H G Wells Omnibus, page 349
‘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 text of a spirited but inconclusive harangue upon Tariff Reform.26
CHAPTER 2
Our Progress from Camden Town to Crest Hill
§1
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-eyed, 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.1
‘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 Institution2 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 notebook in her hand.
‘Where ye 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 Beckenham, and my aunt intermitted her intellectual activities. The house at Beckenham 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 – Clive, Napoleon, Caesar3 and so forth – and having it painted on the door in gilt letters on a black label. ‘Martin Luther’4 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 seedling, 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 as the lawn was down again, and afterwards my aunt made friends with a quiet gentlewoman next door, à 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 Chislehurst.
‘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.’
§2
I look into the jumbled stores of the middle distance of memory, and Beckenham seems to me a quite transitory phase. But really they were there several years; through nearly all my married life in fact, and far longer than the year and odd months we lived together at Wimblehurst. But the Wimblehurst time with them is fuller in my memory by far than the Beckenham period. There comes back to me with a quite considerable amount of detail the effect of that garden party of my aunt’s and of a little social misbehaviour of which I was guilty on that occasion. It’s like a scrap from another life. It’s all set in what is for me a kind of cutaneous feeling, the feeling of rather ill-cut city clothes, frock-coat and grey trousers, and of a high collar and tie worn in sunshine among flowers. I have still a quite vivid memory of the little trapezoidal lawn, of the gathering and particularly of the hats and feathers of the gathering, of the parlour-maid and the blue teacups, and of the magnificent presence of Mrs Hogberry and of her clear resonant voice. It was a voice that would have gone with a garden party on a larger scale; it went into adjacent premises; it included the gardener who was far up the vegetable patch and technically out of play. The only other men were my aunt’s doctor, two of the clergy, amiable contrasted men, and Mrs Hogberry’s imperfectly grown-up son, a youth just bursting into collar. The rest were women, except for a young girl or so in a state of speechless good behaviour. Marion also was there.
Marion and I had arrived a little estranged, and I remember her as a silent presence, a shadow across all that sunlit emptiness of intercourse. We had embittered each other with one of those miserable disputes that seemed so unavoidable between us. She had, with the help of Smithie, dressed rather elaborately for the occasion, and when she saw me prepared to accompany her in, I think it was, a grey suit, she protested that silk hat and frock-coat were imperative. I was recalcitrant, she quoted an illustrated paper showing a garden party with the King present, and finally I capitulated – but after my evil habit, resentfully….
Eh dear! those old quarrels, how pitiful they were, how trivial! And how sorrowful they are to recall! I think they grow more sorrowful as I grow older, and all the small passionate reasons for our mutual anger fade and fade out of memory.
The impression that Beckenham company has left on my mind is one of a modest unreality; they were all maintaining a front of unspecified social pretension, and evading the display of the economic facts of the case. Most of the husbands were ‘in business’ off stage – it would have been outrageous to ask what the business was – and the wives were giving their energies to produce with the assistance of novels and the illustrated magazines, a moralized version of the afternoon life of the aristocratic class. They hadn’t the intellectual or moral enterprise of the upper-class woman, they had no political interests, they had no views about anything, and consequently they were, I remember, extremely difficult to talk to. They all sat about in the summer-house and in garden-chairs, and were very hatty and ruffley and sunshadey. Three ladies and the curate played croquet with a general immense gravity broken by occasional loud cries of feigned distress from the curate. ‘Oh! Whacking me about again! Augh!’
The dominant social fact that afternoon was Mrs Hogberry; she took up a central position commanding the croquet and went on, as my aunt said to me in an incidental aside, ‘like an old Roundabout‘. She talked of the way in which Beckenham society was getting mixed, and turned on to a touching letter she had recently received from her former nurse at Little Gossdean. Followed a loud account of Little Gossdean and how much she and her eight sisters had been looked up to there. ‘My poor mother was quite a little Queen there,’ she said. ‘And such nice Common People! People say the country labourers are getting disrespectful nowadays. It isn’t so – not if they’re properly treated. Here of course in Beckenham it’s different. I don’t call the people we get here a Poor – they’re certainly not a proper Poor. They’re Masses. I always tell Mr Bugshoot they’re Masses, and ought to be treated as such.’
