There comes back, too, among these Hardingham memories, an impression
of a drizzling November day, and how we looked out of the windows upon
a procession of the London unemployed.
It was like looking down a well into some momentarily revealed nether
world. Some thousands of needy ineffectual men had been raked together
to trail their spiritless misery through the West Eire with an appeal
that was also in its way a weak and insubstantial threat: “It is Work
we need, not Charity.”
There they were, half-phantom through the fog, a silent, foot-dragging,
interminable, grey procession. They carried wet, dirty banners, they
rattled boxes for pence; these men who had not said “snap” in the right
place, the men who had “snapped” too eagerly, the men who had never
said “snap,” the men who had never had a chance of saying “snap.” A
shambling, shameful stream they made, oozing along the street, the
gutter waste of competitive civilisation. And we stood high out of it
all, as high as if we looked godlike from another world, standing in a
room beautifully lit and furnished, skillfully warmed, filled with
costly things.
“There,” thought I, “but for the grace of God, go George and Edward
Ponderevo.”
But my uncle’s thoughts ran in a different channel, and he made that
vision the test of a spirited but inconclusive harangue upon Tariff
Reform.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
OUR PROGRESS FROM CAMDEN TOWN TO CREST HILL
I
So far my history of my aunt and uncle has dealt chiefly with his
industrial and financial exploits. But side by side with that history
of inflation from the infinitesimal to the immense is another
development, the change year by year from the shabby impecuniosity of
the Camden Town lodging to the lavish munificence of the Crest Hill
marble staircase and my aunt’s golden bed, the bed that was facsimiled
from Fontainebleau. And the odd thing is that as I come to this nearer
part of my story I find it much more difficult to tell than the clear
little perspective memories of the earlier days. Impressions crowd upon
one another and overlap one another; I was presently to fall in love
again, to be seized by a passion to which I still faintly respond, a
passion that still clouds my mind. I came and went between Ealing and
my aunt and uncle, and presently between Effie and clubland, and then
between business and a life of research that became far more
continuous, infinitely more consecutive and memorable than any of these
other sets of experiences. I didn’t witness a regular social progress
therefore; my aunt and uncle went up in the world, so far as I was
concerned, as if they were displayed by an early cinematograph, with
little jumps and flickers.
As I recall this side of our life, the figure of my round-eyes,
button-nosed, pink-and-white Aunt Susan tends always to the central
position. We drove the car and sustained the car, she sat in it with a
magnificent variety of headgear poised upon her delicate neck, and
always with that faint ghost of a lisp no misspelling can
render—commented on and illuminated the new aspects.
I’ve already sketched the little home behind the Wimblehurst chemist’s
shop, the lodging near the Cobden statue, and the apartments in Gower
Street. Thence my aunt and uncle went into a flat in Redgauntlet
Mansions. There they lived when I married. It was a compact flat, with
very little for a woman to do in it In those days my aunt, I think,
used to find the time heavy upon her hands, and so she took to books
and reading, and after a time even to going to lectures in the
afternoon. I began to find unexpected books upon her table:
sociological books, travels, Shaw’s plays. “Hullo!” I said, at the
sight of some volume of the latter.
“I’m keeping a mind, George,” she explained.
“Eh?”
“Keeping a mind. Dogs I never cared for. It’s been a toss-up between
setting up a mind and setting up a soul. It’s jolly lucky for Him and
you it’s a mind. I’ve joined the London Library, and I’m going in for
the Royal Institution and every blessed lecture that comes along next
winter. You’d better look out.”...
And I remember her coming in late one evening with a note-book in her
hand.
“Where ya been, Susan?” said my uncle.
“Birkbeck—Physiology. I’m getting on.” She sat down and took off her
gloves. “You’re just glass to me,” she sighed, and then in a note of
grave reproach: “You old _Package!_ I had no idea! The Things you’ve
kept from me!”
Presently they were setting; up the house at Beckengham, and my aunt
intermitted her intellectual activities. The house at Beckengham was
something of an enterprise for them at that time, a reasonably large
place by the standards of the early years of Tono-Bungay. It was a big,
rather gaunt villa, with a conservatory and a shrubbery, a tennis-lawn,
a quite considerable vegetable garden, and a small disused coach-house.
I had some glimpses of the excitements of its inauguration, but not
many because of the estrangement between my aunt and Marion.
My aunt went into that house with considerable zest, and my uncle
distinguished himself by the thoroughness with which he did the
repainting and replumbing. He had all the drains up and most of the
garden with them, and stood administrative on heaps—administrating
whisky to the workmen. I found him there one day, most Napoleonic, on a
little Elba of dirt, in an atmosphere that defies print. He also, I
remember, chose what he considered cheerful contrasts of colours for
the painting of the woodwork. This exasperated my aunt extremely—she
called him a “Pestilential old Splosher” with an unusual note of
earnestness—and he also enraged her into novelties of abuse by giving
each bedroom the name of some favourite hero—Cliff, Napoleon, Cæsar,
and so forth—and having it painted on the door in gilt letters on a
black label. “Martin Luther” was kept for me. Only her respect for
domestic discipline, she said, prevented her retaliating with “Old
Pondo” on the housemaid’s cupboard.
Also he went and ordered one of the completest sets of garden
requisites I have ever seen—and had them all painted a hard clear blue.
My aunt got herself large tins of a kindlier hued enamel and had
everything secretly recoated, and this done, she found great joy in the
garden and became an ardent rose grower and herbaceous borderer,
leaving her Mind, indeed, to damp evenings and the winter months. When
I think of her at Beckenham, I always think first of her as dressed in
that blue cotton stuff she affected, with her arms in huge gauntleted
gardening gloves, a trowel in one hand and a small but no doubt hardy
and promising annual, limp and very young-looking and sheepish, in the
other.
Beckenham, in the persons of a vicar, a doctor’s wife, and a large
proud lady called Hogberry, “called” on my uncle and aunt almost at
once, so soon in fact as the lawn was down again, and afterwards my
aunt made friends with a quiet gentlewoman next door, a propos of an
overhanging cherry tree and the need of repairing the party fence. So
she resumed her place in society from which she had fallen with the
disaster of Wimblehurst. She made a partially facetious study of the
etiquette of her position, had cards engraved and retaliated calls. And
then she received a card for one of Mrs. Hogberry’s At Homes, gave an
old garden party herself, participated in a bazaar and sale of work,
and was really becoming quite cheerfully entangled in Beckenham society
when she was suddenly taken up by the roots again by my uncle and
transplanted to Chiselhurst.
“Old Trek, George,” she said compactly, “Onward and Up,” when I found
her superintending the loading of two big furniture vans. “Go up and
say good-bye to ‘Martin Luther,’ and then I’ll see what you can do to
help me.”