Tono-Bungay

E WORLD AND THE LAST

and all, I was sent by my mother in a vindictive spirit, first to her cousin Nic

of my cousin Nicodemus

ion 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 bu

ver'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 ex

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

y colours that would not show the dirt, in a little brick-built 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 e

ountain, fill

m Emmanue

bald head, who was the intellectual leader of the sect, a huge-voiced haberdasher with a big black beard, a white-faced, 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 sun-dry Leva

nd, I think my invincible persuasion that I understa

ading 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 t

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 popul

eceptive, wide-open eyes, and through the blessing (or curse) of some

ripped 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

a time that voca

ept 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 h

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

certainly scared m

d 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

d no eternal punishment. No Go

but listening. "Then you mean," said my elder cousin, when at las

e cad enoug

his brother do likewise, and knelt in the night dimness and prayed at me. That I found tryi

, "but if you're going to cheek me

as my cousin deploring the fact that he "shoul

ness to his father. This was quite outside all my codes

George," he said abruptly. "You

ay, father?" s

uldn't' repe

ngs?" I a

formant, and making me realise the nature of my offence. My

my uncle. "

e troubled in my conscience by my daring, and now I began to f

talking se

ntly I met my cousin in the brick alley behin

smacked his face hard for

eyes met mine, and I saw a sudden gleam of

id. "'It 'it. I'

evading a licking. I shoved him against the wall and lef

ins, George," said my aunt, "till

supper that night a gloomy silen

you, and I turned the

' on 'is back," said my aunt, to the grave dis

few ill-chosen words, prayed

hly miserable and frightened, and this suggestion unnerved me dreadfully but I kept up an impenitent front. "To wake in 'ell," said Unc

ve a look at the bake'ouse fire" before

ide of me. I decided I would whisper my prayers, and stopped midway because I wa

, "damn me if you're coward enough....

d them as much, triumphantly, and went very peac

ar as any fear of Divine injustice goes, I sleep soundly, and shall, I know

ave the whole meeting on

rtation. 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 thoro

h, and that was the younger Frapp. He came up to me in the afterno

said, and fr

re isn't-no one," he s

on

atching y

d there be

"anyhow. You mean-" He stopped hovering.

away with a guilty back g

ed me at last into an Atheism that terrified me. When I learnt that next

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

I

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

t 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 steam

e 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 pl

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

tler's wife with them, then the two laundry maids, odd inseparable old creatures, then the first footman talking to the bu

layful form of appearance. "Coo-ee, mother"

ent very white, and pu

ively 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

sdaining the third-class carriage in which we traveled, and how she looked away from me out of the window when she spoke of my u

erest in such quali

nd set up for himself in Wimblehurst

at last in the tone of one who has been feeling in the dark and finds. "He

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 equatoria

said my mother, ca

hree 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 bel

vo's Cough

O

H

heaper tha

ples! why no

Bound

recognise presently my

s were brown, and that his glasses creased his nose. It was manifest he did not know us from Adam. A stare of s

now me?" pan

. My mother sat down on one of the little chairs before the soap

d my uncle, waved his hand in

e said, "takes after his father. He grows more like

ather,

org

od behind the counter with the glass my mother had r

placing them, behind a pile of boxed-up bottles of blood mixture. "Eleven tho

hrough some masked door. One h

"Well, how are you?" he said. "I was nev

and then mine very warmly holding hi

in! Better late than never!" and led t

h ball-fringe along the mantel and casing in the fireplace,-I first saw ball-fringe here-and even the lamp on the little bureau wore a shade like a large muslin hat. The table-cloth had ball-fringe 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, ill-made shelves packed with books, and enriched with pinked American cloth. There was a dictionary ly

le of domestic utility pettishly flung aside, then the cautious steps of someone desc

e room. He darted to the bureau with a sudden impulse, and turned the sheet about the patent flat face down. T

ug and took up a position there,

er pale blue cotton morning dress. There was a look of half-assumed 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,

" he said.

hough 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,

s stiffly, and told

ing his hands together. He put up a chair for my mother, raised the blind of the little window, lowered it

my attention pretty ex

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

you," and then desisted for a time from the real business in hand. "You find this a comfortable house?" she asked; an

y mother answered in the character of a personal friend of Lady Drew's. The talk

isn't of course quite the

as though she h

e went on. "It's dead-and

id my aunt Susan. "Some day he'll get a showe

said my uncl

siness-slack?"

up anything new. For instance, I've been trying lately-induce 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 whe

aid my

" said my uncle. "I'

said my mother afte

parable with an affectio

"Always putting fresh cards in the window, or getting up to

no good," s

said his wife. "It'

ey came upon

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

e a turn in the market-place than to sit here talking with us. There's

d sitting he

led me through the shop. He stood on his do

last Trump sounded I don't believe it would wake. Nobody would wake! The chaps up there in the churchyard-they'd just

d me out

at they said about

"Tha'chu, George?" he cried, when the shop-door bell sounded. "Come right throug

of them re

f making you a chemist,

" she said, "that Lady Drew would hav

way?" sai

thing perhaps...." She had the servant's invincible p

. "He doesn't accommodate himself. When he thinks Lady Drew wishes a thing, he seems not

Mr. Red

Vic

dent?" said my

e. He seems to think he can get on by slighting people and

n and me. "Have you learnt a

d I h

. H'm. He could go down to the chap at the grammar school here-it's just bee

Latin!" I crie

tle,"

wanted" I sai

of this pretty earnestly home. The literature I had read at Bladesover had all tended that way. Latin had had a quality of emanci

" said my uncle, "except to pass

in," said my mother, "not because you want to. And afterw

iable as a duty, overwhelmed all other facts. I had had it rather clear in my mind for some weeks that all

sked, "with you, and study...

way of it,"

ailure 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 s

he open door of her compartment, and neither of us knew how

earn.... And you mustn't set yourself up against those

ther,"

ed upon me. I was wondering whether I co

, some memory; perhaps some premonition.... Th

hastily, almost sh

her compartment as

hing for her to do. I perceived her eyes were extraordinarily bright, and

gone, leaving me discomforted and perplexed, forgetting for a time even tha

f fuller understanding. Poor, proud, habitual, sternly narrow soul! poor difficult and misundersta

I

ollowing spring. Her ladyship instantly fled to Folkestone with Miss Somerville

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 dress-suit. In my memory those black legs of his, in a particularly thin and shiny black cloth-f

hat 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 inconseq

at believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live

he 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 da

to my mother'

coffin lowered, hearing the words of the ritua

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 l

d speech been required of me. The old vicar read on, there came a mumbled response-and so on to the end. I we

y uncle and Rabbits, telling Avebury, the sexton and underta

I

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. Bladesov

he 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 lustre-dangling chandeliers had passed away. Lady Lichtenstein's books replaced the brown volumes I had browsed among-they were mostly presentation copies of contemporary novels and the National Review and the Empire Review, and the Nineteenth Century and after jostled current

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 b

y last impressi