Герберт Джордж Уэллс
Tono-Bungay
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 motor-cars 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 pe-wits; 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.
IV
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 Gordon-Nasmyth, 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 Gordon-Nasmyth’s appearance in the inner sanctum, a lank, sunburnt person in tweeds with a yellow-brown hatchet face and one faded blue eye – the other was a closed and sunken lid – and 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 ooze of brackish water.
“What’s quap?” said my uncle on the fourth repetition of the word.
“They call it quap, or quab, or quabb,” said Gordon-Nasmyth; “but our relations weren’t friendly enough to get the accent right…
“But there the stuff is for the taking. They don’t know about it. Nobody knows about it. I got down to the damned place in a canoe alone. The boys wouldn’t come. I pretended to be botanising.” …
To begin with, Gordon-Nasmyth was inclined to be dramatic.
“Look here,” he said when he first came in, shutting the door rather carefully behind him as he spoke, “do you two men – yes or no – want to put up six thousand – for – a clear good chance of fifteen hundred per cent. on your money in a year?”
“We’re always getting chances like that,” said my uncle, cocking his cigar offensively, wiping his glasses and tilting his chair back. “We stick to a safe twenty.”
Gordon-Nasmyth’s quick temper showed in a slight stiffening of his attitude.
“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 Gordon-Nasmyth! Sit down. What is it? Minerals?”
“Quap,” said Gordon-Nasmyth, fixing his eye on me, “in heaps.”
“In heaps,” said my uncle softly, with his glasses very oblique.
“You’re only fit for the grocery,” said Gordon-Nasmyth 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 radio-active 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 Xk – provisionally. 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 it – that’s all!”
“That sounds all right,” said I. “Have you samples?”
“Well – should I? You can have anything – up to two ounces.”
“Where is it?”…
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 bone-white dead trees, a sight of the hard-blue 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 rib of rock that cuts the space across, – quap!
“There it is,” said Gordon-Nasmyth, “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!”
“How did it get there?”
“God knows! … There it is – for 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 it – derelict.”
“Can’t you do any sort of deal?”
“They’re too damned stupid. You’ve got to go and take it. That’s all.”
“They might catch you.”
“They might, of course. But they’re not great at catching.”
We went into the particulars of that difficulty. “They wouldn’t catch me, because I’d sink first. Give me a yacht,” said Gordon-Nasmyth; “that’s all I need.”
“But if you get caught,” said my uncle.
I am inclined to think Gordon-Nasmyth 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 analysis, and he consented – reluctantly.
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 it prematurely.
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 to-day. 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 dark treacheries of eastern ports and uncharted channels.
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 Gordon-Nasmyth made it so real and intimate for us that afternoon – for me, at any rate – that it seemed like something seen and forgotten and now again remembered.
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 flannel – red flannel it was, I remember – a hue which is, I know, popularly supposed to double all the mystical efficacies of flannel.
“Don’t carry it about on you,” said Gordon-Nasmyth. “It makes a sore.”
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 Gordon-Nasmyth 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 practises at the sciences.
I made some commercial inquiries, and there seemed even then much truth in Gordon-Nasmyth’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 gas-mantles then in vogue. There were, however, doubts. Indeed, there were numerous doubts. What were the limits of the gas-mantle 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 Gordon-Nasmyth – imaginative? And if these values held, could we after all get the stuff? It wasn’t ours. It was on forbidden ground. You see, there were doubts of every grade and class in the way of this adventure.
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 Gordon-Nasmyth 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 of touching it seriously until Capern’s discovery.
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 Gordon-Nasmyth’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, now alone.
At times they became a sort of fairy-story 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 Gordon-Nasmyth, 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 secret – except so far as canadium and the filament went – as 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, stealing.
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 fairy-tale 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 half-gritty, half soft texture of quap, like sanded moist-sugar mixed with clay in which there stirs something —
One must feel it to understand.
