Tono-Bungay quotes

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.”

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.

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 his nephew, his peculiar and intimate nephew. I was hanging on to his coattails 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 …

She became aware of my doubts again, and added predominantly, “It has always struck me that that was a Singularly True Remark.”

I resolved that if ever I found this polypus of Tact growing up in my soul, I would tear it out by the roots, throw it forth and stamp on it.

“They’re queer people—colonials,” said Rabbits, “very queer. When I was at Templemorton I see something of ’em. Queer fellows, some of ’em. Very respectful of course, free with their money in a spasammy sort of way, but—Some of ’em, I must confess, make me nervous.

It is part of the decent and useful pretences of our world that children of the age at which we were, think nothing, feel nothing, know nothing of love.

It is wonderful what people the English are for keeping up pretences.

But indeed I cannot avoid telling that Beatrice and I talked of love and kissed and embraced one another.

She might have done that anyhow! Supposing I had told on her!

But the son of a servant counts as a servant.

She had forgotten and now remembered.

I solaced myself with some extraordinary dream of coming back to Bladesover, stern, powerful, after the fashion of Coriolanus. I do not recall the details, but I have no doubt I displayed great magnanimity. …

Well, anyhow I never said I was sorry for pounding young Garvell, and I am not sorry to this day.

“It doesn’t suit me,” said my uncle.

“I’m the cascading sort.”

“George was that,” said my mother after a pondering moment.

There were abundant evidences that her ladyship was playing with the Celtic renaissance, and a great number of ugly cats made of china—she “collected” china and stoneware cats—stood about everywhere—in all colours, in all kinds of deliberately comic, highly glazed distortion.

It is nonsense to pretend that finance makes any better aristocrats than rent.

Nothing can make an aristocrat but pride, knowledge, training, and the sword. These people were no improvement on the Drews, none whatever. There was no effect of a beneficial replacement of passive unintelligent people by active intelligent ones.

I will confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I had a clear impression that anyone who contrived to do that would pretty certainly go to jail.

Now I know that anyone who could really bring it off would be much more likely to go to the House of Lords!

My uncle ranged over the gilt labels of his bottles and drawers for a while, dreaming of corners in this and that. But at last he reverted to Wimblehurst again.

I don’t see why, at forty, I shouldn’t confess I respect my own youth. I had dropped being a boy quite abruptly. I thought I was presently to go out into a larger and quite important world and do significant things there.

I thought I was destined to do something definite to a world that had a definite purpose. I did not understand then, as I do now, that life was to consist largely in the world’s doing things to me.

Young people never do seem to understand that aspect of things.

… his arm into a queerly eloquent gesture that gathered up all the tall façades of the banks, the business places, the projecting clock and towers of the Law Courts, the advertisements, the luminous signs, into one social immensity, into a capitalistic system gigantic and invincible.

“These socialists have no sense of proportion,” he said. “What can you expect of them?”

Ewart, as the embodiment of talk, was certainly a leading factor in my conspicuous failure to go on studying. Social theory in its first crude form of Democratic Socialism gripped my intelligence more and more powerfully.

I asked him to come and eat with me in an Italian place near Panton Street where one could get a curious, interesting, glutting sort of dinner for eighteen-pence. He came with a disconcerting black-eye that he wouldn’t explain.

“Not so much a black-eye,” he said, “as the aftermath of a purple patch.⁠ ⁠… What’s your difficulty?”

“I’ll tell you with the salad,” I said.

By all modern standards the business was, as my uncle would say, “absolutely bona fide.”

We sold our stuff and got the money, and spent the money honestly in lies and clamour to sell more stuff.

Section by section we spread it over the whole of the British Isles;

But Ewart, with his gesticulating hairy hands and bony wrists, his single-handed chorus to all this as it played itself over again in my memory, and he kept my fundamental absurdity illuminated for me during all this astonishing time.

“It’s just on all fours with the rest of things,” he remarked; “only more so. You needn’t think you’re anything out of the way.”

I remember one disquisition very distinctly. It was just after Ewart had been to Paris on a mysterious expedition to “rough in” some work for a rising American sculptor.

“Think of the little clerks and jaded women and overworked people. People overstrained with wanting to do, people overstrained with wanting to be. … People, in fact, overstrained. …

The real trouble of life, Ponderevo, isn’t that we exist⁠—that’s a vulgar error; the real trouble is that we don’t really exist and we want to.

