to fancy that in some scheme of its own it had got there. "Chirrrrrrup" it said; "chirrrrrrup."

"Lord, what a place that was at Wimblehurst!" he broke out. "If ever I get a day off we'll motor there, George,

and run over that dog that sleeps in the High Street. Always was a dog asleep therealways. Always... I'd

like to see the old shop again. I daresay old Ruck still stands between the sheep at his door, grinning with all

his teeth, and Marbel, silly beggar! comes out with his white apron on and a pencil stuck behind his ear,

trying to look awake... Wonder if they know it's me? I'd like 'em somehow to know it's me."

"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 yearscan't sleep even there, poor dear, because of the motorhorns and

"Movin' everywhere," said my uncle. "I expect you're right.... It's a big time we're in, George. It's a big

Progressive Oncoming Imperial Time. This Palestine businessthe daring of it.... It's, it's a Process,

George. And we got our hands on it. Here we sitwith our hands on it, George. Entrusted.

"It seems quiet tonight. But if we could see and hear." He waved his cigar towards Leatherhead and

"There they are, millions, George. Jes' think of what they've been up to todaythose ten millionseach

one doing his own particular job. You can't grasp it. It's like old Whitman sayswhat 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 outbecause 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 arewith our hands on it. Big people. Big growing people. In a sort of

"That's it, Georgeenergy. It's put things in our gripthreads, 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 Valleythink 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

He mused for a space. "Cuttin' canals," murmured my uncle. "Making tunnels.... New countries.... New

"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 diffculties 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

I glanced through the twilight at his convexity and I must confess it struck me that on the whole he wasn't

"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 millwheel 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.

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

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 heartand 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."...

"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

His voice ceased. I reflected upon the spirit of his words. Suddenly I kicked my feet in the air, rolled on my

"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 TonoBungayit'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

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

worddelocalised! Why not be the first delocalised peer? That gives youTonoBungay! There is a

"Damn it. George, you don't seem to see I'm serious! You're always sneering at TonoBungay! 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 ideesyou sneer at me. You do. You don't

seeit's a big thing. It's a big thing. You got to get used to new circumstances. You got to face what lies

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, Nietzscheall that

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

inflexiblywilful Napoleon would have done with such scruples as yours;" that was the rule, and the end was

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 waistcoatbuttons 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 Marshalknocks

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

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 gossipfrom 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 masterpassion. 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

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 talkingto at the Hardingham, and then came round to "blowup" me

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 suchlike

"Women!" she said in high indignation, "and men! It isn't women and menit's him and me, George! Why

"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

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 Zzzzy 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

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 heras they sayshe godmothered 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 stillroom, and became a

And while I neglected the development of my uncle's financesand 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

twelvemonth he bought five new motorcars, 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 elbowroom in it; it's choked with old memories. And I can't stand

"That chap in the corner, George. No! the other corner! The man in a cherrycoloured coat. He watched you!

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 outofdate Reformation! Move with the times!they moved against the times.

"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 discordit jarseven 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 oldfashioned thingsmusty old ideesfitter for a silverfish than a modern man.... I don't

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

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

It was an empty sunlit place that summer evening, sky and earth warm with sundown, and a pewit 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 tophat and his grey suit and his blackribboned

glasses, short, thinlegged, largestomached, pointing and gesticulating, threatening this calm.

"Foursquare to the winds of heaven, George!" he said. "Eh? Foursquare to the winds of heaven!"

"Great galleries and thingsrunning out there and thereSee? I been thinking of it, George! Looking out all

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 motorcar that almost dripped architects. He didn't, however, confine himself to architects; every

one was liable to an invitation to weekend 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, Zzzzing, giving immense new orders verballyan

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 fortyfoot arch, with the granite ball behind

himthe astronomical ball, brass coopered, that represented the world, with a little adjustable tube of lenses

on a gunmetal 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 golfingsuits, a little

solicitor, whose name I forget, in grey trousers and a black jacket, and Westminster in Jaeger underclothing, a

The downland breeze flutters my uncle's coattails, 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

Below are hundreds of feet of wheelingplanks, 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 placedisturbing the economic balance of the whole countryside by their

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 billiardroom 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 tenfoot 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

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

wagessheet. Then the whole fabric of confidence and imagination tottersand down they come....

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

"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 mechanismthe wing of a bird."

"Of course. Things come and go. Things come and go. ButH'm. I've just been up over the hill to look at

Mr. Edward Ponderevo's new house. Thatthat 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 findthe great number of strangers introduced into the villages about here by these

operations, workingmen chiefly, a little embarrassing. It put us out. They bring a new spirit into the place;

bettingideasall sorts of queer notions. Our publicans like it, of course. And they come and sleep in one's

outhousesand make the place a little unsafe at nights. The other morning I couldn't sleepa slight

dyspepsiaand I looked out of the window. I was amazed to see people going by on bicycles. A silent

procession. I counted ninetysevenin the dawn. All going up to the new road for Crest Hill. Remarkable I

"Yes, indeed. Things change. We think nothing of it now at allcomparatively. And that big house"

His eye searched my face. "We've grown so accustomed to look up to Lady Grove," he said, and smiled in

"They'll readjust themselvessettle down again. Must. In the old way. It's bound to come right againa

comforting thought. Yes. After all, Lady Grove itself had to be built once upon a timewasto begin

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 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,

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

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. Itwas, 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

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 motorhouse, to three big corrugatedroofed

sheds and lockup 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 heavensent secondincommandCothope his name was. He was a selfeducatedman; 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

fellowcreatures altogetherat 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,

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 TonoBungay. 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

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 selfindulgence. 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 overeat 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

But the glider brought me up smartly. I had to find out how these things went down the air, and the only way

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 dawnlike 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 horriblefor 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

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

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

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 motorbicycle 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.

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, darkeyed, 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 halfbrother,

were with her. My uncle had been bothering me about the Crest Hill hotwater pipes, and we were returning

by a path transverse to theirs and came out upon them suddenly. Old Carnaby was trespassing on our ground,

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 sixtyfive 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 greyblue eyes in his brown face,

"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!"

"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

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

hatshe was wearing a grey hat and loose unbuttoned coatwas knit with perplexity, trying, I suppose, to

remember where she had seen me before. Her shaded eyes met mine with that mute question....

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

stepdaughter 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 aliveso unchanged! The same quick warm blood was

in her cheeks. It seemed only yesterday that we had kissed among the bracken stems....

"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, somethingit's an oldfashioned phrase,

George, but a good one there's a BongTong.... 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."...

"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

"I don't blame him," said my uncle. "Mostly it's imagination. That and leisure, George. When I was a young

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....

"Oh, Crikey!" said my aunt, reading a letter behind her coffeemachine. "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

"Yes. Says she knows you. I'm no hand at old etiquette, George, but her line is a bit unusual. Practically she

"You seem to know a lot about her. She says 'mother'Lady Osprey. They're to call on me, anyhow, next

I became aware of my aunt's head sticking out obliquely from behind the coffeemachine and regarding me

with wide blue curiosity. I met her gaze for a moment, flinched, coloured, and laughed.

My aunt kept her eye on me over and round the coffeemachine as I did so. She was greatly interested, and

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

"You thought I'd get a Down on her," said my aunt conclusively. "That's what you thought" and opened the

The two ladies came in a ponycarriage 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 offchance 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

Beatrice was dressed very quietly in brown, with a simple but courageous broadbrimmed hat, and an

unexpected quality of being grownup and responsible. She guided her stepmother through the first

encounter, scrutinised my aunt, and got us all well in movement through the house, and then she turned her

"Of course," she said, "the Warren! I remembered it all except just the name.... I was eight."

Her smiling eyes insisted on my memories being thorough. I looked up and met them squarely, a little at a

"I gave you away pretty completely," she said, meditating upon my face. "And afterwards I gave way

"They gave him a licking for telling lies!" she said, as though that was a pleasant memory. "And when it was

"Yesand criedfor all the evil I had done you, I suppose.... I've often thought of it since."...

Lady Osprey stopped for us to overtake her. "My dear!" she said to Beatrice. "Such a beautiful gallery!" Then

she stared very hard at me, puzzled in the most naked fashion to understand who I might be.

Lady Osprey, with her skirts gathered for the ascent to the gallery and her hand on the newel, turned and

addressed a look full of meaning overflowing indeed with meaningsat her charge. The chief meaning no

doubt was caution about myself, but much of it was just meaning at large. I chanced to catch the response in a

mirror and detected Beatrice with her nose wrinkled into a swift and entirely diabolical grimace. Lady Osprey

became a deeper shade of pink and speechless with indignationit was evident she disavowed all further

"It's dark, but there's a sort of dignity," said Beatrice very distinctly, regarding the hall with serene

tranquillity, and allowing the unwilling feet on the stairs to widen their distance from us. She stood a step up,

"All this." She indicated space and leisure by a wave of the hand at hall and tall windows and sunlit terrace.

"I've adventured. My uncle has becomea great financier. He used to be a little chemist about twenty miles

from Bladesover. We're promoters now, amalgamators, big people on the new model."

"After a second or so. I saw you recognised me. I couldn't place you, but I knew I knew you. Then Archie

We regarded one another for a moment with a curiously easy and confident satisfaction in coming together

again. I can't explain our ready zest in one another. The thing was so. We pleased each other, we had no

doubt in our minds that we pleased each other. From the first we were at our ease with one another. "So

picturesque, so very picturesque," came a voice from above, and then: "Beeatrice!"

"I've a hundred things I want to know about you," she said with an easy intimacy, as we went up the winding

As the four of us sat at tea together under the cedar on the terrace she asked questions about my aeronautics.

My aunt helped with a word or so about my broken ribs. Lady Osprey evidently regarded flying as a most

indesirable and improper topica blasphemous intrusion upon the angels. "It isn't flying," I explained. "We

The little lady lifted a small gloved hand and indicated a height of about four feet from the ground. "Thus

She became emphatically pink. "NO," she said again quite conclusively, and coughed shortly. "Thank you,"

she said to her ninth or tenth cake. Beatrice burst into cheerful laughter with her eye on me. I was lying on the

turf, and this perhaps caused a slight confusion about the primordial curse in Lady Osprey's mind.

"Upon his belly shall he go," she said with quiet distinctness, "all the days of his life."

Beatrice sat bunched together in a chair and regarded me with exactly the same scrutiny, I thought, the same

adventurous aggression, that I had faced long ago at the teatable in my mother's room. She was amazingly

like that little Princess of my Bladesover memories, the wilful misbehaviours of her hair seemed the

sameher voice; things one would have expected to be changed altogether. She formed her plans in the

At the further corner from the cedar she perched herself up upon the parapet and achieved an air of comfort

among the lichenous stones. "Now tell me," she said, "all about yourself. Tell me about yourself; I know such

duffers of men! They all do the same things. How did you gethere? All my men WERE here. They

couldn't have got here if they hadn't been here always. They wouldn't have thought it right. You've climbed."

She went off at a tangent. "It'sI don't know if you'll understandinteresting to meet you again. I've

remembered you. I don't know why, but I have. I've used you as a sort of lay figurewhen I've told myself

stories. But you've always been rather stiff and difficult in my storiesin readymade clothesa Labour

Member or a Bradlaugh, or something like that. You're not like that a bit. And yet you ARE!"

"I was shot up here by an accident," I said. "There was no fight at all. Except to keep honest, perhaps and I

made no great figure in that. I and my uncle mixed a medicine and it blew us up. No merit in that! But you've

"Produce a little halfbrother for Bladesover. So it went to the Phillbrick gang. And they let it! And I and my

She nodded her head vaguely over her shoulder and turned to me again. "Well, suppose it was an accident.

Here you are! Now you're here, what are you going to do? You're young. Is it to be Parliament? heard some

men the other day talking about you. Before I knew you were you. They said that was what you ought to

She put me through my intentions with a close and vital curiosity. It was just as she had tried to imagine me a

soldier and place me years ago. She made me feel more planless and incidental than ever. "You want to make

a flyingmachine," she pursued, "and when you fly? What then? Would it be for fighting?

I told her something of my experimental work. She had never heard of the soaring aeroplane, and was excited

by the thought, and keen to hear about it. She had thought all the work so far had been a mere projecting of

impossible machines. For her Pilcher and Lilienthal had died in vain. She did not know such men had lived in

"I'll take my chance some day. Some day soon." She looked at me thoughtfully, smiled, and our talk was at

All my later work in aeronautics is associated in my memory with the quality of Beatrice, with her incidenta]

presence, with things she said and did and things I thought of that had reference to her.

In the spring of that year I had got to a flying machine that lacked nothing but longitudinal stability. My

model flew like a bird for fifty or a hundred yards or so, and then either dived and broke its nose or, what was

commoner, reared up, slid back and smashed its propeller. The rhythm of the pitching puzzled me. I felt it

must obey some laws not yet quite clearly stated. I became therefore a student of theory and literature for a

time; I hit upon the string of considerations that led me to what is called Ponderevo's Principle and my F.R.S.,

and I worked this out in three long papers. Meanwhile I made a lot of turntable and glider models and

started in upon an idea of combining gasbags and gliders. Balloon work was new to me. I had made one or

two ascents in the balloons of the Aero Club before I started my gasometer and the balloon shed and gave

Cothope a couple of months with Sir Peter Rumchase. My uncle found part of the money for these

developments; he was growing interested and competitive in this business because of Lord Boom's prize and

the amount of reclame involved, and it was at his request that I named my first navigable balloon Lord

Lord Roberts A very nearly terminated all my investigations. My idea both in this and its more successful and

famous younger brother, Lord Roberts B, was to utilise the idea of a contractile balloon with a rigid flat base,

a balloon shaped rather like an inverted boat that should almost support the apparatus, but not quite. The

gasbag was of the chambered sort used for these long forms, and not with an internal balloonette. The

trouble was to make the thing contractile. This I sought to do by fixing a long, finemeshed silk net over it

that was fastened to be rolled up on two longitudinal rods. Practically I contracted my sausage gasbag by

netting it down. The ends were too complex for me to describe here, but I thought them out elaborately and

they were very carefully planned. Lord Roberts A was furnished with a single big screw forward, and there

was a rudder aft. The engine was the first one to be, so to speak, right in the plane of the gasbag. I lay

immediately under the balloon on a sort of glider framework, far away from either engine or rudder,

controlling them by wirepulls constructed on the principle of the wellknown Bowden brake of the cyclist.

But Lord Roberts A has been pretty exhaustively figured and described in various aeronautical publications.

The unforeseen defect was the badness of the work in the silk netting. It tore aft as soon as I began to contract

the balloon, and the last two segments immediately bulged through the hole, exactly as an inner tube will

bulge through the ruptured outer cover of a pneumatic tire, and then the sharp edge of the torn net cut the

oiledsilk of the distended last segment along a weak seam and burst it with a loud report.

Up to that point the whole thing had been going on extremely well. As a navigable balloon and before I

contracted it, the Lord Roberts A was an unqualified success. It had run out of the shed admirably at nine or

ten miles an hour or more, and although there was a gentle southwester blowing, it had gone up and turned

I lay in my customary glider position, horizontal and face downward, and the invisibility of all the machinery

gave an extraordinary effect of independent levitation. Only by looking up, as it were, and turning my head

back could I see the flat aeroplane bottom of the balloon and the rapid successive passages, swish, swish,

swish of the vans of the propeller. I made a wide circle over Lady Grove and Duffield and out towards

Down below in the October sunlight were my sheds and the little group that had been summoned to witness

the start, their faces craned upward and most of them scrutinising my expression through fieldglasses. I

could see Carnaby and Beatrice on horseback, and two girls I did not know with them; Cothope and three or

four workmen I employed; my aunt and Mrs. Levinstein, who was staying with her, on foot, and Dimmock,

the veterinary surgeon, and one or two others. My shadow moved a little to the north of them like the shadow

of a fish. At Lady Grove the servants were out on the lawn, and the Duffield school playground swarmed

with children too indifferent to aeronautics to cease their playing. But in the Crest Hill directionthe place

looked extraordinarily squat and ugly from abovethere were knots and strings of staring workmen

everywherenot one of them working, but all agape. (But now I write it, it occurs to me that perhaps it was

their dinner hour; it was certainly near twelve.) I hung for a moment or so enjoying the soar, then turned

about to face a clear stretch of open down, let the engine out to full speed and set my rollers at work rolling in

the net, and so tightening the gasbags. Instantly the pace quickened with the diminished resistance...