V
All sorts of things came to the Hardingham and offered themselves to my uncle. Gordon-Nasmyth 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 me – I shall die amazed – that 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 have shown. He would have found it difficult to keep up their dignity.
He certainly did not keep up the dignity of the Sacred Grove, an important critical organ which he acquired one day – by 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 wrapper I discovered the other day runs: —
“THE SACRED GROVE.”
Weekly Magazine of Art, Philosophy, Science and
Belles Lettres
– — —
HAVE YOU A NASTY TASTE IN YOUR MOUTH?
IT IS LIVER
YOU NEED ONE TWENTY-THREE PILL
(JUST ONE.)
NOT A DRUG BUT A LIVE AMERICAN REMEDY
– — —
CONTENTS
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 Infinitive;
“Commence,” or “Begin;” Claverhouse; Socialism and the
Individual; The Dignity of Letters
Folk-lore Gossip
The Stage; the Paradox of Acting
Travel Biography, Verse, Fiction, etc
– — – —
THE BEST PILL IN THE WORLD FOR AN IRREGULAR LIVER
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 conceptions of mine.
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 Grove – the quiet conservatism of the one element embedded in the aggressive brilliance of the other; the contrasted notes of bold physiological experiment and extreme mental immobility.
VI
There comes back, too, among these Hardingham memories, an impression of a drizzling November day, and how we looked out of the windows upon a procession of the London unemployed.
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, half-phantom through the fog, a silent, foot-dragging, 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.
“There,” thought I, “but for the grace of God, go George and Edward Ponderevo.”
But my uncle’s thoughts ran in a different channel, and he made that vision the test of a spirited but inconclusive harangue upon Tariff Reform.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
OUR PROGRESS FROM CAMDEN TOWN TO CREST HILL
I
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 displayed by an early cinematograph, with little jumps and flickers.
As I recall this side of our life, the figure of my round-eyes, button-nosed, pink-and-white 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 can render – commented on and illuminated the new aspects.
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.
“I’m keeping a mind, George,” she explained.
“Eh?”
“Keeping a mind. Dogs I never cared for. It’s been a toss-up 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.”…
And I remember her coming in late one evening with a note-book in her hand.
“Where ya been, Susan?” said my uncle.
“Birkbeck – Physiology. 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 from me!”
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 Tono-Bungay. It was a big, rather gaunt villa, with a conservatory and a shrubbery, a tennis-lawn, a quite considerable vegetable garden, and a small disused coach-house. I had some glimpses of the excitements of its inauguration, but not many because of the estrangement between my aunt and Marion.
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 heaps – administrating 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 extremely – she called him a “Pestilential old Splosher” with an unusual note of earnestness – and he also enraged her into novelties of abuse by giving each bedroom the name of some favourite hero – Cliff, Napoleon, Caesar, and so forth – and 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 “Old Pondo” on the housemaid’s cupboard.
Also he went and ordered one of the completest sets of garden requisites I have ever seen – and 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 and very young-looking and sheepish, in the other.
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 Chiselhurst.
“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 good-bye to ‘Martin Luther,’ and then I’ll see what you can do to help me.”
II
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 ill-cut 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 parlour-maid and the blue tea-cups, 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 grown-up son, a youth just bursting into collar. The rest were women, except for a young girl or so in a state of speechless good behaviour. Marion also was there.
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 capitulated – but 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 memory.
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 was – and 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 upper-class 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 summer-house and in garden-chairs, 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 from the curate. “Oh! Whacking me about again! Augh!”
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 so – not if they’re properly treated. Here of course in Beckenham it’s different. I won’t call the people we get here a Poor – they’re certainly not a proper Poor. They’re Masses. I always tell Mr. Bugshoot they’re Masses, and ought to be treated as such.”…
Dim memories of Mrs. Mackridge floated through my mind as I listened to her…
I was whirled on this roundabout for a bit, and then had the fortune to fall off into a tete-a-tete with a lady whom my aunt introduced as Mrs. Mumble – but then she introduced everybody to me as Mumble that afternoon, either by way of humour or necessity.
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.
