But before I finish this chapter and book altogether and go on with the
great adventure of my uncle’s career. I may perhaps tell what else
remains to tell of Marion and Effie, and then for a time set my private
life behind me.
For a time Marion and I corresponded with some regularity, writing
friendly but rather uninforming letters about small business things.
The clumsy process of divorce completed itself.
She left the house at Ealing and went into the country with her aunt
and parents, taking a small farm near Lewes in Sussex. She put up
glass, she put in heat for her father, happy man! and spoke of figs and
peaches. The thing seemed to promise well throughout a spring and
summer, but the Sussex winter after London was too much for the
Ramboats. They got very muddy and dull; Mr. Ramboat killed a cow by
improper feeding, and that disheartened them all. A twelvemonth saw the
enterprise in difficulties. I had to help her out of this, and then
they returned to London and she went into partnership with Smithie at
Streatham, and ran a business that was intimated on the firm’s
stationery as “Robes.” The parents and aunt were stowed away in a
cottage somewhere. After that the letters became infrequent. But in one
I remember a postscript that had a little stab of our old intimacy:
“Poor old Miggles is dead.”
Nearly eight years slipped by. I grew up. I grew in experience, in
capacity, until I was fully a man, but with many new interests, living
on a larger scale in a wider world than I could have dreamt of in my
Marion days. Her letters become rare and insignificant. At last came a
gap of silence that made me curious. For eighteen months or more I had
nothing from Marion save her quarterly receipts through the bank. Then
I damned at Smithie, and wrote a card to Marion.
“Dear Marion,” I said, “how goes it?”
She astonished me tremendously by telling me she had married again—“a
Mr. Wachorn, a leading agent in the paper-pattern trade.” But she still
wrote on the Ponderevo and Smith (Robes) notepaper, from the Ponderevo
and Smith address.
And that, except for a little difference of opinion about the
continuance of alimony which gave me some passages of anger, and the
use of my name by the firm, which also annoyed me, is the end of
Marion’s history for me, and she vanishes out of this story. I do not
know where she is or what she is doing. I do not know whether she is
alive or dead. It seems to me utterly grotesque that two people who
have stood so close to one another as she and I should be so separated,
but so it is between us.
Effie, too, I have parted from, though I still see her at times.
Between us there was never any intention of marriage nor intimacy of
soul. She had a sudden, fierce, hot-blooded passion for me and I for
her, but I was not her first lover nor her last. She was in another
world from Marion. She had a queer, delightful nature; I’ve no memory
of ever seeing her sullen or malicious. She was—indeed she was
magnificently—eupeptic. That, I think, was the central secret of her
agreeableness, and, moreover, that she was infinitely kind-hearted. I
helped her at last into an opening she coveted, and she amazed me by a
sudden display of business capacity. She has now a typewriting bureau
in Riffle’s Inn, and she runs it with a brisk vigour and considerable
success, albeit a certain plumpness has overtaken her. And she still
loves her kind. She married a year or so ago a boy half her age—a
wretch of a poet, a wretched poet, and given to drugs, a thing with
lank fair hair always getting into his blue eyes, and limp legs. She
did it, she said, because he needed nursing....
But enough of this disaster of my marriage and of my early love
affairs; I have told all that is needed for my picture to explain how I
came to take up aeroplane experiments and engineering science; let me
get back to my essential story, to Tono-Bungay and my uncle’s
promotions and to the vision of the world these things have given me.
BOOK THE THIRD
THE GREAT DAYS OF TONO-BUNGAY
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE HARDINGHAM HOTEL, AND HOW WE BECAME BIG PEOPLE
I
But now that I resume the main line of my story it may be well to
describe the personal appearance of my uncle as I remember him during
those magnificent years that followed his passage from trade to
finance. The little man plumped up very considerably during the
creation of the Tono-Bungay property, but with the increasing
excitements that followed that first flotation came dyspepsia and a
certain flabbiness and falling away. His abdomen—if the reader will
pardon my taking his features in the order of their value—had at first
a nice full roundness, but afterwards it lost tone without, however,
losing size. He always went as though he was proud of it and would make
as much of it as possible. To the last his movements remained quick and
sudden, his short firm legs, as he walked, seemed to twinkle rather
than display the scissors-stride of common humanity, and he never
seemed to have knees, but instead, a dispersed flexibility of limb.