That’s what this—in the highest sense—just stands for! The hunger to be—for once—really alive—to the finger tips! …

“Well, if we can’t agree, I don’t see why you should go on talking,” she used to say. That would always enrage me beyond measure. Or, “I’m afraid I’m not clever enough to understand that.”

Silly little people! I see it all now, but then I was no older than she and I couldn’t see anything but that Marion, for some inexplicable reason, wouldn’t come alive.

We would contrive semi-surreptitious walks on Sunday, and part speechless with the anger of indefinable offences. Poor Marion!

She was so pleased that I forgot absolutely my disgust of a moment before.

I forgot that she had raised her price two hundred pounds a year and that I had bought her at that.

“Come!” I said, standing up; “let’s go towards the sunset, dear, and talk about it all. Do you know—this is a most beautiful world, an amazingly beautiful world, and when the sunset falls upon you it makes you into shining gold.

For a moment we held one another in each other’s arms and kissed—incredibly without malice. We heard our little servant in the passage going to open the door. For the last time we pressed ourselves to one another.

We were not lovers nor enemies, but two human souls in a frank community of pain.

I tore myself from her.

“Oh!” I cried, recalled again; “I don’t know. I don’t understand these things.

Life is a thing that hurts, my dear! It hurts without logic or reason.

I’ve blundered! I didn’t understand. Anyhow—there is no need to go hurting you, is there?”

I’m in earnest in warp and woof. I stumble and flounder, but I know that over all these merry immediate things, there are other things that are great and serene, very high, beautiful things—the reality. I haven’t got it, but it’s there nevertheless.

I’m a spiritual guttersnipe in love with unimaginable goddesses.

I’ve never seen the goddesses nor ever shall—but it takes all the fun out of the mud—and at times I fear it takes all the kindliness, too.

The bank reserve or a policeman keeping order in a jostling multitude of people, are only slightly less impudent bluffs than my uncle’s prospectuses. They couldn’t for a moment “make good” if the quarter of what they guarantee was demanded of them.

The whole of this modern mercantile investing civilisation is indeed such stuff as dreams are made of.

A mass of people swelters and toils, great railway systems grow, cities arise to the skies and spread wide and far, mines are opened, factories hum, foundries roar, ships plough the seas, countries are settled;

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.

We handed tea for a while. …

“Give ’em cakes,” said my aunt, flushed, but well in hand. “Helps ’em to talk, George. Always talk best after a little nourishment. Like throwing a bit of turf down an old geyser.”

She surveyed the gathering with a predominant blue eye and helped herself to tea.

I remember my aunt’s first dinner-gown very brightly, and how she stood before the fire in the drawing-room confessing once unsuspected pretty arms with all the courage she possessed, and looking over her shoulder at herself in a mirror.

“A ham,” she remarked reflectively, “must feel like this. Just a necklace.”

…

“No one,” I thought, “would sit so apart if she hadn’t dreams—and what are her dreams?”

And I remember, too, an outburst of scornful description after she had lunched with a party of women at the Imperial Cosmic Club.

She came round to my rooms on the chance of finding me there, and I gave her tea. She professed herself tired and cross, and flung herself into my chair. …

I soothed her as well as I could. “They are good aren’t they?” I said.

“It’s the old pawnshop in their blood,” she said, drinking tea; and then in infinite disgust, “They run their hands over your clothes⁠—they paw you.”

I had a moment of doubt whether perhaps she had not been discovered in possession of unsuspected forgeries. I don’t know.

He was an Oxford man, clean-shaven, with a cadaverous complexion and a guardedly respectful manner, a cultivated intonation, and a general air of accommodation to the new order of things.

These Oxford men are the Greeks of our plutocratic empire.

He was a Tory in spirit, and what one may call an adapted Tory by stress of circumstances; that is to say, he was no longer a legitimist; he was prepared for the substitution of new lords for old.

“How far our people would take up that sort of thing—” began the vicar.

“I’m all for getting that good old English spirit back again,” said my uncle.

“Merrymakings. Lads and lasses dancing on the village green. Harvest home. Fairings. Yule Log—all the rest of it.”

