Tono-Bungay

“Grundy sins. Oh, yes, he’s a hypocrite. Sneaks round a corner and sins ugly. It’s Grundy and his dark corners that make vice, vice! We artists – we have no vices.

“And then he’s frantic with repentance. And wants to be cruel to fallen women and decent harmless sculptors of the simple nude – like me – and so back to his panic again.”

“Mrs. Grundy, I suppose, doesn’t know he sins,” I remarked.

“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 smile – like an accident to a butter tub – all over his face, being Liberal Minded – Grundy in his Anti-Puritan moments, ‘trying not to see Harm in it’ – Grundy the friend of innocent pleasure. He makes you sick with the Harm he’s trying not to see in it…

“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 find – quite naturally and properly – supremely interesting. So we don’t adolescence; we blunder up to sex. Dare – dare to look – and he may dirt you for ever! The girls are terror-stricken to silence by his significant whiskers, by the bleary something in his eyes.”

Suddenly Ewart, with an almost Jack-in-the-box effect, sat up.

“He’s about us everywhere, Ponderevo,” he said, very solemnly. “Sometimes – sometimes I think he is – in our blood. In MINE.”

He regarded me for my opinion very earnestly, with his pipe in the corner of his mouth.

“You’re the remotest cousin he ever had,” I said.

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 and – yes – formidable 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 indecency…”

“Grundy would have fits!” I injected.

“Grundy, Ponderevo, would have cold douches – publicly – if the sight was not too painful – three times a day… But I don’t think, mind you, that I should let the sexes run about together. No. The fact behind the sexes – is sex. It’s no good humbugging. It trails about – even in the best mixed company. Tugs at your ankle. The men get showing off and quarrelling – and 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, never – except with only one man or only one woman. How would that be?..

“Or duets only?..

“How to manage it? Some rule of etiquette, perhaps.”… He became portentously grave.

Then his long hand went out in weird gestures.

“I seem to see – I seem to see – a sort of City of Women, Ponderevo. Yes… A walled enclosure – good stone-mason’s work – a city wall, high as the walls of Rome, going about a garden. Dozens of square miles of garden – trees – fountains – arbours – lakes. 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 women – the superiority of school and college – to anything they get afterwards. And this city-garden 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 man – except to do rough work, perhaps – ever comes in. The men live in a world where they can hunt and engineer, invent and mine and manufacture, sail ships, drink deep and practice the arts, and fight – ”

“Yes,” I said, “but – ”

He stilled me with a gesture.

“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 manner – with a little balcony on the outside wall. Built into the wall – and 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 chooses – if she wants to talk closer…”

“The men would still be competing.”

“There perhaps – yes. But they’d have to abide by the women’s decisions.”

I raised one or two difficulties, and for a while we played with this idea.

“Ewart,” I said, “this is like Doll’s Island.

“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 organ-grinders. No difficulty about that. And you could forbid it – make it against the etiquette. No life is decent without etiquette… And people obey etiquette sooner than laws…”

“H’m,” I said, and was struck by an idea that is remote in the world of a young man. “How about children?” I asked; “in the City? Girls are all very well. But boys, for example – grow up.”

“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 son…”

“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 to his discourse. He wouldn’t even reply to my tentatives for a time.

“While I was talking just now,” he remarked presently,

“I had a quite different idea.”

“What?”

“For a masterpiece. A series. Like the busts of the Caesars. Only not heads, you know. We don’t see the people who do things to us nowadays…”

“How will you do it, then?”

“Hands – a series of hands! The hands of the Twentieth Century. I’ll do it. Some day some one will discover it – go there – see what I have done, and what is meant by it.”

“See it where?”

“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 affair – Grundy the terror! – the little wrinkles and the thumb! Only it ought to hold all the others together – in a slightly disturbing squeeze…Like Rodin’s great Hand – you know the thing!”

IV

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 sweetly.

So we were married.

