BOOK THE FIRST
CHAPTER THE FIRST
CHAPTER THE SECOND
CHAPTER THE THIRD
BOOK THE SECOND
CHAPTER THE FIRST
CHAPTER THE SECOND
CHAPTER THE THIRD
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
BOOK THE THIRD
CHAPTER THE FIRST
CHAPTER THE SECOND
CHAPTER THE THIRD
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
BOOK THE FOURTH
CHAPTER THE FIRST
CHAPTER THE SECOND
CHAPTER THE THIRD
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 _en famille_ (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 β....
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.