In that moment before the bang I think I must have been really flying. Before the net ripped, just in the instant

when my balloon was at its systole, the whole apparatus was, I am convinced, heavier than air. That,

however, is a claim that has been disputed, and in any case this sort of priority is a very trivial thing.

Then came a sudden retardation, instantly followed by an inexpressibly disconcerting tilt downward of the

machine. That I still recall with horror. I couldn't see what was happening at all and I couldn't imagine. It was

a mysterious, inexplicable dive. The thing, it seemed, without rhyme or reason, was kicking up its heels in the

I was too much taken by surprise to think of the proper cause of the report. I don't even know what I made of

it. I was obsessed, I suppose, by that perpetual dread of the modern aeronaut, a flash between engine and

balloon. Yet obviously I wasn't wrapped in flames. I ought to have realised instantly it wasn't that. I did, at

any rate, whatever other impressions there were, release the winding of the outer net and let the balloon

expand again, and that no doubt did something to break my fall. I don't remember doing that. Indeed, all I do

remember is the giddy effect upon the landscape of falling swiftly upon it down a flat spiral, the hurried rush

of fields and trees and cottages on my left shoulder and the overhung feeling as if the whole apparatus was

pressing down the top of my head. I didn't stop or attempt to stop the screw. That was going on, swish, swish,

Cothope really knows more about the fall than I do. He describes the easterly start, the tilt, and the

appearance and bursting of a sort of bladder aft. Then down I swooped, very swiftly, but not nearly so steeply

as I imagined I was doing. "Fifteen or twenty degrees," said Cothope, "to be exact." From him it was that I

learnt that I let the nets loose again, and so arrested my fall. He thinks I was more in control of myself than I

But I do not see why I should have forgotten so excellent a resolution. His impression is that I was really

steering and trying to drop into the Farthing Down beeches. "You hit the trees," he said, "and the whole affair

stood on its nose among them, and then very slowly crumpled up. I saw you'd been jerked out, as I thought,

As a matter of fact, it was purely accidental that I came down in the woods. I am reasonably certain that I had

no more control then than a thing in a parcel. I remember I felt a sort of wincing, "Now it comes!" as the trees

rushed up to me. If I remember that, I should remember steering. Then the propeller smashed, everything

stopped with a jerk, and I was falling into a mass of yellowing leaves, and Lord Roberts A, so it seemed to

I felt twigs and things hit me in the face, but I didn't feel injured at the time; I clutched at things that broke,

tumbled through a froth of green and yellow into a shadowy world of great barkcovered arms, and there,

I became intensely alert and clearheaded. I held by that branch for a moment and then looked about me, and

caught at another, and then found myself holding to a practicable fork. I swung forward to that and got a leg

around it below its junction, and so was able presently to clamber down, climbing very coolly and

deliberately. I dropped ten feet or so from the lowest branch and fell on my feet. "That's all right," I said, and

stared up through the tree to see what I could of the deflated and crumpled remains that had once been Lord

Roberts A festooned on the branches it had broken. "Gods!" I said, "what a tumble!"

I wiped something that trickled from my face and was shocked to see my hand covered with blood. I looked

at myself and saw what seemed to me an astonishing quantity of blood running down my arm and shoulder. I

perceived my mouth was full of blood. It's a queer moment when one realises one is hurt, and perhaps badly

hurt, and has still to discover just how far one is hurt. I explored my face carefully and found unfamiliar

contours on the left side. The broken end of a branch had driven right through my cheek, damaging my cheek

and teeth and gums, and left a splinter of itself stuck, like an explorer's fartherestpoint flag, in the upper

maxillary. That and a sprained wrist were all my damage. But I bled as though I had been chopped to pieces,

and it seemed to me that my face had been driven in. I can't describe just the horrible disgust I felt at that.

"I wonder where there's a spider's web"an odd twist for my mind to take. But it was the only treatment that

I must have conceived some idea of going home unaided, because I was thirty yards from the tree before I

Then a kind of black disc appeared in the middle of the world and rushed out to the edge of things and blotted

them out. I don't remember falling down. I fainted from excitement, disgust at my injury and loss of blood,

He was the first to find me, scorching as he did over the downland turf, and making a wide course to get the

Carnaby plantations at their narrowest. Then presently, while he was trying to apply the methodical teachings

of the St. John's Ambulance classes to a rather abnormal case, Beatrice came galloping through the trees

fulltilt, with Lord Carnaby hard behind her, and she was hatless, muddy from a fall, and white as death.

"And cool as a cucumber, too," said Cothope, turning it over in his mind as he told me.

("They never seem quite to have their heads, and never seem quite to lose 'em," said Cothope, generalising

Also he witnessed she acted with remarkable decision. The question was whether I should be taken to the

house her stepmother occupied at Bedley Corner, the Carnaby dower house, or down to Carnaby's place at

Easting. Beatrice had no doubt in the matter, for she meant to nurse me. Carnaby didn't seem to want that to

happen. "She WOULD have it wasn't half so far," said Cothope. "She faced us out....

"I hate to be faced out of my opinion, so I've taken a pedometer over it since. It's exactly fortythree yards

"Lord Carnaby looked at her pretty straight," said Cothope, finishing the picture; "and then he give in."

But my story has made a jump from June to October, and during that time my relations with Beatrice and the

countryside that was her setting had developed in many directions. She came and went, moving in an orbit for

which I had no data, going to London and Paris, into Wales and Northampton, while her stepmother, on some

independent system of her own, also vanished and recurred intermittently. At home they obeyed the rule of an

inflexible old maid, Charlotte, and Beatrice exercised all the rights of proprietorship in Carnaby's extensive

stables. Her interest in me was from the first undisguised. She found her way to my worksheds and developed

rapidly, in spite of the sincere discouragement of Cothope, into a keen amateur of aeronautics. She would

come sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes afoot with an Irish terrier,

sometimes riding. She would come for three or four days every day, vanish for a fortnight or three weeks,

It was not long before I came to look for her. From the first I found her immensely interesting. To me she was

a new feminine type altogetherI have made it plain, I think, how limited was my knowledge of women.

But she made me not simply interested in her, but in myself. She became for me something that greatly

changes a man's world. How shall I put it? She became an audience. Since I've emerged from the emotional

developments of the affair I have thought it out in a hundred aspects, and it does seem to me that this way in

which men and women make audiences for one another is a curiously influential force in their lives. For some

it seems an audience is a vital necessity, they seek audiences as creatures seek food; others again, my uncle

among them, can play to an imaginary audience. I, I think, have lived and can live without one. In my

adolescence I was my own audience and my own court of honour. And to have an audience in one's mind is

to play a part, to become selfconscious and dramatic. For many years I had been selfforgetful and

scientific. I had lived for work and impersonal interests until I found scrutiny, applause and expectation in

Beatrice's eyes. Then I began to live for the effect I imagined I made upon her, to make that very soon the

principal value in my life. I played to her. I did things for the look of them. I began to dream more and more

I put these things down because they puzzle me. I think I was in love with Beatrice, as being in love is

usually understood; but it was quite a different state altogether from my passionate hunger for Marion, or my

keen, sensuous desire for and pleasure in Effie. These were selfish, sincere things, fundamental and

instinctive, as sincere as the leap of a tiger. But until matters drew to a crisis with Beatrice, there was an

immense imaginative insurgence of a quite different quality. I am setting down here very gravely, and

perhaps absurdly, what are no doubt elementary commonplaces for innumerable people. This love that grew

up between Beatrice and myself was, I thinkI put it quite tentatively and rather curiouslyromantic love.

That unfortunate and truncated affair of my uncle and the Scrymgeour lady was really of the same stuff, if a

little different in quality. I have to admit that. The factor of audience was of primary importance in either

Its effect upon me was to make me in many respects adolescent again. It made me keener upon the point of

honour, and anxious and eager to do high and splendid things, and in particular, brave things. So far it

ennobled and upheld me. But it did also push me towards vulgar and showy things. At bottom it was

disingenuous; it gave my life the quality of stage scenery, with one side to the audience, another side that

wasn't meant to show, and an economy of substance. It certainly robbed my work of high patience and

quality. I cut down the toil of research in my eagerness and her eagerness for fine flourishes in the air, flights

Yet that was not everything in our relationship. The elemental thing was there also. It came in very suddenly.

It was one day in the summer, though I do not now recall without reference to my experimental memoranda

whether it was in July or August. I was working with a new and more birdlike aeroplane with wing

curvatures studied from Lilienthal, Pilcher and Phillips, that I thought would give a different rhythm for the

pitching oscillations than anything I'd had before. I was soaring my long course from the framework on the

old barrow by my sheds down to Tinker's Corner. It is a clear stretch of downland, except for two or three

thickets of box and thorn to the right of my course; one transverse trough, in which there is bush and a small

rabbit warren, comes in from the east. I had started, and was very intent on the peculiar long swoop with

which any new arrangement flew. Then, without any sort of notice, right ahead of me appeared Beatrice,

riding towards Tinker's Corner to waylay and talk to me. She looked round over her shoulder, saw me

coming, touched her horse to a gallop, and then the brute bolted right into the path of my machine.

There was a queer moment of doubt whether we shouldn't all smash together. I had to make up my mind very

quickly whether I would pitchup and drop backward at once and take my chance of falling undamageda

poor chance it would have beenin order to avoid any risk to her, or whether I would lift against the wind

and soar right over her. This latter I did. She had already got her horse in hand when I came up to her. Her

woman's body lay along his neck, and she glanced up as I, with wings aspread, and every nerve in a state of

Then I had landed, and was going back to where her horse stood still and trembling.

We exchanged no greetings. She slid from her saddle into my arms, and for one instant I held her.

"Very near a nasty accident," said Cothope, coming up and regarding our grouping with disfavour. He took

Beatrice disengaged herself from me, stood for a moment trembling, and then sat down on the turf "I'll just sit

She covered her face with her hands, while Cothope looked at her with an expression between suspicion and

For some moments nobody moved. Then Cothope remarked that perhaps he'd better get her water.

As for me, I was filled with a new outrageous idea, begotten I scarcely know how from this incident, with its

instant contacts and swift emotions, and that was that I must make love to and possess Beatrice. I see no

particular reason why that thought should have come to me in that moment, but it did. I do not believe that

before then I had thought of our relations in such terms at all. Suddenly, as I remember it, the factor of

passion came. She crouched there, and I stood over her, and neither of us said a word. But it was just as

Cothope had gone twenty paces perhaps when she uncovered her face. "I shan't want any water," she said.

VI After that the spirit of our relations changed. The old ease had gone. She came to me less frequently, and

when she came she would have some one with her, usually old Carnaby, and he would do the bulk of the

talking. All through September she was away. When we were alone together there was a curious constraint.

We became clouds of inexpressible feeling towards one another; we could think of nothing that was not too

Then came the smash of Lord Roberts A, and I found myself with a bandaged face in a bedroom in the

Bedley Corner dowerhouse with Beatrice presiding over an inefficient nurse, Lady Osprey very pink and

My injuries were much more showy than serious, and I could have been taken to Lady Grove next day, but

Beatrice would not permit that, and kept me at Bedley Corner three clear days. In the afternoon of the second

day she became extremely solicitous for the proper aeration of the nurse, packed her off for an hour in a brisk

All the whole I must admit it was not a situation that lent itself to eloquence. I lay on my back and talked

through bandages, and with some little difficulty, for my tongue and mouth had swollen. But I was feverish

and in pain, and the emotional suspense I had been in so long with regard to her became now an unendurable

She came and stood by my bedside and looked me in the eyes. "I don'tI don't want you to talk to me," she

"Oh!" she said, as if she had expected something quite different. "Did you think you'd become a sort of

"Michaelmas daisies," she said. "I'm glad you'r not disfigured, and those are perennial sunflowers. Do you

know no flowers at all? When I saw you on the ground I certainly thought you were dead. You ought to have

"H'm. Difficult to say. But why do you ask? Is the daughter of a courtesy Baron who diedof general

She whitened and said nothing. I suddenly felt I must plead with her. "Damn these bandages!" I said,

She roused herself to her duties as nurse. "What are you doing? Why are you trying to sit up? Sit down! Don't

She stood helpless for a moment, then took me firmly by the shoulders and pushed me back upon the pillow.

"I told you not to talk," she whispered close to my face. "I asked you not to talk. Why couldn't you do as I

I obeyed. She sat on the edge of the bed. A flush had come to her cheeks, and her eyes were very bright. "I

"I know," she said. "I can't explain. I can't. But it has to be 'No!' It can't be. It's utterly, finally, for ever

She came to the table beside my bed and pulled the Michaelmas daisies awry. "Why did you talk like that?"

She went and stood at the further window, staring out at the rain. For a long time we were absolutely still.

The wind and rain came in little gusts upon the pane. She turned to me abruptly.

She made no answer. She walked across the room to the piano and began to play, rather noisily and rapidly,

with odd gusts of emphasis, the shepherd's pipe music from the last act in "Tristan and Isolde." Presently she

missed a note, failed again, ran her finger heavily up the scale, struck the piano passionately with her fist,

The nurse found me still wearing my helmet of bandages, partially dressed, and pottering round the room to

find the rest of my clothes. I was in a state of exasperated hunger for Beatrice, and I was too inflamed and

weakened to conceal the state of my mind. I was feebly angry because of the irritation of dressing, and

particularly of the struggle to put on my trousers without being able to see my legs. I was staggering about,

and once I had fallen over a chair and I had upset the jar of Michaelmas daisies.

I must have been a detestable spectacle. "I'll go back to bed," said I, "if I may have a word with Miss

My point was conceded, but there were long delays. Whether the household had my ultimatum or whether

she told Beatrice directly I do not know, and what Lady Osprey can have made of it in the former case I don't

"All I want to say," I said with the querulous note of a misunderstood child, "is that I can't take this as final. I

want to see you and talk when I'm better, and write. I can't do anything now. I can't argue."

I was overtaken with selfpity and began to snivel, "I can't rest. You see? I can't do anything."

She sat down beside me again and spoke softly. "I promise I will talk it all over with you again. When you

are well. I promise I will meet you somewhere so that we can talk. You can't talk now.

I asked you not to talk now. All you want to know you shall know... Will that do?"

Then she crouched beside me and began whispering very softly and rapidly with her face close to me.

"Dear," she said, "I love you. If it will make you happy to marry me, I will marry you. I was in a mood just

nowa stupid, inconsiderate mood. Of course I will marry you. You are my prince, my king. Women are

such things of moodor I would have behaved differently. We say 'No' when we mean 'Yes'and fly into

crises. So now, Yesyesyes. I will. I can't even kiss you. Give me your hand to kiss that. Understand, I

am yours. Do you understand? I am yours just as if we had been married fifty years. Your wifeBeatrice. Is

"There are complications. There are difficulties. When you are better you will be able tounderstand them.

But now they don't matter. Only you know this must be secretfor a time. Absolutely secret between us.

But I was only beginning to gauge the unaccountable elements in Beatrice. For a week after my return to

Lady Grove I had no sign of her, and then she called with Lady Osprey and brought a huge bunch of

perennial sunflowers and Michaelmas daisies, "just the old flowers there were in your room," said my aunt,

with a relentless eye on me. I didn't get any talk alone with Beatrice then, and she took occasion to tell us she

was going to London for some indefinite number of weeks. I couldn't even pledge her to write to me, and

when she did it was a brief, enigmatical, friendly letter with not a word of the reality between us.