It is a different thing from any other sort of human effort. You are free from the exasperating conflict with your fellow-creatures altogether—at least so far as the essential work goes; that for me is its peculiar merit.

Scientific truth is the remotest of mistresses; she hides in strange places, she is attained by tortuous and laborious roads, but she is always there!

Win to her and she will not fail you; she is yours and mankind’s forever. She is reality, the one reality I have found in this strange disorder of existence.

… living at the intellectual level of palmistry and genteel fiction, pink in the face and generally flustered by a sense of my aunt’s social strangeness and disposed under the circumstances to behave rather like an imitation of the more queenly moments of her own cook.

The one seemed made of whalebone, the other of dough.

My aunt was nervous, partly through the intrinsic difficulty of handling the lady and partly because of her passionate desire to watch Beatrice and me, and her nervousness took a common form with her, a wider clumsiness of gesture and an exacerbation of her habitual …

Then the objective story is made up of little things that are difficult to set in a proper order. And love in an hysterical passion, now high, now low, now exalted, and now intensely physical.

No one has ever yet dared to tell a love story completely, its alternations, its comings and goings, its debased moments, its hate.

The love stories we tell, tell only the net consequence, the ruling effect. …

We pressed against each other reassuringly.

“I’m glad we’re dead,” she whispered. “I’m glad we’re dead. I was tired of it, dear. I was so tired of it, dear, and so entangled.”

We splashed through a string of puddles. I began to remember things I had meant to say.

And as we pitched and floundered southward they gambled and fought, were brutal to one another, argued and wrangled loudly, until we protested at the uproar.

There’s no romance about the sea in a small sailing ship as I saw it. The romance is in the mind of the landsman dreamer.

These brigs and schooners and brigantines that still stand out from every little port are relics from an age of petty trade, as rotten and obsolescent as a Georgian house that has sunken into a slum.

This is no imaginative comparison of mine.

To my mind radioactivity is a real disease of matter.

Moreover, it is a contagious disease. It spreads. You bring those debased and crumbling atoms near others and those too presently catch the trick of swinging themselves out of coherent existence.

So that while man still struggles and dreams his very substance will change and crumble from beneath him. I mention this here as a queer persistent fancy.

Suppose, indeed, that is to be the end of our planet; no splendid climax and finale, no towering accumulation of achievements, but just⁠—atomic decay!

I add that to the ideas of the suffocating comet, the dark body out of space, the burning out of the sun, the distorted orbit, as a new and far more possible end—as Science can see ends—to this strange byplay of matter that we call …

“More’s kept from me than anyone. The very servants won’t let me know. They try and stop the worst of the papers—Boom’s things—from coming upstairs. … I suppose they’ve got him in a corner, George. Poor old Teddy!

Poor old Adam and Eve we are! Ficial Receivers with flaming swords to drive us out of our garden!

I’d hoped we’d never have another Trek. Well—anyway, it won’t be Crest Hill. … But it’s hard on Teddy. He must be in such a mess up there. Poor old chap. I suppose we can’t help him. I suppose we’d only worry him.

That gave my mind a twist into a new channel. My uncle came uppermost again. What a strange, melancholy emptiness of intention that stricken enterprise seemed in the even evening sunlight, what vulgar magnificence and crudity and utter absurdity!

It was as idiotic as the pyramids.

I sat down on the stile, staring at it as though I had never seen that forest of scaffold poles, that waste of walls and bricks and plaster and shaped stones, that wilderness of broken soil and wheeling tracks and dumps before.

I sat down on the stile, staring at it as though I had never seen that forest of scaffold poles, that waste of walls and bricks and plaster and shaped stones, that wilderness of broken soil and wheeling tracks and dumps before.

It struck me suddenly as the compactest image and sample of all that passes for Progress, of all the advertisement-inflated spending, the aimless building up and pulling down, the enterprise and promise of my age.

This was our fruit, this was what he had done, I and my uncle, in the fashion of our time. We were its leaders and exponents, we were the thing it most flourishingly produced.

We were its leaders and exponents, we were the thing it most flourishingly produced. For this futility in its end, for an epoch of such futility, the solemn scroll of history had unfolded. …

“Great God!” I cried, “but is this Life?”

