



Produced by John Bean; Diane Bean and David Widger





TONO-BUNGAY

by H.G Wells




BOOK THE FIRST

THE DAYS BEFORE TONO-BUNGAY WAS INVENTED




CHAPTER THE FIRST

OF BLADESOVER HOUSE, AND MY MOTHER; AND THE CONSTITUTION OF SOCIETY


I

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 snacks--the unjustifiable gifts of footmen--in pantries,
and been despised for my want of style (and subsequently married and
divorced) by the daughter of a gasworks clerk; and--to go to my other
extreme--I was once--oh, glittering days!--an item in the house-party
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 dinner-table I've met not simply the titled but the great. On
one occasion--it is my brightest memory--I upset my champagne over the
trousers of the greatest statesman in the empire--Heaven forbid I should
be so invidious as to name him!--in the warmth of our mutual admiration.

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
high-roads drunk but enfamille (so redeeming the minor lapse), in the
summertime, with a perambulator, lavender to sell, sun-brown children,
a smell, and ambiguous bundles that fire the imagination. Navvies,
farm-labourers, sailormen and stokers, all such as sit in 1834
beer-houses, 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 the legs. But that failed.

I'm sorry I haven't done the whole lot though....

You will ask by what merit I achieved this remarkable social range,
this extensive cross-section of the British social organism. It was the
Accident of Birth. It always is in England.

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 comet-like transit of the financial
heavens happened--it 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 world-shaking enterprise! Then you know him only
too well. Astraddle on Tono-Bungay, he flashed athwart the empty
heavens--like a comet--rather, like a stupendous rocket!--and overawed
investors spoke of his star. At his zenith he burst into a cloud of
the most magnificent promotions. What a time that was! The Napoleon of
domestic conveniences!

I was his nephew, his peculiar and intimate nephew. I was hanging on
to his coat-tails 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's-eye 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 Thames-side yard, into these white heats
and hammerings, amidst the fine realites of steel--to 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 got--even 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 clearer-headed
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
Tono-Bungay 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 austere....

Tono-Bungay 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 trajectories--of an
altogether different sort from that of Tono-Bungay.

II

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 hotch-potch 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 Life--as one man has found it. I
want to tell--MYSELF, 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,
novel-writing age, and here I am writing mine--my one novel--without
having any of the discipline to refrain and omit that I suppose the
regular novel-writer acquires.

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 story-teller. 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
love-story--and if only I can keep up the spirit of truth-telling all
through as strongly as I have now, you shall have it all--falls into
no sort of neat scheme of telling. It involves three separate feminine
persons. It's all mixed up with the other things....

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
House.

III

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 working-model--and not so very little either--of the
whole world.

Let me try and give you the effect of it.

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 well-placed 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, oast-set farm-houses and copses
and wheat fields and the occasional gleam of water, its hundred
and seventeen windows look on nothing but its own wide and