I wrote back a love lettermy first love letterand she made no reply for eight days. Then came a scrawl:

I think the reader would be amused if he could see the papers on my desk as I write all this, the mangled and

disfigured pages, the experimental arrangements of notes, the sheets of suggestions balanced in

constellations, the blottesque intellectual battlegrounds over which I have been fighting. I find this account of

my relations to Beatrice quite the most difficult part of my story to write. I happen to be a very

objectiveminded person, I forget my moods, and this was so much an affair of moods. And even such

moods and emotions as I recall are very difficult to convey. To me it is about as difficult as describing a taste

Then the objective story is made up of little things that are difficult to set in a proper order. And love in an

hysterical passion, now high, now low, now exalted, and now intensely physical. No one has ever yet dared to

tell a love story completely, its alternations, its comings and goings, its debased moments, its hate. The love

How can I rescue from the past now the mystical quality of Beatrice; my intense longing for her; the

overwhelming, irrational, formless desire? How can I explain how intimately that worship mingled with a

high, impatient resolve to make her mine, to take her by strength and courage, to do my loving in a violent

heroic manner? And then the doubts, the puzzled arrest at the fact of her fluctuations, at her refusal to marry

me, at the fact that even when at last she returned to Bedley Corner she seemed to evade me?

I felt that it was treachery. I thought of every conceivable explanation, and the most exalted and romantic

confidence in her did not simply alternate, but mingled with the basest misgivings.

And into the tangle of memories comes the figure of Carnaby, coming out slowly from the background to a

position of significance, as an influence, as a predominant strand in the nets that kept us apart, as a rival.

What were the forces that pulled her away from me when it was so clearly manifest she loved me? Did she

think of marrying him? Had I invaded some longplanned scheme? It was evident he did not like me, that in

some way I spoilt the world for him. She returned to Bedley Corner, and for some weeks she was flitting

about me, and never once could I have talk with her alone. When she came to my sheds Carnaby was always

with her, jealously observant. (Why the devil couldn't she send him about his business?) The days slipped by

All this mingles with the making of Lord Roberts B. I had resolved upon that one night as I lay awake at

Bedley Corner; I got it planned out before the bandages were off my face. I conceived this second navigable

balloon in a grandiose manner. It was to be a second Lord Roberts A, only more so; it was to be three times

as big, large enough to carry three men, and it was to be an altogether triumphant vindication of my claims

upon the air. The framework was to be hollow like a bird's bones, airtight, and the air pumped in or out, and

the weight of fuel I carried changed. I talked much and boasted to Cothopewhom I suspected of

scepticisms about this new typeof what it would do, and it progressedslowly. It progressed slowly

because I was restless and uncertain. At times I would go away to London to snatch some chance of seeing

Beatrice there, at times nothing but a day of gliding and hard and dangerous exercise would satisfy me. And

now in the newspapers, in conversation, in everything about me, arose a new invader of my mental states.

Something was happening to the great schemes of my uncle's affairs; people were beginning to doubt, to

question. It was the first quiver of his tremendous insecurity, the first wobble of that gigantic credit top he

There were comings and goings, November and December slipped by. I had two unsatisfactory meetings with

Beatrice, meetings that had no privacyin which we said things of the sort that need atmosphere, baldly and

furtively. I wrote to her several times and she wrote back notes that I would sometimes respond to altogether,

sometimes condemn as insincere evasions. "You don't understand. I can't just now explain. Be patient with

I would talk aloud to these notes and wrangle over them in my workroomwhile the plans of Lord Roberts

"You don't give me a chance!" I would say. "Why don't you let me know the secret? That's what I'm forto

I took an arrogant, outrageous line that left her no loopholes; I behaved as though we were living in a

"You must come and talk to me," I wrote, "or I will come and take you. I want youand the time runs

We met in a ride in the upper plantations. It must have been early in January, for there was snow on the

ground and on the branches of the trees. We walked to and fro for an hour or more, and from the first I

pitched the key high in romance and made understandings impossible. It was our worst time together. I

Now I think over that talk in the light of all that has happened since, I can imagine how she came to me full

of a human appeal I was too foolish to let her make. I don't know. I confess I have never completely

understood Beatrice. I confess I am still perplexed at many things she said and did. That afternoon, anyhow, I

was impossible. I posed and scolded. I wasI said itfor "taking the Universe by the throat!"

At last she gave way to me and talked no more. Instead she looked at meas a thing beyond her controlling,

but none the less interestingmuch as she had looked at me from behind the skirts of Lady Drew in the

"What are the difficulties" I cried. "there's no difficulty I will not overcome for you! Do your people think I'm

no equal for you? Who says it? My dear, tell me to win a title! I'll do it in five years!...

"Here am I just grown a man at the sight of you. I have wanted something to fight for. Let me fight for you!...

"I'm rich without intending it. Let me mean it, give me an honourable excuse for it, and I'll put all this rotten

I said such things as that. I write them down here in all their resounding base pride. I said these empty and

foolish things, and they are part of me. Why should I still cling to pride and be ashamed? I shouted her down.

"You think we're unsubstantial. You've listened to all these rumours Boom has started because we talked of a

newspaper of our own. When you are with me you know I'm a man; when you get away from me you think

I'm a cheat and a cad.... There's not a word of truth in the things they say about us. I've been slack. I've left

things. But we have only to exert ourselves. You do not know how wide and far we have spread our nets.

Her eyes asked mutely and asked in vain that I would cease to boast of the very qualities she admired in me.

In the night I could not sleep for thinking of that talk and the vulgar things I had said in it. I could not

understand the drift my mind had taken. I was acutely disgusted. And my unwonted doubts about myself

spread from a merely personal discontent to our financial position. It was all very well to talk as I had done of

wealth and power and peerages, but what did I know nowadays of my uncle's position? Suppose in the midst

of such boasting and confidence there came some turn I did not suspect, some rottenness he had concealed

from me? I resolved I had been playing with aeronautics long enough; that next morning I would go to him

I went up to the Hardingham through a dense London fog to see how things really stood. Before I had talked

to my uncle for ten minutes I felt like a man who has just awakened in a bleak, inhospitable room out of a

I remember that even at the sight of him I had a sense of impending calamity. He sat under the electric light

with the shadow of his hair making bars down his face. He looked shrunken, and as though his skin had

suddenly got loose and yellow. The decorations of the room seemed to have lost freshness, and outside the

blinds were upthere was not so much fog as a dun darkness. One saw the dingy outlines of the chimneys

opposite quite distinctly, and then a sky of such brown as only London can display.

"That's Boom," he said. "Boom and his damned newspapers. He's trying to fight me down. Ever since I

offered to buy the Daily Decorator he's been at me. And he thinks consolidating Do Ut cut down the ads. He

wants everything, damn him! He's got no sense of dealing. I'd like to bash his face!"

"We got to keep going. There's a scare on. Did you notice the rooms? Half the people out there this morning

are reporters. And if I talk they touch it up!... They didn't used to touch things up! Now they put in character

touchesinsulting you. Don't know what journalism's coming to. It's all Boom's doing."

"Shove us up against time, George; make money tight for us. We been handling a lot of moneyand he

"Oh, we're sound, George. Trust me for that! But all the same There's such a lot of imagination in these

He blew. "Damn Boom!" he said, and his eyes over his glasses met mine defiantly.

"What!" he shouted. "Me stop Crest Hill for Boom!" He waved a fist as if to hit his inkpot, and controlled

himself with difficulty. He spoke at last in a reasonable voice. "If I did," he said, "he'd kick up a fuss. It's no

good, even if I wanted to. Everybody's watching the place. If I was to stop building we'd be down in a week."

He had an idea. "I wish I could do something to start a strike or something. No such luck. Treat those

workmen a sight too well. No, sink or swim, Crest Hill goes on until we're under water."

"Oh, dash these explanations, George!" he cried; "You only make things look rottener than they are. It's your

way. It isn't a case of figures. We're all rightthere's only one thing we got to do."

"Show value, George. That's where this quap comes in; that's why I fell in so readily with what you brought

to me week before last. Here we are, we got our option on the perfect filament, and all we want's canadium.

Nobody knows there's more canadium in the world than will go on the edge of a sixpence except me and you.

Nobody has an idee the perfect filament's more than just a bit of theorising. Fifty tons of quap and we'd turn

that bit of theorising into something. We'd make the lamp trade sit on its tail and howl. We'd put Ediswan and

all of 'em into a parcel withour last year's trousers and a hat, and swap 'em off for a pot ofgeraniums. See?

We'd do it through Business Organisations, and there you are! See? Capern's Patent Filament!

The Ideal and the Real! George, we'll do it! We'll bring it off! And then we'll give such a facer to Boom, he'll

think for fifty years. He's laying up for our London and African meeting. Let him. He can turn the whole

paper on to us. He says the Business Organisations shares aren't worth fiftytwo and we quote 'em at

"Yes," I said, "that's all right. But I can't help thinking where should we be if we hadn't just by accident got

Capern's Perfect Filament. Because, you know it was an accidentmy buying up that."

He crumpled up his nose into an expression of impatient distaste at my unreasonableness.

"And after all, the meeting's in June, and you haven't begun to get the quap! After all, we've still got to load

"Safe as a bank," he said. "More I see of that man the more I like him. All I wish is we'd got a steamer instead

"And," I went on, "you seem to overlook what used to weigh with us a bit. This canadium side of the business

and the Capern chance has rushed you off your legs. After allit's stealing, and in its way an international

"Heaven knows where I haven't been. And here's our only chanceand you give it to that adventurous

"I wish I'd been in this before. We ought to have run out a steamer to Lagos or one of those West Coast

places and done it from there. Fancy a brig in the channel at this time of year, if it blows southwest!"

"I dessay you'd have shoved it, George. Still you know, George.... I believe in him."

We took up a telegram that was lying on his desk and opened it. His face became a livid yellow. He put the

"I'm going," I said quite consciously and dramatically. I saw the whole affairhow shall I put it?in

I sat down beside him. "Give me all the data you've got," I said, "and I'll pull this thing off."

"George," he said, "if you pull this thing offOnce or twice before you've stepped inwith that sort of

"Give me that notebook," I said, "and tell me all you know. Where's the ship? Where's Pollack? And where's

that telegram from? If that quap's to be got, I'll get it or bust. If you'll hold on here until I get back with it."...

I requisitioned my uncle's best car forthwith. I went down that night to the place of despatch named on

Nasmyth's telegram, Bampton S.O. Oxon, routed him out with a little trouble from that centre, made things

right with him and got his explicit directions; and I was inspecting the Maud Mary with young Pollack, his

cousin and aide, the following afternoon. She was rather a shock to me and not at all in my style, a beast of a

brig inured to the potato trade, and she reeked from end to end with the faint, subtle smell of raw potatoes so

that it prevailed even over the temporary smell of new paint. She was a beast of a brig, all hold and dirty

framework, and they had ballasted her with old iron and old rails and iron sleepers, and got a miscellaneous

lot of spades and iron wheelbarrows against the loading of the quap. I thought her over with Pollack, one of

those tall blond young men who smoke pipes and don't help much, and then by myself, and as a result I did

my best to sweep Gravesend clean of wheeling planks, and got in as much cord and small rope as I could for

lashing. I had an idea we might need to run up a jetty. In addition to much ballast she held, remotely hidden

in a sort of inadvertent way a certain number of ambiguous cases which I didn't examine, but which I

The captain was a most extraordinary creature, under the impression we were after copper ore; he was a

Roumanian Jew, with twitching, excitable features, who had made his way to a certificate after some

preliminary naval experiences in the Black Sea. The mate was an Essex man of impenetrable reserve. The

crew were astoundingly illclad and destitute and dirty; most of them youths, unwashed, out of colliers. One,

the cook was a mulatto; and one, the bestbuilt fellow of them all, was a Breton. There was some subterfuge

about our position on boardI forget the particulars nowI was called the supercargo and Pollack was the

steward. This added to the piratical flavour that insufficient funds and GordonNasmyth's original genius had

Those two days of bustle at Gravesend, under dingy skies, in narrow, dirty streets, were a new experience for

me. It is like nothing else in my life. I realised that I was a modern and a civilised man. I found the food filthy

and the coffee horrible; the whole town stank in my nostrils, the landlord of the Good Intent on the quay had

a standup quarrel with us before I could get even a hot bath, and the bedroom I slept in was infested by a

quantity of exotic but voracious flat parasites called locally "bugs," in the walls, in the woodwork,

everywhere. I fought them with insect powder, and found them comatose in the morning. I was dipping down

into the dingy underworld of the contemporary state, and I liked it no better than I did my first dip into it

when I stayed with my Uncle Nicodemus Frapp at the bakery at Chathamwhere, bytheby, we had to

deal with cockroaches of a smaller, darker variety, and also with bugs of sorts.

Let me confess that through all this time before we started I was immensely selfconscious, and that Beatrice

played the part of audience in my imagination throughout. I was, as I say, "saving the situation," and I was

acutely aware of that. The evening before we sailed, instead of revising our medicinechest as I had intended,

I took the car and ran across country to Lady Grove to tell my aunt of the journey I was making, dress, and

The two ladies were at home and alone beside a big fire that seemed wonderfully cheerful after the winter

night. I remember the effect of the little parlour in which they sat as very bright and domestic. Lady Osprey,

in a costume of mauve and lace, sat on a chintz sofa and played an elaborately spreadout patience by the

light of a tall shaded lamp; Beatrice, in a whiteness that showed her throat, smoked a cigarette in an armchair

and read with a lamp at her elbow. The room was whitepanelled and chintzcurtained. About those two

bright centres of light were warm dark shadow, in which a circular mirror shone like a pool of brown water. I

carried off my raid by behaving like a slave of etiquette. There were moments when I think I really made

Lady Osprey believe that my call was an unavoidable necessity, that it would have been negligent of me not

They received me with disciplined amazement. Lady Osprey was interested in my face and scrutinised the

scar. Beatrice stood behind her solicitude. Our eyes met, and in hers I could see startled interrogations.

"We've interests there. It is urgent I should go. I don't know when I may return."

The conversation was rather difficult. I embarked upon lengthy thanks for their kindness to me after my

accident. I tried to understand Lady Osprey's game of patience, but it didn't appear that Lady Osprey was

anxious for me to understand her patience. I came to the verge of taking my leave

She walked across to the piano, took a pile of music from the cabinet near, surveyed Lady Osprey's back, and

"Must talk," she said, kneeling close to me as I helped her to pick it up. "Turn my pages. At the piano."

Presently we were at the piano, and Beatrice was playing with noisy inaccuracy. She glanced over her

shoulder and Lady Osprey had resumed her patience. The old lady was very pink, and appeared to be

"Isn't West Africa a vile climate?" "Are you going to live there?" "Why are you going?"

Beatrice asked these questions in a low voice and gave me no chance to answer. Then taking a rhythm from

"At the back of the house is a gardena door in the wallon the lane. Understand?"

"I can't play tonight," she said, standing up and meeting my eyes. "I wanted to give you a parting

"Was that Wagner, Beatrice?" asked Lady Osprey looking up from her cards. "It sounded very confused."