There was, I seem to remember, a secular intensification of his
features; his nose developed character, became aggressive, stuck out at
the world more and more; the obliquity of his mouth, I think,
increased. From the face that returns to my memory projects a long
cigar that is sometimes cocked jauntily up from the higher corner, that
sometimes droops from the lower;—it was as eloquent as a dog’s tail,
and he removed it only for the more emphatic modes of speech. He
assumed a broad black ribbon for his glasses, and wore them more and
more askew as time went on. His hair seemed to stiffen with success,
but towards the climax it thinned greatly over the crown, and he
brushed it hard back over his ears where, however, it stuck out
fiercely. It always stuck out fiercely over his forehead, up and
forward.
He adopted an urban style of dressing with the onset of Tono-Bungay and
rarely abandoned it. He preferred silk hats with ample rich brims,
often a trifle large for him by modern ideas, and he wore them at
various angles to his axis; his taste in trouserings was towards fairly
emphatic stripes and his trouser cut was neat; he liked his frock-coat
long and full, although that seemed to shorten him. He displayed a
number of valuable rings, and I remember one upon his left little
finger with a large red stone bearing Gnostic symbols. “Clever chaps,
those Gnostics, George,” he told me. “Means a lot. Lucky!” He never had
any but a black mohair watch-chair. In the country he affected grey and
a large grey cloth top-hat, except when motoring; then he would have a
brown deer-stalker cap and a fur suit of esquimaux cut with a sort of
boot-end to the trousers. Of an evening he would wear white waistcoats
and plain gold studs. He hated diamonds. “Flashy,” he said they were.
“Might as well wear—an income tax-receipt. All very well for Park Lane.
Unsold stock. Not my style. Sober financier, George.”
So much for his visible presence. For a time it was very familiar to
the world, for at the crest of the boom he allowed quite a number of
photographs and at least one pencil sketch to be published in the
sixpenny papers.
His voice declined during those years from his early tenor to a flat
rich quality of sound that my knowledge of music is inadequate to
describe. His Zzz-ing inrush of air became less frequent as he ripened,
but returned in moments of excitement. Throughout his career, in spite
of his increasing and at last astounding opulence, his more intimate
habits remained as simple as they had been at Wimblehurst. He would
never avail himself of the services of a valet; at the very climax of
his greatness his trousers were folded by a housemaid and his shoulders
brushed as he left his house or hotel. He became wary about breakfast
as life advanced, and at one time talked much of Dr. Haig and uric
acid. But for other meals he remained reasonably omnivorous. He was
something of a gastronome, and would eat anything he particularly liked
in an audible manner, and perspire upon his forehead. He was a
studiously moderate drinker—except when the spirit of some public
banquet or some great occasion caught him and bore him beyond his
wariness—there he would, as it were, drink inadvertently and become
flushed and talkative—about everything but his business projects.
To make the portrait complete one wants to convey an effect of sudden,
quick bursts of movement like the jumps of a Chinese-cracker to
indicate that his pose whatever it is, has been preceded and will be
followed by a rush. If I were painting him, I should certainly give him
for a background that distressed, uneasy sky that was popular in the
eighteenth century, and at a convenient distance a throbbing motor-car,
very big and contemporary, a secretary hurrying with papers, and an
alert chauffeur.
Such was the figure that created and directed the great property of
Tono-Bungay, and from the successful reconstruction of that company
passed on to a slow crescendo of magnificent creations and promotions
until the whole world of investors marveled. I have already I think,
mentioned how, long before we offered Tono Bungay to the public, we
took over the English agency of certain American specialties. To this
was presently added our exploitation of Moggs’ Domestic Soap, and so he
took up the Domestic Convenience Campaign that, coupled with his
equatorial rotundity and a certain resolute convexity in his bearings
won my uncle his Napoleonic title.