We were married with all the customary incongruity. I gave – perhaps after a while not altogether ungrudgingly – and 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 coachmen – with improvised flavour and very shabby silk hats – bearing 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 silver-printed 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 vestry-ward. I produced my aunt and uncle a select group of two. The effect in that shabby little house was one of exhilarating congestion. The side-board, in which lived the table-cloth and the “Apartments” card, was used for a display of the presents, eked out by the unused balance of the silver-printed cards.

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 played – up to the extent of dressing my part; I had an admirably cut frock – coat, a new silk hat, trousers as light as I could endure them – lighter, in fact – a 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 lost – in a strange body, and when I glanced down myself for reassurance, the straight white abdomen, the alien legs confirmed that impression.

My uncle was my best man, and looked like a banker – a little banker – in 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 you – a very great occasion.” He spoke a little doubtfully.

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 everything about her. Why didn’t you tell – ME at least – before?”

I was surprised to find how difficult it was to tell her about Marion. I perplexed her.

“Then is she beautiful?” she asked at last.

“I don’t know what you’ll think of her,” I parried. “I think – ”

“Yes?”

“I think she might be the most beautiful person in the world.”

“And isn’t she? To you?”

“Of course,” I said, nodding my head. “Yes. She IS…”

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 big-plumed 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 self-forgetfulness, 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 is – for 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 parting – and she never said a word or looked at me, but just squeezed my hand…

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 middle-aged 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 aisle – there was a sort of jumble in the aisle – and 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 umbrella-stand 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 picture – at 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 gathering-place 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 stood beside me and stared out of the window.

“There was a funeral over there yesterday,” he said, by way of making conversation, and moved his head at the house opposite. “Quite a smart affair it was with a glass ‘earse…”

And our little procession of three carriages with white-favour-adorned horses and drivers, went through all the huge, noisy, indifferent traffic like a lost china image in the coal-chute 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 dust-cart. The irrelevant clatter and tumult gave a queer flavour of indecency to this public coming together of lovers. We seemed to have obtruded ourselves shamelessly. The crowd that gathered outside the church would have gathered in the same spirit and with greater alacrity for a street accident…

At Charing Cross – we were going to Hastings – the experienced eye of the guard detected the significance of our unusual costume and he secured us a compartment.

“Well,” said I, as the train moved out of the station, “That’s all over!” And I turned to Marion – a little unfamiliar still, in her unfamiliar clothes – and smiled.

She regarded me gravely, timidly.

“You’re not cross?” she asked.

“Cross! Why?”

“At having it all proper.”

“My dear Marion!” said I, and by way of answer took and kissed her white-gloved, leather-scented hand…

I don’t remember much else about the journey, an hour or so it was of undistinguished time – for 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 acutely sorry I had not told her earlier of my marriage.

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, Marion weeping and reluctant in my arms.

V

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 self-contradictory as life. I think of this thing and love her, of that and hate her – of 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 end Smithie thought our household the most amiable in the world.

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 understand – to 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 baby-talk; a compromise, the least effectual thing in all one’s life.

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 sensibility.

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 curl-papers 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 ideal – that 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 grog-tubs. 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 dining-room recess. And we had a piano though Marion’s playing was at an elementary level.

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 drawing-room chairs and in marriage ceremonial and in every relation of life with a simple and luminous honesty and conviction, with an immense unimaginative inflexibility – as a tailor-bird builds its nest or a beaver makes its dam.

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 lights, she did her duty by me.

Presently the rapid development of Tono-Bungay 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 poker-work and a Kodak and hyacinths in glasses. She called once on a neighbour. Her parents left Walham Green – her father severed his connection with the gas-works – and 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 father-in-law was perpetually catching me in moody moments and urging me to take to gardening. He irritated me beyond measure.

“You think too much,” he would say. “If you was to let in a bit with a spade, you might soon ‘ave that garden of yours a Vision of Flowers. That’s better than thinking, George.”

Or in a torrent of exasperation, “I CARN’T think, George, why you don’t get a bit of glass ‘ere. This sunny corner you c’d do wonders with a bit of glass.”

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!..