I took my leave. I had a curious twinge of conscience as I parted from Lady Osprey. Either a first intimation

of middleage or my inexperience in romantic affairs was to blame, but I felt a very distinct objection to the

prospect of invading this good lady's premises from the garden door. I motored up to the pavilion, found

Cothope reading in bed, told him for the first time of West Africa, spent an hour with him in settling all the

outstanding details of Lord Roberts B, and left that in his hands to finish against my return. I sent the motor

back to Lady Grove, and still wearing my fur coatfor the January night was damp and bitterly

coldwalked to Bedley Corner. I found the lane to the back of the Dower House without any difficulty, and

was at the door in the wall with ten minutes to spare. I lit a cigar and fell to walking up and down. This queer

flavour of intrigue, this nocturnal gardendoor business, had taken me by surprise and changed my mental

altitudes. I was startled out of my egotistical pose and thinking intently of Beatrice, of that elfin quality in her

that always pleased me, that always took me by surprise, that had made her for example so instantly conceive

She came within a minute of midnight; the door opened softly and she appeared, a short, grey figure in a

motorcoat of sheepskin, bareheaded to the cold drizzle. She flitted up to me, and her eyes were shadows in

"Oh, that's all right. One never knows what people think or what people fancy." She took me by the arm,

"That's all right," she laughed. "We can go along the lane and into the Old Woking Road. Do you mind? Of

"I've wandered like this before.... Of course. Did you think"she nodded her head back at her home"that's

She took my arm and turned me down the lane. "Night's my time," she said by my side. "There's a touch of

the werewolf in my blood. One never knows in these old families.... I've wondered often.... Here we are,

anyhow, alone in the world. Just darkness and cold and a sky of clouds and wet. And wetogether.

"That's all," she said, releasing herself. "What bundles of clothes we are tonight. I felt we should kiss some

"Among the bracken. You remember. And your lips were cold. Were mine? The same lipsafter so

longafter so much!... And now let's trudge through this blottedout world together for a time. Yes, let me

take your arm. Just trudge. See? Hold tight to me because I know the wayand don't talkdon't talk.

Unless you want to talk.... Let me tell you things! You see, dear, the whole world is blotted outit's dead

and gone, and we're in this place. This dark wild place.... We're dead. Or all the world is dead. No! We're

dead. No one can see us. We're shadows. We've got out of our positions, out of our bodiesand together.

That's the good thing of ittogether. But that's why the world can't see us and why we hardly see the world.

We stumbled along for a time in a close silence. We passed a dimlit, rainveiled window.

"The silly world," she said, "the silly world! It eats and sleeps. If the wet didn't patter so from the trees we'd

hear it snoring. It's dreaming such stupid thingsstupid judgments. It doesn't know we are passing, we

"I'm glad we're dead," she whispered. "I'm glad we're dead. I was tired of it, dear. I was so tired of it, dear,

We splashed through a string of puddles. I began to remember things I had meant to say.

"Look here!" I cried. "I want to help you beyond measure. You are entangled. What is the trouble? I asked

"Is it something about my position?... Or is it somethingperhapsabout some other man?"

"You've puzzled me so. At firstI mean quite earlyI thought you meant to make me marry you."

"Tonight," she said after a long pause, "I can't explain. No! I can't explain. I love you! Butexplanations!

Tonight my dear, here we are in the world aloneand the world doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Here I am

in the cold with you and my bed away there deserted. I'd tell youI will tell you when things enable me to

She turned upon me. "Look here," she said, "I insist upon your being dead. Do you understand? I'm not

joking. Tonight you and I are out of life. It's our time together. There may be other times, but this we won't

spoil. We'rein Hades if you like. Where there's nothing to hide and nothing to tell. No bodies even. No

bothers. We loved each otherdown thereand were kept apart, but now it doesn't matter. It's over.... If

"I know. Oh! my dear, if you'd only understand I understand. If you'd only not careand love me tonight."

"Then LOVE me," she answered, "and leave all the things that bother you. Love me! Here I am!"

So she carried her point, and we wandered into the night together and Beatrice talked to me of love....

I'd never heard a woman before in all my life who could talk of love, who could lay bare and develop and

touch with imagination all that mass of fine emotion every woman, it may be, hides. She had read of love, she

had thought of love, a thousand sweet lyrics had sounded through her brain and left fine fragments in her

memory; she poured it out, all of it, shamelessly, skilfully, for me. I cannot give any sense of that talk, I

cannot even tell how much of the delight of it was the magic of her voice, the glow of her near presence. And

always we walked swathed warmly through a chilly air, along dim, interminable greasy roadswith never a

"But why do I love you? Why is your voice better than any voice, your face sweeter than any face?"

"And why do I love you?" she asked; "not only what is fine in you, but what isn't? Why do I love your

dullness, your arrogance? For I do. Tonight I love the very raindrops on the fur of your coat!"...

So we talked; and at last very wet, still glowing but a little tired, we parted at the garden door. We had been

wandering for two hours in our strange irrational community of happiness, and all the world about us, and

particularly Lady Osprey and her household, had been asleepand dreaming of anything rather than

She touched the lapel of my coat. "I love you NOW," she said, and lifted her face to mine.

I held her to me and was atremble from top to toe. "O God!" I cried. "And I must go!"

She slipped from my arms and paused, regarding me. For an instant the world seemed full of fantastic

"Yes, GO!" she said, and vanished and slammed the door upon me, leaving me alone like a man new fallen

That expedition to Mordet Island stands apart from all the rest of my life, detached, a piece by itself with an

atmosphere of its own. It would, I suppose, make a book by itselfit has made a fairly voluminous official

reportbut so far as this novel of mine goes it is merely an episode, a contributory experience, and I mean to

Vile weather, an impatient fretting against unbearable slowness and delay, seasickness, general discomfort

I was sick all through the journey out. I don't know why. It was the only time I was ever seasick, and I have

seen some pretty bad weather since I became a boatbuilder. But that phantom smell of potatoes was

peculiarly vile to me. Coming back on the brig we were all ill, every one of us, so soon as we got to sea,

poisoned, I firmly believe, by quap. On the way out most of the others recovered in a few days, but the

stuffiness below, the coarse food, the cramped dirty accommodation kept me, if not actually seasick, in a

state of acute physical wretchedness the whole time. The ship abounded in cockroaches and more intimate

vermin. I was cold all the time until after we passed Cape Verde, then I became steamily hot; I had been too

preoccupied with Beatrice and my keen desire to get the Maud Mary under way at once, to consider a proper

wardrobe for myself, and in particular I lacked a coat. Heavens! how I lacked that coat! And, moreover, I was

cooped up with two of the worst bores in Christendom, Pollack and the captain. Pollack, after conducting his

illness in a style better adapted to the capacity of an opera house than a small compartment, suddenly got

insupportably well and breezy, and produced a manly pipe in which he smoked a tobacco as blond as himself,

and divided his time almost equally between smoking it and trying to clean it. "There's only three things you

can clean a pipe with," he used to remark with a twist of paper in hand. "The best's a feather, the second's a

straw, and the third's a girl's hairpin. I never see such a ship. You can't find any of 'em. Last time I came this

way I did find hairpins anyway, and found 'em on the floor of the captain's cabin. Regular deposit. Eh?...

He never tired of asking me to "have a hand at Nap. Good game. Makes you forget it, and that's half the

He would sit swaying with the rolling of the ship and suck at his pipe of blond tobacco and look with an

inexpressibly sage but somnolent blue eye at the captain by the hour together. "Captain's a Card," he would

say over and over again as the outcome of these meditations. "He'd like to know what we're up to. He'd like

That did seem to be the captain's ruling idea. But he also wanted to impress me with the notion that he was a

gentleman of good family and to air a number of views adverse to the English, to English literature, to the

He had learnt the sea in the Roumanian navy, and English out of a book; he would still at times pronounce

the e's at the end of "there" and "here"; he was a naturalised Englishman, and he drove me into a reluctant and

uncongenial patriotism by his everlasting carping at things English. Pollack would set himself to "draw him

Fiftythree days I had outward, cooped up with these two and a shy and profoundly depressed mate who read

the Bible on Sundays and spent the rest of his leisure in lethargy, three and fifty days of life cooped up in a

perpetual smell, in a persistent sick hunger that turned from the sight of food, in darkness, cold and wet, in a

lightly ballasted ship that rolled and pitched and swayed. And all the time the sands in the hourglass of my

uncle's fortunes were streaming out. Misery! Amidst it all I remember only one thing brightly, one morning

of sunshine in the Bay of Biscay and a vision of frothing waves, sapphire green, a bird following our wake

You must not imagine they were ordinary days, days, I mean, of an average length; they were not so much

days as long damp slabs of time that stretched each one to the horizon, and much of that length was night.

One paraded the staggering deck in a borrowed sou'wester hour after hour in the chilly, windy, splashing

and spitting darkness, or sat in the cabin, bored and ill, and looked at the faces of those inseparable

companions by the help of a lamp that gave smell rather than light. Then one would see going up, up, up, and

then sinking down, down, down, Pollack, extinct pipe in mouth, humorously observant, bringing his mind

slowly to the seventyseventh decision that the captain was a Card, while the words flowed from the latter in

a nimble incessant good. "Dis England eet is not a country aristocratic, no! Eet is a glorified bourgeoisie! Eet

is plutocratic. In England dere is no aristocracy since de Wars of Roses. In the rest of Europe east of the

"Eet is all middleclass, youra England. Everything you look at, middleclass. Respectable! Everything

goodeet is, you say, shocking. Madame Grundy! Eet is all limited and computing and selfseeking. Dat is

why your art is so limited, youra fiction, your philosophin, why you are all so inartistic. You want nothing

He had all those violent adjuncts to speech we Western Europeans have abandoned, shruggings of the

shoulders, waving of the arms, thrusting out of the face, wonderful grimaces and twiddlings of the hands

under your nose until you wanted to hit them away. Day after day it went on, and I had to keep any anger to

myself, to reserve myself for the time ahead when it would be necessary to see the quap was got aboard and

stowedknee deep in this man's astonishment. I knew he would make a thousand objections to all we had

before us. He talked like a drugged man. It ran glibly over his tongue. And all the time one could see his

seamanship fretting him, he was gnawed by responsibility, perpetually uneasy about the ship's position,

perpetually imagining dangers. If a sea hit us exceptionally hard he'd be out of the cabin in an instant making

an outcry of inquiries, and he was pursued by a dread of the hold, of ballast shifting, of insidious wicked

leaks. As we drew near the African coast his fear of rocks and shoals became infectious.

"I do not know dis coast," he used to say. "I cama hera because GordonNasmyth was coming too. Den he

"Fortunes of war," I said, and tried to think in vain if any motive but sheer haphazard could have guided

GordonNasmyth in the choice of these two men. I think perhaps GordonNasmyth had the artistic

temperament and wanted contrasts, and also that the captain helped him to express his own malignant

He was indeed an exceptionally inefficient captain. On the whole I was glad I had come even at the eleventh

(The captain, bytheby, did at last, out of sheer nervousness, get aground at the end of Mordet's Island, but

I suspected the mate of his opinion of the captain long before he expressed it. He was, I say, a taciturn man,

but one day speech broke through him. He had been sitting at the table with his arms folded on it, musing

The mate lifted his heavy eyes to me and regarded me for a moment. Then he began to heave with the

beginnings of speech. He disembarrassed himself of his pipe. I cowered with expectation. Speech was

He moved his head strangely and mysteriously, but a child might have known he spoke of the captain.

He regarded me doubtfully for a time, and at last decided for the sake of lucidity to clench the matter.

He nodded like a man who gives a last tap to a nail, and I could see he considered his remark well and truly

laid. His face, though still resolute, became as tranquil and uneventful as a huge hall after a public meeting

More would have been too much. The thing was said. But from that time forth I knew I could depend upon

him and that he and I were friends. It happens I never did have to depend upon him, but that does not affect

Forward the crew lived lives very much after the fashion of ours, more crowded, more cramped and dirty,

wetter, steamier, more verminous. The coarse food they had was still not so coarse but that they did not think

they were living "like fighting cocks." So far as I could make out they were all nearly destitute men; hardly

any of them had a proper sea outfit, and what small possessions they had were a source of mutual distrust.

And as we pitched and floundered southward they gambled and fought, were brutal to one another, argued

There's no romance about the sea in a small sailing ship as I saw it. The romance is in the mind of the

landsman dreamer. These brigs and schooners and brigantines that still stand out from every little port are

relics from an age of petty trade, as rotten and obsolescent as a Georgian house that has sunken into a slum.

They are indeed just floating fragments of slum, much as icebergs are floating fragments of glacier. The

civilised man who has learnt to wash, who has developed a sense of physical honour, of cleanly temperate

feeding, of time, can endure them no more. They pass, and the clanking coalwasting steamers will follow

But so it was I made my voyage to Africa, and came at last into a world of steamy fogs and a hot smell of

vegetable decay, and into sound and sight of surf and distant intermittent glimpses of the coast. I lived a

strange concentrated life through all that time, such a life as a creature must do that has fallen in a well. All

The situation I was saving was very small and distant now; I felt its urgency no more. Beatrice and Lady

Grove, my uncle and the Hardingham, my soaring in the air and my habitual wide vision of swift effectual

All these African memories stand by themselves. It was for me an expedition into the realms of undisciplined

nature out of the world that is ruled by men, my first bout with that hot side of our mother that gives you the

junglethat cold side that gives you the aireddy I was beginning to know passing well. They are memories

woven upon a fabric of sunshine and heat and a constant warm smell of decay. They end in rainsuch rain

as I had never seen before, a vehement, a frantic downpouring of water, but our first slow passage through the

There we go in my memory still, a blistered dirty ship with patched sails and a battered mermaid to present

Maud Mary, sounding and taking thought between high ranks of forest whose trees come out kneedeep at

last in the water. There we go with a little breeze on our quarter, Mordet Island rounded and the quap, it

Here and there strange blossoms woke the dank intensities of green with a trumpet call of colour. Things

crept among the jungle and peeped and dashed back rustling into stillness. Always in the sluggishly drifting,

opaque water were eddyings and stirrings; little rushes of bubbles came chuckling up lightheartedly from

this or that submerged conflict and tragedy; now and again were crocodiles like a stranded fleet of logs

basking in the sun. Still it was by day, a dreary stillness broken only by insect sounds and the creaking and

flapping of our progress, by the calling of the soundings and the captain's confused shouts; but in the night as

we lay moored to a clump of trees the darkness brought a thousand swampy things to life and out of the forest

came screaming and howlings, screaming and yells that made us glad to be afloat. And once we saw between

the tree stems long blazing fires. We passed two or three villages landward, and brownblack women and

children came and stared at us and gesticulated, and once a man came out in a boat from a creek and hailed us

in an unknown tongue; and so at last we came to a great open place, a broad lake rimmed with a desolation of

mud and bleached refuse and dead trees, free from crocodiles or water birds or sight or sound of any living

thing, and saw far off, even as Nasmyth had described, the ruins of the deserted station, and hard by two little

heaps of buffhued rubbish under a great rib of rock, the quap! The forest receded. The land to the right of us

fell away and became barren, and far on across notch in its backbone was surf and the sea.

We took the ship in towards those heaps and the ruined jetty slowly and carefully. The captain came and

"I'll tell you now," I said. "We are going to lay in as close as we can to those two heaps of stuffyou see

them?under the rock. Then we are going to chuck all our ballast overboard and take those in. Then we're

I turned on him suddenly angry and met bright excited eyes. For a minute we scrutinised one another. Then I

said, "That's our risk. Trade is forbidden. But this isn't trade.... This thing's got to be done."

The brig stood in slowly through the twilight toward this strange scorched and blistered stretch of beach, and

the man at the wheel strained his ears to listening the lowvoiced angry argument that began between myself

and the captain, that was presently joined by Pollack. We moored at last within a hundred yards of our goal,

and all through our dinner and far into the night we argued intermittently and fiercely with the captain about

our right to load just what we pleased. "I will haf nothing to do with eet," he persisted. "I wash my hands." It

seemed that night as though we argued in vain. "If it is not trade," he said, "it is prospecting and mining. That

We argued and I lost my temper and swore at him. Pollack kept cooler and chewed his pipe watchfully with

that blue eye of his upon the captain's gestures. Finally I went on deck to cool. The sky was overcast I

discovered all the men were in a knot forward, staring at the faint quivering luminosity that had spread over

the heaps of quap, a phosphorescence such as one sees at times on rotting wood. And about the beach east

In the small hours I was still awake and turning over scheme after scheme in my mind whereby I might

circumvent the captain's opposition. I meant to get that quap aboard if I had to kill some one to do it. Never in

my life had I been so thwarted! After this intolerable voyage! There came a rap at my cabin door and then it

opened and I made out a bearded face. "Come in," I said, and a black voluble figure I could just see obscurely

came in to talk in my private ear and fill my cabin with its whisperings and gestures. It was the captain. He,

too, had been awake and thinking things over. He had come to explainenormously. I lay there hating him

and wondering if I and Pollack could lock him in his cabin and run the ship without him. "I do not want to

spoil dis expedition," emerged from a cloud of protestations, and then I was able to disentangle "a

commissionshush a small commissionfor special risks!" "Special risks" became frequent. I let him

explain himself out. It appeared he was also demanding an apology for something I had said. No doubt I had

insulted him generously. At last came definite offers. I broke my silence and bargained.