For this the armies drilled, for this the Law was administered and the prisons did their duty, for this the millions toiled and perished in suffering, in order that a few of us should build palaces we never finished, make billiard-rooms under ponds, run imbecile …

But then comes indistinctness again. I was beginning to act. I know I persuaded him to put himself in my hands, and began at once to plan and do.

I think that when we act most we remember least, that just in the measure that the impulse of our impressions translates itself into schemes and movements, it ceases to record itself in memories.

I know I resolved to get him away at once, and to use the Lord Roberts β in effecting that.

There was just a little pause. “Can you carry this bundle?” she asked.

“No woman ever has respected the law⁠—ever,” she said. “It’s too silly.⁠ ⁠… The things it lets you do! And then pulls you up⁠—like a mad nurse minding a child.”

She carried some rugs for me through the shrubbery in the darkling.

Then I began what I suppose would be called a fight against the east wind.

One calls it a fight, but it was really almost as unlike a fight as plain sewing.

The wind tried to drive me westwardly, and I tried to get as much as I could eastwardly, with the wind beating and rocking us irregularly, but by no means unbearably, for about twelve hours.

The doctor stood, the others were all sitting on chairs the landlady had brought in and arranged for them.

And my uncle spoilt the climax, and did not die.

I replaced the little clergyman on the chair by the bedside, and he hovered about the room.

I bent my head down, and he tried to lift his hand to my shoulder. I raised him a little on his pillows, and listened.

“It seems to me, George, always⁠—there must be something in me⁠—that won’t die.”

He looked at me as though the decision rested with me.

“Perhaps,” I said. “Who knows?”

“Not the same scope for enterprise,” I said. “No.”

He became silent. I sat leaning down to him, and following out my own thoughts, and presently the religieuse resumed her periodic conflict with the window fastening. For a time he struggled for breath.

I fell into a pit of thought. I did not remark at first the change that was creeping over his face.

He lay back on his pillow, made a faint zzzing sound that ceased, and presently and quite quietly he died⁠—greatly comforted by my assurance.

I do not know when he died. His hand relaxed insensibly. Suddenly, with a start, with a shock, I found that his mouth had fallen open, and that he was dead. …

It came to me like a discovery that none of these things existed.

Before and after I have thought and called life a phantasmagoria, but never have I felt its truth as I did that night.

… We had parted; we two who had kept company so long had parted. But there was, I knew, no end to him or me. He had died a dream death, and ended a dream; his pain dream was over.

There, for a time, we stood leaning on the parapet of the bridge and surveying the distant peeks, the rich blue masses of the Pyrenees. For a long time we said nothing, and then she began talking.

“Life’s a rum go, George!”

she began. “Who would have thought, when I used to darn your stockings at old Wimblehurst, that this would be the end of the story? It seems far away now—that little shop, his and my first home.

But my heart’s torn to pieces by this, torn to rags, and things drop out I’ve kept in it. It’s true he wasn’t a husband much for me at the last.

But he was my child, George, he was my child and all my children, my silly child, and life has knocked him about for me, and I’ve never had a say in the matter; never a say; it’s puffed him up and smashed him⁠—like an old bag⁠—under my eyes.

I was clever enough to see it, and not clever enough to prevent it, and all I could do was to jeer. I’ve had to make what I could of it. Like most people. Like most of us. … But it wasn’t fair, George.

Like most people. Like most of us. … But it wasn’t fair, George. It wasn’t fair. Life and Death—great serious things—why couldn’t they leave him alone, and his lies and ways? If we could see the lightness of it—

“Why couldn’t they leave him alone?”

she repeated in a whisper as we went towards the inn.

It seemed a more daring and difficult feat than it was, and I couldn’t very well write to the papers to sustain my private estimate.

There can be little doubt that men infinitely prefer the appearance of dash and enterprise to simple honesty.

No one believed I was not an arch plotter in his financing. Yet they favoured me.

Her eyes flitted to the pavilion and back to me.

We stood close together, extraordinarily intimate, and extraordinarily apart.

“I’ve never seen this cottage of yours,” she said, “and I want to.”

I roused myself from my preoccupation.

“Like a musical gorilla with fingers all of one length. And a sort of soul.⁠ ⁠… It’s all the world of music to me.”

“Beethoven, when I want to clear up my head while I’m working. He is—how one would always like to work. Sometimes Chopin and those others, but Beethoven. Beethoven mainly. Yes.”