We had to buy the captain off; we had to promise him ten per cent. of our problematical profits. We were to

give him ten per cent. on what we sold the cargo for over and above his legitimate pay, and I found in my

outbargained and disordered state small consolation in the thought that I, as the GordonNasmyth

expedition, was to sell the stuff to myself as Business Organisations. And he further exasperated me by

insisting on having our bargain in writing. "In the form of a letter," he insisted.

My hand shook with anger as I wrote, and afterwards I could not sleep for hate of him. At last I got up. I

suffered, I found, from an unusual clumsiness. I struck my toe against my cabin door, and cut myself as I

shaved. I found myself at last pacing the deck under the dawn in a mood of extreme exasperation. The sun

rose abruptly and splashed light blindingly into my eyes and I swore at the sun. I found myself imagining

fresh obstacles with the men and talking aloud in anticipatory rehearsal of the consequent row.

Sooner or later the ridiculous embargo that now lies upon all the coast eastward of Mordet Island will be

lifted and the reality of the deposits of quap ascertained. I am sure that we were merely taking the outcrop of

a stratum of nodulated deposits that dip steeply seaward. Those heaps were merely the crumbled out contents

of two irregular cavities in the rock; they are as natural as any talus or heap of that kind, and the mud along

the edge of the water for miles is mixed with quap, and is radioactive and lifeless and faintly

phosphorescent at night. But the reader will find the full particulars of my impression of all this in the

Geological Magazine for October, l905, and to that I must refer him. There, too, he will find my unconfirmed

theories of its nature. If I am right it is something far more significant from the scientific point of view than

those incidental constituents of various rare metals, pitchblende, rutile, and the like, upon which the

revolutionary discoveries of the last decade are based. Those are just little molecular centres of disintegration,

of that mysterious decay and rotting of those elements, elements once regarded as the most stable things in

nature. But there is somethingthe only word that comes near it is CANCEROUSand that is not very

near, about the whole of quap, something that creeps and lives as a disease lives by destroying; an elemental

This is no imaginative comparison of mine. To my mind radioactivity is a real disease of matter. Moreover,

it is a contagious disease. It spreads. You bring those debased and crumbling atoms near others and those too

presently catch the trick of swinging themselves out of coherent existence. It is in matter exactly what the

decay of our old culture is in society, a loss of traditions and distinctions and assured reactions. When I think

of these inexplicable dissolvent centres that have come into being in our globethese quap heaps are surely

by far the largest that have yet been found in the world; the rest as yet mere specks in grains and crystalsI

am haunted by a grotesque fancy of the ultimate eating away and dryrotting and dispersal of all our world.

So that while man still struggles and dreams his very substance will change and crumble from beneath him. I

mention this here as a queer persistent fancy. Suppose, indeed, that is to be the end of our planet; no splendid

climax and finale, no towering accumulation of achievements, but justatomic decay! I add that to the ideas

of the suffocating comet, the dark body out of space, the burning out of the sun, the distorted orbit, as a new

and far more possible endas Science can see endsto this strange byplay of matter that we call human

life. I do not believe this can be the end; no human soul can believe in such an end and go on living, but to it

science points as a possible thing, science and reason alike. If single human beingsif one single ricketty

infantcan be born as it were by accident and die futile, why not the whole race? These are questions I have

never answered, that now I never attempt to answer, but the thought of quap and its mysteries brings them

I can witness that the beach and mud for two miles or more either way was a lifeless beachlifeless as I

could have imagined no tropical mud could ever be, and all the dead branches and leaves and rotting dead

fish and so forth that drifted ashore became presently shrivelled and white. Sometimes crocodiles would

come up out of the water and bask, and now and then water birds would explore the mud and rocky ribs that

rose out of it, in a mood of transitory speculation. That was its utmost admiration. And the air felt at once hot

and austere, dry and blistering, and altogether different the warm moist embrace that had met us at our first

I believe that the primary influence of the quap upon us was to increase the conductivity of our nerves, but

that is a mere unjustifiable speculation on my part. At any rate it gave a sort of east wind effect to life. We all

became irritable, clumsy, languid and disposed to be impatient with our languor. We moored the brig to the

rocks with difficulty, and got aground on mud and decided to stick there and tow off when we had donethe

bottom was as greasy as butter. Our efforts to fix up planks and sleepers in order to wheel the quap aboard

were as illconceived as that sort of work can beand that sort of work can at times be very illconceived.

The captain had a superstitious fear of his hold: he became wildly gesticulatory and expository and

incompetent at the bare thought of it. His shouts still echo in my memory, becoming as each crisis

But I cannot now write the history of those days of blundering and toil: of how Milton, one of the boys, fell

from a plank to the beach, thirty feet perhaps, with his barrow and broke his arm and I believe a rib, of how I

and Pollack set the limb and nursed him through the fever that followed, of how one man after another

succumbed to a feverish malaria, and how Iby virtue of my scientific reputationwas obliged to play the

part of doctor and dose them with quinine, and then finding that worse than nothing, with rum and small

doses of Easton's Syrup, of which there chanced to be a case of bottles aboardHeaven and

GordonNasmyth know why. For three long days we lay in misery and never shipped a barrowload. Then,

when they resumed, the men's hands broke out into sores. There were no gloves available; and I tried to get

them, while they shovelled and wheeled, to cover their hands with stockings or greased rags. They would not

do this on account of the heat and discomfort. This attempt of mine did, however, direct their attention to the

quap as the source of their illness and precipitated what in the end finished our lading, an informal strike.

"We've had enough of this," they said, and they meant it. They came aft to say as much. They cowed the

Through all these days the weather was variously vile, first a furnace heat under a sky of a scowling intensity

of blue, then a hot fog that stuck in one's throat like wool and turned the men on the planks into colourless

figures of giants, then a wild burst of thunderstorms, mad elemental uproar and rain. Through it all, against

illness, heat, confusion of mind, one master impetus prevailed with me, to keep the shipping going, to

maintain one motif at least, whatever else arose or ceased, the chuff of the spades, the squeaking and shriek

of the barrows, the pluppa, pluppa, pluppa, as the men came trotting along the swinging high planks, and then

at last, the dollop, dollop, as the stuff shot into the hold. "Another barrowload, thank God! Another fifteen

I found out many things about myself and humanity in those weeks of effort behind Mordet Island. I

understand now the heart of the sweater, of the harsh employer, of the niggerdriver. I had brought these men

into a danger they didn't understand, I was fiercely resolved to overcome their opposition and bend and use

them for my purpose, and I hated the men. But I hated all humanity during the time that the quap was near

And my mind was pervaded, too, by a sense of urgency and by the fear that we should be discovered and our

proceedings stopped. I wanted to get out to sea againto be beating up northward with our plunder. I was

afraid our masts showed to seaward and might betray us to some curious passer on the high sea. And one

evening near the end I saw a canoe with three natives far off down the lake; I got fieldglasses from the

captain and scrutinised them, and I could see them staring at us. One man might have been a halfbreed and

was dressed in white. They watched us for some time very quietly and then paddled off into some channel in

And for three nights running, so that it took a painful grip upon my inflamed imagination, I dreamt of my

uncle's face, only that it was ghastly white like a clown's, and the throat was cut from ear to eara long

A day or so after we had got to work upon the quap I found myself so sleepless and miserable that the ship

became unendurable. Just before the rush of sunrise I borrowed Pollack's gun, walked down the planks,

clambered over the quap heaps and prowled along the beach. I went perhaps a mile and a half that day and

some distance beyond the ruins of the old station. I became interested in the desolation about me, and found

when I returned that I was able to sleep for nearly an hour. It was delightful to have been alone for so

long,no captain, no Pollack, no one. Accordingly I repeated this expedition the next morning and the next

until it became a custom with me. There was little for me to do once the digging and wheeling was organised,

and so these prowlings of mine grew longer and longer, and presently I began to take food with me.

I pushed these walks far beyond the area desolated by the quap. On the edges of that was first a zone of

stunted vegetation, then a sort of swampy jungle that was difficult to penetrate, and then the beginnings of the

forest, a scene of huge tree stems and tangled creeper ropes and roots mingled with oozy mud. Here I used to

loaf in a state between botanising and reveriealways very anxious to know what was up above in the

It was the most unmeaning and purposeless murder imaginable. Even as I write down its wellremembered

particulars there comes again the sense of its strangeness, its pointlessness, its incompatibility with any of the

neat and definite theories people hold about life and the meaning of the world. I did this thing and I want to

tell of my doing it, but why I did it and particularly why I should be held responsible for it I cannot explain.

That morning I had come upon a track in the forest, and it had occurred to me as a disagreeable idea that this

was a human pathway. I didn't want to come upon any human beings. The less our expedition saw of the

African population the better for its prospects. Thus far we had been singularly free from native pestering. So

I turned back and was making my way over mud and roots and dead fronds and petals scattered from the

I became aware of him perhaps forty feet off standing quite still and regarding me.

He wasn't by any means a pretty figure. He was very black and naked except for a dirty loincloth, his legs

were illshaped and his toes spread wide and the upper edge of his cloth and a girdle of string cut his clumsy

abdomen into folds. His forehead was low, his nose very flat and his lower lip swollen and purplishred. His

hair was short and fuzzy, and about his neck was a string and a little purse of skin. He carried a musket, and a

powderflask was stuck in his girdle. It was a curious confrontation. There opposed to him stood I, a little

soiled, perhaps, but still a rather elaborately civilised human being, born, bred and trained in a vague

tradition. In my hand was an unaccustomed gun. And each of us was essentially a teeming, vivid brain,

tensely excited by the encounter, quite unaware of the other's mental content or what to do with him.

"Stop," I cried; "stop, you fool!" and started to run after him, shouting such things in English. But I was no

And with that instantly I brought both feet together, raised my gun, aimed quite coolly, drew the trigger

I saw, and saw with a leap of pure exaltation, the smash of my bullet between his shoulder blades. "Got him,"

said I, dropping my gun and down he flopped and died without a groan. "By Jove!" I cried with note of

surprise, "I've killed him!" I looked about me and then went forward cautiously, in a mood between curiosity

and astonishment, to look at this man whose soul I had flung so unceremoniously out of our common world. I

went to him, not as one goes to something one has made or done, but as one approaches something found.

He was frightfully smashed out in front; he must have died in the instant. I stooped and raised him by his

shoulder and realised that. I dropped him, and stood about and peered about me through the trees. "My

word!" I said. He was the second dead human beingapart, I mean, from surgical properties and mummies

and common shows of that sortthat I have ever seen. I stood over him wondering, wondering beyond

After a time I felt securer, and gave my mind again to the dead I had killed. What must I do?

It occurred to me that perhaps I ought to bury him. At any rate, I ought to hide him. I reflected coolly, and

then put my gun within easy reach and dragged him by the arm towards a place where the mud seemed soft,

and thrust him in. His powderflask slipped from his loincloth, and I went back to get it. Then I pressed him

Afterwards this all seemed to me most horrible, but at the time it was entirely a matteroffact transaction. I

looked round for any other visible evidence of his fate, looked round as one does when one packs one's

When I got my bearings, and carefully returned towards the ship. I had the mood of grave concentration of a

boy who has lapsed into poaching. And the business only began to assume proper proportions for me as I got

near the ship, to seem any other kind of thing than the killing of a bird or rabbit.

In the night, however, it took on enormous and portentous forms. "By God!" I cried suddenly, starting wide

I lay after that wide awake, staring at my memories. In some odd way these visions mixed up with my dream

of in my uncle in his despair. The black body which saw now damaged and partly buried, but which,

nevertheless, I no longer felt was dead but acutely alive and perceiving, I mixed up with the ochreous slash

under my uncle's face. I tried to dismiss this horrible obsession from my mind, but it prevailed over all my

The next day was utterly black with my sense of that ugly creature's body. I am the least superstitious of men,

but it drew me. It drew me back into those thickets to the very place where I had hidden him.

Methodically I buried his swollen and mangled carcass again, and returned to the ship for another night of

dreams. Next day for all the morning I resisted the impulse to go to him, and played nap with Pollack with

my secret gnawing at me, and in the evening started to go and was near benighted. I never told a soul of them

Next day I went early, and he had gone, and there were human footmarks and ugly stains round the muddy

I returned to the ship, disconcerted and perplexed. That day it was the men came aft, with blistered hands and

faces, and sullen eyes. When they proclaimed, through Edwards, their spokesman, "We've had enough of this,

We were none too soon. People had been reconnoitring us, the telegraph had been at work, and we were not

four hours at sea before we ran against the gunboat that had been sent down the coast to look for us and that

would have caught us behind the island like a beast in a trap. It was a night of driving cloud that gave

intermittent gleams of moonlight; the wind and sea were strong and we were rolling along through a drift of

rails and mist. Suddenly the world was white with moonshine. The gunboat came out as a long dark shape

"The captain be damned" said I, and we let him sleep through two hours of chase till a rainstorm swallowed

us up. Then we changed our course and sailed right across them, and by morning only her smoke was

We were clear of Africaand with the booty aboard I did not see what stood between us and home.

For the first time since I had fallen sick in the Thames my spirits rose. I was seasick and physically

disgusted, of course, but I felt kindly in spite of my qualms. So far as I could calculate then the situation was

saved. I saw myself returning triumphantly into the Thames, and nothing on earth to prevent old Capern's

Perfect Filament going on the market in fortnight. I had the monopoly of electric lamps beneath my feet.

I was released from the spell of that bloodstained black body all mixed up with greyblack mud. I was going

back to baths and decent food and aeronautics and Beatrice. I was going back to Beatrice and my real life

againout of this well into which I had fallen. It would have needed something more than seasickness and

I told the captain that I agreed with him that the British were the scum of Europe, the westward drift of all the

people, a disgusting rabble, and I lost three pounds by attenuated retail to Pollack at ha'penny nap and euchre.

And then you know, as we got out into the Atlantic this side of Cape Verde, the ship began to go to pieces. I

don't pretend for one moment to understand what happened. But I think Greiffenhagen's recent work on the

effects of radium upon ligneous tissue does rather carry out my idea that emanations from quap have rapid

From the first there had been a different feel about the ship, and as the big winds and waves began to strain

her she commenced leaking. Soon she was leakingnot at any particular point, but everywhere. She did not

spring a leak, I mean, but water came in first of all near the decaying edges of her planks, and then through

I firmly believe the water came through the wood. First it began to ooze, then to trickle. It was like trying to

carry moist sugar in a thin paper bag. Soon we were taking in water as though we had opened a door in her

Once it began, the thing went ahead beyond all fighting. For a day or so we did our best, and I can still

remember in my limbs and back the pumpingthe fatigue in my arms and the memory of a clear little

dribble of water that jerked as one pumped, and of knocking off and the being awakened to go on again, and

of fatigue piling up upon fatigue. At last we ceased to think of anything but pumping; one became a thing of

torment enchanted, doomed to pump for ever. I still remember it as pure relief when at last Pollack came to

"The captain says the damned thing's going down right now;' he remarked, chewing his mouthpiece. "Eh?"

And without hurry or alacrity, sullenly and wearily we got into the boats and pulled away from the Maud

Mary until we were clear of her, and then we stayed resting on our oars, motionless upon a glassy sea,

waiting for her to sink. We were all silent, even the captain was silent until she went down. And then he

"Dat is the first ship I haf ever lost.... And it was not a fair game! It wass not a cargo any man should take.

I stared at the slow eddies that circled above the departed Maud Mary, and the last chance of Business

Organisations. I felt weary beyond emotion. I thought of my heroics to Beatrice and my uncle, of my prompt

"I'LL go," and of all the ineffectual months I had spent after this headlong decision. I was moved to laughter

But the captain and the men did not laugh. The men scowled at me and rubbed their sore and blistered hands,

As all the world knows we were picked up by the Union Castle liner, Portland Castle.

The hairdresser aboard was a wonderful man, and he even improvised me a dress suit, and produced a clean

shirt and warm underclothing. I had a hot bath, and dressed and dined and drank a bottle of Burgundy.

"Now," I said, "are there any newspapers? I want to know what's been happening in the world."

My steward gave me what he had, but I landed at Plymouth still largely ignorant of the course of events. I

shook off Pollack, and left the captain and mate in an hotel, and the men in a Sailor's Home until I could send

The newspapers I bought, the placards I saw, all England indeed resounded to my uncle's bankruptcy.

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 the crowd of importunate courtiers there were just half a dozen uninviting

men, journalists waiting for an interview. Ropper the big commissionaire was still there, but now indeed he

was defending my uncle from something more than timewasting intrusions. I found the little man alone in

the inner office pretending to work, but really brooding. He was looking yellow and deflated.

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

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

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

"My stomack isn't what it was," he explained. "One finds itthese times. How did it all happen, George?

I told him concisely. He nodded to the paragraphs of my narrative and at the end he poured something from a

medicine bottle into a sticky little wineglass and drank it. I became aware of the presence of drugs, of three or

four small bottles before him among his disorder of papers, of a faint elusively familiar odour in the room.

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

He reflected, bottle in hand. "Sometimes the luck goes with you and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it

He asked a few questions and then his thoughts came back to his own urgent affairs. I tried to get some

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

"Besidesyou'd better keep out of it. It's getting tight. Get 'em talking. Go down to Crest Hill and fly. That's

I will confess that that Mordet Island nightmare of mine returned, and as I looked at him his hand went out

"I been fightin' on that. Every man fights on some thinggives way somewhereshead, heart,

liversomething. Zzzz. Gives way somewhere. Napoleon did at last. All through the Waterloo campaign,

The mood of depression passed as the drug worked within him. His eyes brightened. He began to talk big. He

began to dress up the situation for my eyes, to recover what he had admitted to me. He put it as a retreat from

"It's a battle, Georgea big fight. We're fighting for millions. I've still chances. There's still a card or so. I

"I can't, George. It's like asking to look at some embryo. You got to wait. I know. In a sort of way, I know.

My perception of disastrous entanglements deepened with the rise of his spirits. It was evident that I could

only help to tie him up in whatever net was weaving round his mind by forcing questions and explanations

I had to repeat the question. His busy whispering lips stopped for a moment, and he answered in the note of

"She'd like to be in the battle with me. She'd like to be here in London. But there's corners I got to turn

alone." His eye rested for a moment 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 tomorrow night, I

My return home to Lady Grove was a very different thing from what I had anticipated when I had got out to

sea with my load of quap and fancied the PerfectFilament was safe within my grasp. As I walked through

the evening light along the downs, the summer stillness seemed like the stillness of something newly dead.

Cessation was manifest everywhere. There had been, I learnt from my aunt, a touching and quite voluntary

demonstration when the Crest Hill work had come to an end and the men had drawn their last pay; they had

I cannot now recall the manner in which my aunt and I greeted one another. I must have been very tired there,

but whatever impression was made has gone out of my memory. But I recall very clearly how we sat at the

little round table near the big window that gave on the terrace, and dined and talked. I remember her talking

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 doing things was never mine. And sincesince. Since he began to get so rich,

"More's kept from me than anyone. The very servants won't let me know. They try and stop the worst of the

papersBoom's thingsfrom coming upstairs.... I suppose they've got him in a corner, George. Poor old

Teddy! Poor old Adam and Eve we are! Ficial Receivers with flaming swords to drive us out of our garden!

I'd hoped we'd never have another Trek. Wellanyway, 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 we can't help him. I suppose we'd only worry him.

The next day was one of those days of strong perception that stand out clear in one's memory when the

common course of days is blurred. I can recall now the awakening in the large familiar room that was always

kept for me, and how I lay staring at its chintzcovered chairs, its spaced fine furniture, its glimpse of the

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 the newspapers after breakfastI and my aunt togetherand then I walked up

to see what Cothope had done in the matter of Lord Roberts B. Never before had I appreciated so acutely the

ample brightness of the Lady Grove gardens, the dignity and wide peace of all about me. It was one of those

warm mornings in late May that have won all the glory of summer without losing the gay delicacy of spring.

The shrubbery was bright with laburnum and lilac, the beds swarmed with daffodils and narcissi and with

I went along the wellkept paths among the rhododendra and through the private gate into the woods where

the bluebells and common orchid were in profusion. Never before had I tasted so completely the fine sense of

privilege and ownership. And all this has to end, I told myself, all this has to end.

Neither my uncle nor I had made any provision for disaster; all we had was in the game, and I had little doubt

now of the completeness of our ruin. For the first time in my life since he had sent me that wonderful

telegram of his I had to consider that common anxiety of mankind,Employment. I had to come off my

And suddenly I found myself at the cross drives where I had seen Beatrice for the first time after so many

years. It is strange, but so far as I can recollect I had not thought of her once since I had landed at Plymouth.

No doubt she had filled the background of my mind, but I do not remember one definite, clear thought. I had

Suddenly I was filled with the thought of her and a great longing for her. What would she do when she

realised our immense disaster? What would she do? How would she take it? It filled me with astonishment to

I went on through the plantations and out upon the downs, and thence I saw Cothope with a new glider of his

own design soaring down wind to my old familiar "grounding" place. To judge by its long rhythm it was a

very good glider. "Like Cothope's cheek," thought I, "to go on with the research. I wonder if he's keeping

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

"I just stuck on and did what I could with the stuff. I got a bit of money of my ownand I said to myself,

'Well, here you are with the gear and no one to look after you. You won't get such a chance again, my boy,

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

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

"Oh! I read the papers. It's scandalous, sir, such work as ours should depend on things like that. You and I

"Nothing to excuse," I said. "I've always been a Socialistof a sortin theory. Let's go and have a look at

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

"Glad to think you're a Socialist, sir," he said, "it's the only civilised state. I been a Socialist some yearsoff

the Clarion. It's a rotten scramble, this world. It takes the things we make and invent and it plays the silly fool

with 'em. We scientific people, we'll have to take things over and stop all this financing and advertisement

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 Cothope regarding him, and it was borne in upon me more acutely than ever that all this had

to end. I had a feeling just like the feeling of a boy who wants to do wrong, that I would use up the stuff while

I had it before the creditors descended. I had a queer fancy, too, I remember, that if I could get into the air it

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

I worked and interested myself with Cothope all the morning and for a time forgot my other troubles. But the

thought of Beatrice flooded me slowly 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 I must hunt her up and see her soon. I got

everything forward and lunched with Cothope, and then with the feeblest excuses left him in order to prowl

down through the woods towards Bedley Corner. I became a prey to wretched hesitations and diffidence.

Ought I to go near her now? I asked myself, reviewing all the social abasements of my early years. At last,

about five, I called at the Dower House. I was greeted by their Charlottewith a forbidding eye and a cold

There came into my head some prowling dream of meeting her. I went along the lane towards Woking, the

I mooned for a time in our former footsteps, then swore and turned back across the fields, and then conceived

a distaste for Cothope and went Downward. At last I found myself looking down on the huge abandoned

That gave my mind a twist into a new channel. My uncle came uppermost again. What a strange, melancholy

emptiness of intention that stricken enterprise seemed in the even evening sunlight, what vulgar magnificence

and crudity and utter absurdity! It was as idiotic as the pyramids. I sat down on the stile, staring at it as

though I had never seen that forest of scaffold poles, that waste of walls and bricks and plaster and shaped

stones, that wilderness of broken soil and wheeling tracks and dumps before. It struck me suddenly as the

compactest image and sample of all that passes for Progress, of all the advertisementinflated spending, the

aimless building up and pulling down, the enterprise and promise of my age. This was our fruit, this was what

he had done, I and my uncle, in the fashion of our time. We were its leaders and exponents, we were the thing

it most flourishingly produced. For this futility in its end, for an epoch of such futility, the solemn scroll of

For this the armies drilled, for this the Law was administered and the prisons did their duty, for this the

millions toiled and perished in suffering, in order that a few of us should build palaces we never finished,

make billiardrooms under ponds, run imbecile walls round irrational estates, scorch about the world in

motorcars, devise flyingmachines, play golf and a dozen such foolish games of ball, crowd into chattering

dinner parties, gamble and make our lives one vast, dismal spectacle of witless waste! So it struck me then,

and for a time I could think of no other interpretation. This was Life! It came to me like a revelation, a

revelation at once incredible and indisputable of the abysmal folly of our being.

I turned half hopefulso foolish is a lover's imagination, and stopped amazed. It was my uncle. His face was

We stood swaying and then came forward with a weak motion of his arms like a man who cannot see

distinctly, and caught at and leant upon the stile. For a moment we were absolutely still. He made a clumsy

gesture towards the great futility below and choked. I discovered that his face was wet with tears, that his wet

glasses blinded him. He put up his little fat hand and clawed them off clumsily, felt inefficiently for his

pockethandkerchief, and then, to my horror, as he clung to me, he began to weep aloud, this little, old

worldworn swindler. It wasn't just sobbing 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."

"It's not a fair game, George. They tire you out. And I'm not well. My stomach's all wrong. And I been and

got a cold. I always been li'ble to cold, and this one's on my chest. And then they tell you to speak up. They

bait youand bait you, and bait you. It's torture. The strain of it. You can't remember what you said. You're

bound to contradict yourself. It's like Russia, George.... It isn't fair play.... Prominent man. I've been next at

dinners with that chap, Neal; I've told him storiesand he's bitter! Sets out to ruin me. Don't ask a civil

questionbellows." He broke down again. "I've been bellowed at, I been bullied, I been treated like a dog.

Dirty cads they are! Dirty cads! I'd rather be a ThreeCard Sharper than a barrister; I'd rather sell cat'smeat

"They sprung things on me this morning, things I didn't expect. They rushed 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 mouthfulnot in the lunch hour. I couldn't face it. It's true, GeorgeI couldn't face it.

I said I'd get a bit of air and slipped out and down to the Embankment, and there I took a boat to Richmond.

Some idee. I took a rowing boat when I got there and I rowed about on the river for a bit. A lot of chaps and

girls there was on the bank laughed at my shirtsleeves and top hat. Dessay they thought it was a pleasure

trip. Fat lot of pleasure! I rowed round for a bit and came in. Then I came on here. Windsor way. And there

"And I thought I'd live in that place, George and die a lord! It's a great place, reely, an imperialif anyone

"Look here!" I said. "What's that abouta warrant? Are you sure they'll get a warrant? I'm sorry uncle; but

"Haven't I told you?" "Yes, but they won't do very much to you for that. They'll only bring you up for the rest

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

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

"We've all done things," I said. "It's part of the game the world makes us play. If they want to arrest

"That chap Wittaker Wright," he said, "he had his stuff ready. I haven't. Now you got it, George. That's the

That memory of my uncle at the gate is very clear and full. I am able to recall even the undertow of my

thoughts while he was speaking. I remember my pity and affection for him in his misery growing and stirring

within me, my realisation that at any risk I must help him. But then comes indistinctness again. I was

beginning to act. I know I persuaded him to put himself in my hands, and began at once to plan and do. I

think that when we act most we remember least, that just in the measure that the impulse of our impressions

translates itself into schemes and movements, it ceases to record itself in memories. I know I resolved to get

him away at once, and to use the Lord Roberts B in effecting that. It was clear he was soon to be a hunted

man, and it seemed to me already unsafe for him to try the ordinary Continental routes in his flight. I had to

evolve some scheme, and evolve it rapidly, how we might drop most inconspicuously into the world across

the water. My resolve to have one flight at least in my airship fitted with this like hand to glove. It seemed to

me we might be able to cross over the water in the night, set our airship adrift, and turn up as pedestrian

tourists in Normandy or Brittany, and so get away. That, at any rate, was my ruling idea.

I sent off Cothope with a dummy note to Woking, because I did not want to implicate him, and took my uncle

to the pavilion. I went down to my aunt, and made a clean breast of the situation. She became admirably

competent. We went into his dressingroom and ruthlessly broke his locks. 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 his pedestrian

gear; and, in addition, a big motoring overcoat and a supply of rugs to add to those I had at the pavilion. I also

got a flask of brandy, and she made sandwiches. I don't remember any servants appearing, and I forget where

she got those sandwiches. Meanwhile we talked. Afterwards I thought with what a sure confidence we talked

"No woman ever has respected the lawever," she said. "It's too silly.... The things it lets you do! And then

"They'll think we're going mooning," she said, jerking her head at the household. "I wonder what they make

of uscriminals." ... An immense droning note came as if in answer to that. It startled us both for a moment.

"The dears!" she said. "It's the gong for dinner!... But I wish I could help little Teddy, George. It's awful to

think of him there with hot eyes, red and dry. And I knowthe sight of me makes him feel sore. Things I

said, George. If I could have seen, I'd have let him have an omnibusful of Scrymgeours. I cut him up. He'd

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

I went over the plans I had made for communicating, and the things I thought she might do. I had given her

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

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

I found my uncle in my sittingroom in an armchair, with his feet upon the fender of the gas stove, which

he had lit, and now he was feebly drunken with my whisky, and very weary in body and spirit, and inclined to

He changed his clothes slowly and unwillingly. I had to bully him, I had almost to shove him to the airship

and tuck him up upon its wicker flat. Singlehanded I made but a clumsy start; we scraped along the roof of

the shed and bent a van of the propeller, and for a time I hung underneath without his offering a hand to help

me to clamber up. If it hadn't been for a sort of anchoring trolley device of Cothope's, a sort of slip anchor

V The incidents of our flight in Lord Roberts B do not arrange themselves in any consecutive order. To think

of that adventure is like dipping haphazard into an album of views. One is reminded first of this and then of

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. I lay forward, and my uncle behind me in such a position that he could

see hardly anything of our flight. We were protected from rolling over simply by netting between the steel

stays. It was impossible for us to stand up at all; we had either to lie or crawl on all fours over the basket

work. Amidships were lockers made of Watson's Aulite material,and between these it was that I had put

my uncle, wrapped in rugs. I wore sealskin motoring boots and gloves, and a motoring fur coat over my

tweeds, and I controlled the engine by Bowden wires and levers forward. The early part of that night's

experience was made up of warmth, of moonlit Surrey and Sussex landscape, and of a rapid and successful

flight, ascending and swooping, and then ascending again southward. I could not watch the clouds because

the airship overhung me; I could not see the stars nor gauge the meteorological happening, but it was fairly

clear to me that a wind shifting between north and northeast was gathering strength, and after I had satisfied

myself by a series of entirely successful expansions and contractions of the real airworthiness of Lord

Roberts B, I stopped the engine to save my petrol, and let the monster drift, checking its progress by the dim

landscape below. My uncle lay quite still behind me, saying little and staring in front of him, and I was left to

My thoughts, whatever they were, have long since faded out of memory, and my sensations have merged into

one continuous memory of an countryside lying, as it seemed, under snow, with square patches of dimness,

white phantoms of roads, rents and pools of velvety blackness, and lampjewelled houses. I remember a train

boring its way like a hastening caterpillar of fire across the landscape, and how distinctly I heard its clatter.

Every town and street was buttoned with street lamps. I came quite close to the South Downs near Lewes,

and all the lights were out in the houses, and the people gone to bed. We left the land a little to the east of

Brighton, and by that time Brighton was well abed. and the brightly lit seafront deserted. Then I let out the

I do not clearly know what happened in the night. I think I must have dozed, and probably my uncle slept. I

remember that once or twice I heard him talking in an eager, muffled voice to himself, or to an imaginary

court. But there can be no doubt the wind changed right round into the east, and that we were carried far

down the Channel without any suspicion of the immense leeway we were making. I remember the kind of

stupid perplexity with which I saw the dawn breaking over a grey waste of water, below, and realised that

something was wrong. I was so stupid that it was only after the sunrise I really noticed the trend of the foam

caps below, and perceived we were in a severe easterly gale. Even then, instead of heading southeasterly, I

set the engine going, headed south, and so continued a course that must needs have either just hit Ushant, or

carry us over the Bay of Biscay. I thought I was east of Cherbourg, when I was far to the west and stopped

my engine in that belief, and then set it going again. I did actually sight the coast of Brittany to the southeast

in the late afternoon, and that it was woke me up to the gravity of our position. I discovered it by accident in

the southeast, when I was looking for it in the southwest. I turned about east and faced the wind for some

time, and finding I had no chance in its teeth, went high, where it seemed less violent, and tried to make a

course southeast. It was only then that I realised what a gale I was in. I had been going westward, and perhaps

Then I began what I suppose would be called a Fight against the east wind. One calls it a Fight, but it was

really almost as unlike a fight as plain sewing. The wind tried to drive me westwardly, and I tried to get as

much as I could eastwardly, with the wind beating and rocking us irregularly, but by no means unbearably,

for about twelve hours. My hope lay in the wind abating, and our keeping in the air and eastward of Finisterre

until it did, and the chief danger was the exhaustion of our petrol. It was a long and anxious and almost

meditative time; we were fairly warm, and only slowly getting hungry, and except that my uncle grumbled a

little and produced some philosophical reflections, and began to fuss about having a temperature, we talked

very little. I was tired and sulky, and chiefly worried about the engine. I had to resist a tendency to crawl back

and look at it. I did not care to risk contracting our gas chamber for fear of losing gas. Nothing was less like a

fight. I know that in popular magazines, and so forth, all such occasions as this are depicted in terms of

hysteria. Captains save their ships engineers complete their bridges, generals conduct their battles, in a state

of dancing excitement, foaming recondite technicalities at the lips. I suppose that sort of thing works up the

reader, but so far as it professes to represent reality, I am convinced it is all childish nonsense. schoolboys of

fifteen, girls of eighteen, and literary men all their lives, may have these squealing fits, but my own

experience is that most exciting scenes are not exciting, and most of the urgent moments in life are met by

Neither I nor my uncle spent the night in ejaculations, nor in humorous allusions, nor any of these things. We

My uncle stuck in his place and grumbled about his stomach, and occasionally rambled off into expositions

of his financial position and denunciations of Nealhe certainly struck out one or two good phrases for

Nealand I crawled about at rare intervals in a vague sort of way and grunted, and our basketwork creaked

continually, and the wind on our quarter made a sort of ruffled flapping in the wall of the gas chamber. For all

I must have dozed, and it was still dark when I realised with a start that we were nearly due south of, and a

long way from, a regularlyflashing lighthouse, standing out before the glow of some great town, and then

that the thing that had awakened me was the cessation of our engine, and that we were driving back to the

Then, indeed, for a time I felt the grim thrill of life. I crawled forward to the cords of the release valves, made

my uncle crawl forward too, and let out the gas until we were falling down through the air like a clumsy

I saw the lights of Bordeaux when it was quite dark, a nebulous haze against black; of that I am reasonably

sure. But certainly our fall took 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 miles from Bordeaux, whose harbour lights I must have

I remember coming down at last with a curious indifference, and actually rousing myself to steer. But the

actual coming to earth was exciting enough. I remember our prolonged dragging landfall, and the difficulty I

had to get clear, and how a gust of wind caught Lord Roberts B as my uncle stumbled away from the ropes

and litter, and dropped me heavily, and threw me on to my knees. Then came the realisation that the monster

was almost consciously disentangling itself for escape, and then the light leap of its rebound. The rope

slipped out of reach of my hand. I remember running kneedeep in a salt pool in hopeless pursuit of the

As it dragged and rose seaward, and how only after it had escaped my uttermost effort to recapture it, did I

realise that this was quite the best thing that could have happened. It drove swiftly over the sandy dunes,

lifting and falling, and was hidden by a clump of windbitten trees. Then it reappeared much further off, and

still receding. It soared for a time, and sank slowly, and after that I saw it no more. I suppose it fell into the

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

But if I find it hard to tell the story of our long flight through the air overseas, at least that dawn in France

stands cold and clear and full. I see again almost as if I saw once more with my bodily eyes the ridges of sand

rising behind ridges of sand, grey and cold and blackbrowed, with an insufficient grass. I feel again the

clear, cold chill of dawn, and hear the distant barking of a dog. I find myself asking again, "What shall we do

At first my uncle occupied my attention. He was shivering a good deal, and it was all I could do to resist my

desire to get him into a comfortable bed at once. But I wanted to appear plausibly in this part of the world. I

felt it would not do to turn up anywhere at dawn and rest, it would be altogether too conspicuous; we must

rest until the day was well advanced, and then appear as roadstained pedestrians seeking a meal. I gave him

most of what was left of the biscuits, emptied our flasks, and advised him to sleep, but at first it was too cold,

I was struck now by the flushed weariness of his face, and the look of age the grey stubble on his unshaved

chin gave him. He sat crumpled up, shivering and coughing, munching reluctantly, but drinking eagerly, and

whimpering a little, a dreadfully pitiful figure to me. But we had to go through with it; there was no way out

Presently the sun rose over the pines, and the sand grew rapidly warm. My uncle had done eating, and sat

Thenit was horrible to mehe cried, "I ought to be in bed; I ought to be in bed... instead of flying about,"

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

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

Presently, after a long time, I perceived he was asleep. His breath came with peculiar wheezings, and every

now and again he would cough. I was very stiff and tired myself, and perhaps I dozed. I don't remember. I

remember only sitting, as it seemed, nigh interminably, beside him, too weary even to think in that sandy

No one came near us; no creature, not even a dog. I roused myself at last, 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 way through the

wearisome sand to a farmhouse. There I feigned even a more insufficient French than I possess naturally, and

let it appear that we were pedestrians from Biarritz who had lost our way along the shore and got benighted.

This explained us pretty well, I thought, and we got most heartening coffee and a cart to a little roadside

station. My uncle grew more and more manifestly ill with every stage of our journey. I got him to Bayonne,

where he refused at first to eat, and was afterwards very sick, and then took him shivering and collapsed up a

We found one homely inn with two small bedrooms, kept by a kindly Basque woman. I got him to bed, and

that night shared his room, and after an hour or so of sleep he woke up in a raging fever and with a wandering

mind, cursing Neal and repeating long, inaccurate lists of figures. He was 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 very

mysterious and technical and modern and unhelpful. He spoke of cold and exposure, and la grippe and

pneumonia. He gave many explicit and difficult directions.... I perceived it devolved upon me to organise

nursing and a sickroom. I installed a religieuse in the second bedroom of the inn, and took a room for

And now my story converges on what, in that queer corner of refuge out of the world, was destined to be my

uncle's deathbed. There is a background of the Pyrenees, of blue hills and sunlit houses, of the old castle of

Luzon and a noisy cascading river, and for a foreground the dim, stuffy room whose windows both the

religieuse and hostess conspired to shut, with its waxed floor, its fourposter bed, its characteristically French

chairs and fireplace, its champagne bottles and dirty basins and used towels and packets of Somatose on the

table. And in the sickly air of the confined space in behind the curtains of the bed lay my little uncle, with an

effect of being enthroned and secluded, 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 speak to him or look at him.

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

I have a confused memory of vigils and mornings and afternoons spent by that bedside, and how the

religieuse hovered about me, and how meek and good and inefficient she was, and how horribly black were

her nails. Other figures come and go, and particularly the doctor, a young man plumply rococo, in bicycling

dress, with fine waxen features, a little pointed beard, and the long black frizzy hair and huge tie of a minor

poet. Bright and clearcut and irrelevant are memories of the Basque hostess of my uncle's inn and of the

family of Spanish people who entertained me and prepared the most amazingly elaborate meals for me, with

soup and salad and chicken and remarkable sweets. They were all very kind and sympathetic people,

systematically so. And constantly, without attracting attention, I was trying to get newspapers from home.

I have tried to make you picture him, time after time, as the young man of the Wimblehurst chemist's shop, as

the shabby assistant in Tottenham Court Road, as the adventurer of the early days of TonoBungay, as the

confident, preposterous plutocrat. And now I have to tell of him strangely changed under the shadow of

oncoming death, with his skin lax and yellow and glistening with sweat, his eyes large and glassy, his

countenance unfamiliar through the growth of a beard, his nose pinched and thin. Never had he looked so

small as now. And he talked to me in a 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 it were, disconnected from all the other

phases. It was as if he crawled out from the ruins of his career, and looked about him before he died. For he

He knew he was almost certainly dying. In a way that took the burthen of his cares off his mind. There was

"It has been a great career, George," he said, "but I shall be glad to rest. 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 he would most often exaggerate this selfsatisfaction, and talk of his splendours. He

would pluck at the sheet and stare before him, and whisper halfaudible fragments of sentences.

"What is this great place, these cloudcapped towers, these any pinnacles?... Ilion. Skypointing.... Ilion

House, the residence of one of our great merchant princes.... Terrace above terrace. Reaching to the

heavens.... Kingdoms Caesar never knew.... A great poet, George. Zzzz. Kingdoms Caesar never knew....

It was hard at times to tell when his sane talk ceased and his delirium began. The secret springs of his life, the

vain imaginations were revealed. I sometimes think that all the life of man sprawls abed, careless and

unkempt, until it must needs clothe and wash itself and come forth seemly in act and speech for the encounter

with one's fellowmen. I suspect that all things unspoken in our souls partake somewhat of the laxity of

delirium and dementia. Certainly from those slimy, tormented lips above the bristling grey beard came

Sometimes he raved about Neal, threatened Neal. "What has he got invested?" he said. "Does he think he can

escape me?... If I followed him 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

mantoo oldfor this sort of thing.... You know you're not savingyou're killing me."

Towards the end it became evident our identity was discovered. I found the press, and especially Boom's

section of it, had made a sort of hue and cry for us, sent special commissioners to hunt for us, and though

none of these emissaries reached us until my uncle was dead, one felt the forewash of that storm of energy.

The thing got into the popular French press. People became curious in their manner towards us, and a number

of fresh faces appeared about the weak little struggle that went on in the closeness behind the curtains of the

bed. The young doctor insisted on consultations, and a motorcar came up from Biarritz, and suddenly odd

people with questioning eyes began to poke in with inquiries and help. Though nothing was said, I could feel

that we were no longer regarded as simple middleclass tourists; about me, as I went, I perceived almost as

though it trailed visibly, the prestige of Finance and a criminal notoriety. Local personages of a plump and

prosperous quality appeared in the inn making inquiries, the Luzon priest became helpful, people watched our

window, and stared at me as I went to and fro; and then we had a raid from a little English clergyman and his

amiable, capable wife in severely Anglican blacks, who swooped down upon us like virtuous but resolute

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

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

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

Close at hand was the doctor with one of those cruel and idiotic injection needles modern science puts in the

hands of these halfeducated 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 importancewho 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

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 believeit 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

"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

I did not let the little clergyman come near him again, and I was watchful for any sign that his mind had been

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

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

"George. You have always been responsible for the science. George. You know better than I do. IsIs it

He would not answer. "Aspirations," he whispered. He fell into a broken monologue, regardless of me.

"Trailing clouds of glory," he said, and "firstrate poet, firstrate....George was always hard. Always."

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

Then, for a moment, his mind wandered. "Just a little link," he whispered almost pleadingly, and lay quite

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

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

"Ohpractically 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 diedgreatly comforted

by my assurance. I do not know when he died. His hand relaxed insensibly. Suddenly, with a start, with a

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

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

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

Part of the fog became a big mastiff that came towards me and stopped and slunk round me, growling, barked

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 earthalong the paths that are real, and the way that

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

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 nowthat 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 allbright and

shininglike a Dutch picture. Real! And yesterday. And here we are in a dream. You a manand me an old

woman, George. And poor little Teddy, who used to rush about and talkmaking that noise he didOh!"

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

She stood leaning over the bridge; her tearwet handkerchief gripped in her clenched hand.

"Just an hour in the old shop againand him talking. Before things got done. Before they got hold of him.

"No," I lied stoutly, suppressing the memory of that foolish injection needle I had caught the young doctor

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 onit'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 himlike an old bagunder 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 Deathgreat serious

thingswhy 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.

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

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 halfyear and

more, a halfyear 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 trouble about any civilities. I stood up and asked point blank a question that came into my head.

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

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

Her eyes flitted to the pavilion and back to me. We stood close together, extraordinarily intimate, and

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

She walked before me into the livingroom of the chalet, and I saw that she gripped her ridingwhip very

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

"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, andis that a pianola? That is your desk. I thought men's

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

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

"Beethoven, when I want to clear up my head while I'm working. He ishow one would always like to

"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

"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 pigeonholes. "Nownow 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

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.

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

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 joysthat

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

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

I have come to know so much of love that I know now what love might be. We loved, scarred and stained; we

I remember as we sat in a Canadian canoe, in a reedy, bushmasked shallow we had discovered operating out

of that pineshaded Woking canal, how she fell talking of the things that happened to her before she met me

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,

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

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 supposethe

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.

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

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

"Nothing matters," she said, completing me. "I felt I had to tell you. I wanted you to understand why I didn't

marry youwith both hands. I have loved you"she paused"have loved you ever since the day I kissed

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

"I wish I could. Anyhow, we have had this time. It has been a fine timehas it beenfor you also? I haven't

nudged you all I had to give. It's a poor giftexcept for what it means and might have been. But we are near

"You think," she said, "I could take courage and come to you and be your everyday wifewhile you work

She looked at me gravely, with extended finger. "Do you really think thatof me? Haven't you seen

"Never once have I really meant marrying you," she insisted. "Never once. I fell in love with you from the

first. But when you seemed a successful man, I told myself I wouldn't. I was lovesick for you, and you were

so stupid, I came near it then. But I knew I wasn't good enough. What could I have been to you? A woman

with bad habits and bad associations, a woman smirched. And what could I do for you or be to you? If I

wasn't good enough to be a rich man's wife, I'm certainly not good enough to be a poor one's. Forgive me for

"Good God!" I cried, disconcerted beyond measure, "won't you learn to do your own hair for me? Do you

She flung out her hands at me. "Don't spoil it," she cried. "I have given you all I have, I have given you all I

can. If I could do it, if I was good enough to do it, I would. But I am a woman spoilt and ruined, dear, and

you are a ruined man. When we are making love we're loversbut think of the gulf between us in habits and

ways of thought, in will and training, when we are not making love. Think of itand don't think of it! Don't

She suddenly knelt forward toward me, with a glowing darkness in her eyes. "Who cares if it upsets?" she

cried. "If you say another word I will 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

youreadily. Do listen to me! I love you. I shall always love you. It's because I love you that I won't go

down to become a dirty familiar thing with you amidst the grime. I've given 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 magic still? Listen

to the ripple of water from your paddle. Look at the warm evening light in the sky. Who cares if the canoe

It was our last morning together, and we had met very early, about sunrise, knowing that we were to part. No

sun shone that day. The sky was overcast, the morning chilly and lit by a clear, cold, spiritless light. A heavy

dampness in the air verged close on rain. When I think of that morning, it has always the quality of greying

Beatrice too had changed. The spring had gone out of her movement; it came to me, for the first time, that

some day she might grow old. She had become one flesh with the rest of common humanity; the softness had

gone from her voice and manner, the dusky magic of her presence had gone. I saw these things with perfect

clearness, and they made me sorry for them and for her. But they altered my love not a whit, abated it

nothing. And when we had talked awkwardly for half a dozen sentences, I came dully to my point.

"This world is a soft world," I said, "in spite of my present disasters. I know now how to do things. If I had

"But!" I did not feel angry. I had no sort of jealousy, no wounded pride, no sense of injury. I had only a

"Look here," she said. "I have been awake all night and every night. I have been thinking of thisevery

moment when we have not been together. I'm not answering you on an impulse. I love you. I love you. I'll say

"It wouldn't be together. Now we are together. Now we have been together. We are full of memories I do not

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

She turned her white face to me. "All I know of love, all I have ever dreamt or learnt of love I have packed

into these days for you. You think we might live together and go on loving. No! For you I will have no vain

repetitions. You have had the best and all of me. Would you have us, after this, meet again in London or Paris

or somewhere, scuffle to some wretched dressmaker's, meet in a cabinet particulier?"

"No," I said. "I want you to marry me. I want you to play the game of life with me as an honest woman

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

"My God! Beatrice!" I cried; "but this is cowardice and folly! Are you afraid of life? You of all people! What

does it matter what has been or what we were? Here we are with the world before us! Start clean and new

with me. We'll fight it through! I'm not such a simple lover that I'll not tell you plainly when you go wrong,

and fight our difference out with you. It's the one thing I want, the one thing I needto have you, and more

of you and more! This lovemakingit's lovemaking. It's just a part of us, an incident"

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

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

"It's no good," she cried almost petulantly. "This little world has made us what we are. Don't you seedon't

you see what I am? I can make love. I can make love and be loved, prettily. Dear, don't blame me. I have

given you all I have. If I had anything more. I have gone through it all over and over againthought it

The light has gone out of me and I am a sick and tired woman. But I'm talking wisdombitter 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 wealth just as much as by poverty. Do you think I wouldn't face life with you if I

could, if I wasn't absolutely certain I should be down and dragging in the first halfmile of the journey? Here

I amdamned! Damned! But I won't damn you. You know what I am! You know. You are too clear and

simple not to know the truth. You try to romance and hector, but you know the truth. I am a little cadsold

and done. I'm. My dear, you think I've been misbehaving, but all these days I've been on my best

"You're a fool to want me," she said. "You're a fool to want mefor my sake just as much as yours. We've

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

For a long time we spoke never a word, but walked on together, slowly and sorrowfully, reluctant to turn

"I've wanted" she went on. "I've talked to you in the nights and made up speeches. Now when I want to

make them I'm tonguetied. But to me it's just as if the moments we have had lasted for ever. Moods and

To this day I cannot determine whether she said or whether I imagined she said "chloral." Perhaps a

halfconscious diagnosis flashed it on my brain. Perhaps I am the victim of some perverse imaginative freak

of memory, some hinted possibility that scratched and seared. There the word stands in my memory, as if it

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

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

That should have been the last I saw of her, but, indeed, I was destined to see her once again. Two days after I

was at Lady Grove, I forget altogether upon what errand, and as I walked back to the station believing her to

be gone away she came upon me, and she was riding with Carnaby, just as I had seen them first. The

encounter jumped upon us unprepared. She rode by, her eyes dark in her white face, and scarcely noticed me.

She winced and grew stiff at the sight of me and bowed her head. But Carnaby, because he thought I was a

broken and discomfited man, saluted me with an easy friendliness, and shouted some genial commonplace to

And then, indeed, I tasted the ultimate bitterness of life. For the first time I felt utter futility, and was wrung

by emotion that begot no action, by shame and pity beyond words. I had parted from her dully and I had seen

my uncle break and die with dry eyes and a steady mind, but this chance sight of my lost Beatrice brought me

to tears. My face was wrung, and tears came pouring down my cheeks. All the magic she had for me 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 beech trees and cursed at fate. I wanted to do preposterous things, to pursue her, 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

There was nothing in earth or heaven to respect my curses or weeping. In the midst of it a man who had been

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

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

I have tried throughout all this story to tell things as they happened to me. In the beginningthe sheets are

still here on the table, grimy and dogseared and oldlookingI said I wanted to tell MYSELF and the

world in which I found myself, and I have done my best. But whether I have succeeded I cannot imagine. All

this writing is grey now and dead and trite and unmeaning to me; some of it I know by heart. I am the last

As I turn over the big pile of manuscript before me certain things become clearer to me, and particularly the

immense inconsequences of my experiences. It is, I see now that I have it all before me, a story of activity

and urgency and sterility. I have called it TonoBungay, but I had far better have called it Waste. I have told

of childless Marion, of my childless aunt, of Beatrice wasted and wasteful and futile. What hope is there for a

people whose women become fruitless? I think of all the energy I have given to vain things. I think of my

industrious scheming with my uncle, of Crest Hill's vast cessation, of his resonant strenuous career. 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 use and do not replace, the story of a country hectic with a wasting aimless fever of

Other people may see this country in other terms; this is how I have seen it. In some early chapter in this heap

I compared all our present colour and abundance to October foliage before the frosts nip down the leaves.

That I still feel was a good image. Perhaps I see wrongly. It may be I see decay all about me because I am, in

a sense, decay. To others it may be a scene of achievement and construction radiant with hope. I, too, have a

sort of hope, but it is a remote hope, a hope that finds no promise in this Empire or in any of the great things

How they will look in history I do not know, how time and chance will prove them I cannot guess; that is

Concurrently with writing the last chapter of this book I have been much engaged by the affairs of a new

destroyer we have completed. It has been an oddly complementary alternation of occupations. Three weeks or

so ago this novel had to be put aside in order that I might give all my time day and night to the fitting and

finishing of the engines. Last Thursday X 2, for so we call her, was done and I took her down the Thames and

It is curious how at times one's impressions will all fuse and run together into a sort of unity and become

continuous with things that have hitherto been utterly alien and remote. That rush down the river became

As I passed down the Thames I seemed in a new and parallel manner to be passing all England in review. I

saw it then as I had wanted my readers to see it. The thought came to me slowly as I picked my way through

the Pool; it stood out clear as I went dreaming into the night out upon the wide North Sea.

It wasn't so much thinking at the time as a sort of photographic thought that came and grew clear. X2 went

ripping through the dirty oily water as scissors rip through canvas, and the front of my mind was all intent

with getting her through under the bridges and in and out among the steamboats and barges and

rowingboats and piers. I lived with my hands and eyes hard ahead. I thought nothing then of any

appearances but obstacles, but for all that the back of my mind took the photographic memory of it complete

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

We started in the late afternoon. We throbbed out of our yard above Hammersmith 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 Battersea and Chelsea, round

the cape of tidy frontage that is Grosvenor Road and under Vauxhall Bridge, and Westminster opened before

us. We cleared a string of coal barges and there on the left in the October sunshine stood the Parliament

I saw it at the time unseeingly; afterwards it came into my mind as the centre of the whole broad panoramic

effect of that afternoon. The stiff square lace of Victorian Gothic with its Dutch clock of a tower came upon

me suddenly and stared and whirled past in a slow half pirouette and became still, I know, behind me as if

Not I! There in that great pile of Victorian architecture the landlords and the lawyers, the bishops, the railway

men and the magnates of commerce go to and froin their incurable tradition of commercialised

Bladesovery, of meretricious gentry and nobility sold for riches. I have been near enough to know. The Irish

and the Labourmen run about among their feet, making a fuss, effecting little, they've got no better plans

that I can see. Respect it indeed! There's a certain paraphernalia of dignity, but whom does it deceive? The

King comes down in a gilt coach to open the show and wears long robes and a crown; and there's a display of

stout and slender legs in white stockings and stout and slender legs in black stockings and artful old

gentlemen in ermine. I was reminded of one congested afternoon I had spent with my aunt amidst a cluster of

agitated women's hats in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords and how I saw the King going to open

Parliament, and the Duke of Devonshire looking like a gorgeous pedlar and terribly bored with the cap of

maintenance on a tray before him hung by slings from his shoulder. A wonderful spectacle!

It is quaint, no doubt, this Englandit is even dignified in placesand full of mellow associations. That

does not alter the quality of 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 all as that crusader my uncle championed against the nettles outside the Duffield church.

To run down the Thames so is to run one's hand over the pages in the book of England from end to end. One

begins in Craven Reach and it is as if one were in the heart of old England. Behind us are Kew and Hampton

Court with their memories of Kings and Cardinals, and one runs at first between Fulham's episcopal garden

parties and Hurlingham's playground for the sporting instinct of our race. The whole effect is English. There

is space, there are old trees and all the best qualities of the homeland in that upper reach. Putney, too, looks

Anglican on a dwindling scale. And then for a stretch the newer developments slop over, one misses

Bladesover and there come first squalid stretches of mean homes right and left and then the dingy

industrialism of the south side, and on the north bank the polite long front of nice houses, artistic, literary,

administrative people's residences, that stretches from Cheyne Walk nearly to Westminster and hides a

wilderness of slums. What a long slow crescendo that is, mile after mile, with the houses crowding closelier,

the multiplying succession of church towers, the architectural moments, the successive bridges, until you

come out into the second movement of the piece with Lambeth's old palace under your quarter and the houses

of Parliament on your bow! Westminster Bridge is ahead of you then, and through it you flash, and in a

moment the roundfaced clock tower cranes up to peer at you again and New Scotland Yard squares at you, a

For a stretch you have the essential London; you have Charing Cross railway station, heart of the world, and

the Embankment on the north side with its new hotels overshadowing its Georgian and Victorian architecture,

and mud and great warehouses and factories, chimneys, shot towers, advertisements on the south. The

northward skyline grows more intricate and pleasing, and more and more does one thank God for Wren.

Somerset House is as picturesque as the civil war, one is reminded again of the original England, one feels in

(I had a passing memory of myself there, how once I had trudged along the Embankment westward, weighing

Through that central essential London reach I drove, and X2 bored her nose under the foam regardless of it

all like a black hound going through reedson what trail even I who made her cannot tell.

And in this reach, too, one first meets the seagulls and is reminded of the sea. Blackfriars one takesjust

under these two bridges and just between them is the finest bridge moment in the worldand behold, soaring

up, hanging in the sky over a rude tumult of warehouses, over a jostling competition of traders, irrelevantly

beautiful and altogether remote, Saint Paul's! "Of course!" one says, "Saint Paul's!" It is the very 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, only the tall warehouses and

all the roar of traffic have forgotten it, every one has forgotten it; the steamships, the barges, go heedlessly by

regardless of it, intricacies of telephone wires and poles cut blackly into its thin mysteries, and presently,

when in a moment the traffic permits you and you look round for it, it has dissolved like a cloud into the grey

And then the traditional and ostensible England falls from you altogether. The third movement begins, the

last great movement in the London symphony, in which the trim scheme of the old order is altogether

dwarfed and swallowed up. Comes London Bridge, and the great warehouses tower up about you, waving

stupendous cranes, the gulls circle and scream in your ears, large ships lie among their lighters, and one is in

the port of the world. Again and again in this book I have written of England as a feudal scheme overtaken by

For the last time I must strike that note as the memory of the dear neat little sunlit ancient Tower of London

lying away in a gap among the warehouses comes back to me, that little accumulation of buildings so

provincially pleasant and dignified, overshadowed by the vulgarest, most typical exploit of modern England,

the sham Gothic casings to the ironwork of the Tower Bridge. That Tower Bridge is the very balance and

confirmation of Westminster's dull pinnacles and tower. That sham Gothic bridge; in the very gates of our

But after that one is in a world of accident and nature. For the third part of the panorama of London is beyond

all law, order, and precedence; it is the seaport and the sea. One goes down the widening reaches through a

monstrous variety of shipping, great steamers, great sailingships, trailing the flags of all the world, a

monstrous confusion of lighters, witches' conferences of brownsailed barges, wallowing tugs, a tumultuous

crowding and jostling of cranes and spars, and wharves and stores, and assertive inscriptions. Huge vistas of

dock open right and left of one, and here and there beyond and amidst it all are church towers, little patches

of indescribably oldfashioned and wornout houses, riverside pubs and the like, vestiges of townships that

were long since torn to fragments and submerged in these new growths. And amidst it all no plan appears, no

intention, no comprehensive desire. That is the very key of it all. Each day one feels that the pressure of

commerce and traffic grew, grew insensibly monstrous, and first this man made a wharf and that erected a

crane, and then this company set to work and then that, and so they jostled together to make this

unassimilable enormity of traffic. Through it we dodged and drove eager for the high seas.

I remember how I laughed aloud at the glimpse of the name of a London County Council steamboat that ran

across me. Caxton it was called, and another was Pepys, and another was Shakespeare. They seemed so

wildly out of place, splashing about in that confusion. One wanted to take them out 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 men toiling at the sweeps, the

water all aswirl with the wash of shipping, scaling into millions of little wavelets, curling and frothing under

the whip of the unceasing wind. Past it all we drove. And at Greenwich to the south, you know, there stands a

fine stone frontage where all the victories are recorded in a Painted Hall, and beside it is the "Ship" where

once upon a time those gentlemen of Westminster used to have an annual dinnerbefore the port of London

got too much for them altogether. The old facade of the Hospital was just warming to the sunset as we went

by, and after that, right and left, the river opened, the sense of the sea increased and prevailed, reach after

And out you come at last with the sun behind you into the eastern sea. You speed up and tear the oily water

louder and faster, siroo, sirooswishsiroo, and the hills of Kentover which I once fled from the Christian

teachings of Nicodemus Frappfall away on the right hand and Essex on the left. They fall away and vanish

into blue haze, and the tall slow ships behind the tugs, scarce moving ships and wallowing sturdy tugs, are all

wrought of wet gold as one goes frothing by. They stand out, bound on strange missions of life and death, to

the killing of men in unfamiliar lands. And now behind us is blue mystery and the phantom flash of unseen

lights, and presently even these are gone, and I 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 to talking in unfamiliar tongues. Out to

the open we go, to windy freedom and trackless ways. Light after light goes down. England and the

Kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions, glide abeam, astern, sink down upon

This is the note I have tried to emphasise, the note that sounds clear in my mind when I think of anything

It is a note of crumbling and confusion, of change and seemingly aimless swelling, of a bubbling up and

medley of futile loves and sorrows. But through the confusion sounds another note. Through the confusion

something drives, something that is at once human achievement and the most inhuman of all existing things.

Something comes out of it.... How can I express the values of a thing at once so essential and so immaterial.

I have figured it in my last section by the symbol of my destroyer, stark and swift, irrelevant to most human

interests. Sometimes I call this reality Science, sometimes I call it Truth. But it is something we draw by pain

and effort ont of the heart of life, that we disentangle and make clear. Other men serve it, I know, in art, in

literature, in social invention, and see it in a thousand different figures, under a hundred names. I see it

always as austerity, as beauty. This thing we make clear is the heart of life. It is the one enduring thing. Men

and nations, epochs and civilisation pass each making its contribution I do not 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 in norms, now in sounds, now in thoughts. It emerges from life with each year 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, lonely above the rush and murmur of my

Far out to the northeast there came the flicker of a squadron of warships waving white swords of light about

the sky. I kept them hulldown, and presently they were mere summer lightning over the watery edge of the

globe.... I fell into thought that was nearly formless, into doubts and dreams that have no words, and it

seemed good to me to drive ahead and on and or through the windy starlight, over the long black waves.

It was morning and day before I returned with the four sick and starving journalists who had got permission

I recall the back views of those journalists very distinctly, going with a certain damp weariness of movement,

along a side street away from the river. They were good men and bore me no malice, and they served me up

to the public in turgid degenerate Kiplingese, as a modest button on the complacent stomach of the Empire.

Though as a matter of fact, X2 isn't intended 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 to do with me, and I have long since

ceased to trouble much about such questions. I have come to see myself from the outside, my country from

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