Dim memories of Mrs Mackridge floated through my mind as I listened to her….
I was whirled on this roundabout for a bit, and then had the fortune to fall off into a tête-à-tête with a lady whom my aunt introduced as Mrs Mumble – but then she introduced everybody to me as Mumble that afternoon, either by way of humour or necessity.
That must have been one of my earliest essays in the art of polite conversation, and I remember that I began by criticizing the local railway service, and that at the third sentence or thereabouts Mrs Mumble said in a distinctly bright and encouraging way that she feared I was a very ‘frivolous’ person.
I wonder now what it was I said that was ‘frivolous’.
I don’t know what happened to end that conversation, or if it had an end. I remember talking to one of the clergy for a time rather awkwardly, and being given a sort of topographical history of Beckenham, which he assured me time after time, was ‘Quite an old place. Quite an old place.’ As though I had treated it as new and he meant to be very patient but very convincing. Then we hung up in a distinct pause, and my aunt rescued me. ‘George,’ she said in a confidential undertone, ‘keep the pot-a-boiling.’ And then audibly, ‘I say, will you both old trot about with tea a bit?’
‘Only too delighted to trot for you, Mrs Ponderevo,’ said the clergyman, becoming fearfully expert and in his element; ‘only too delighted.’
I found we were near a rustic table, and that the housemaid was behind us in a suitable position to catch us on the rebound with the tea-things.
‘Trot!’ repeated the clergyman to me, much amused; ‘excellent expression!’ and I just saved him from the tray as he turned about.
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 nush-ment. Like throwing a bit of turf down an old geyser.’
She surveyed the gathering with a predominant blue eye and helped herself to tea.
‘They keep on going stiff,’ she said in an undertone…. ‘I’ve done my best.’
‘It’s been a huge success,’ I said encouragingly.
‘That boy has had his legs crossed in that position and hasn’t spoken for ten minutes. Stiffer and stiffer. Brittle. He’s beginning a dry cough – always a bad sign, George…. Walk ‘em about, shall I! – rub their noses with snow?’
Happily she didn’t. I got myself involved with the gentlewoman from next door, a pensive, languid-looking little woman with a low voice, and fell talking; our topic, Cats and Dogs, and which it was we liked best.
‘I always feel,’ said the pensive little woman, ‘that there’s something about a dog—A cat hasn’t got it.’
‘Yes,’ I found myself admitting with great enthusiasm, ‘there is something. And yet again—’
‘Oh! I know there’s something about a cat too. But it isn’t the same.’
‘Not quite the same,’ I admitted; ‘but still it’s something.’
‘Ah! But such a different something!’
‘More sinuous.’
‘Much more.’
‘Ever so much more.’…
‘It makes all the difference, don’t you think?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘all.’
She glanced at me gravely and sighed a long, deep-felt ‘Yes’.
A long pause.
The thing seemed to me to amount to a stalemate. Fear came into my heart and much perplexity.
‘The -er, Roses,’ I said. I felt like a drowning man. ‘Those roses – don’t you think they are – very beautiful flowers?’
‘Aren’t they!’ she agreed gently. ‘There seems to be something in roses – something – I don’t know how to express it.’
‘Something,’ I said helpfully.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘something. Isn’t there?’
‘So few people see it,’ I said; ‘more’s the pity!’
She sighed and said again very softly, ‘Yes.’…
There was another long pause. I looked at her, and she was thinking dreamily. The drowning sensation returned, the fear and enfeeblement. I perceived by a sort of inspiration that her teacup was empty.
‘Let me take your cup,’ I said abruptly, and, that secured, made for the table by the summer-house. I had no intention then of deserting my aunt. But close at hand the big French window of the drawing-room yawned inviting and suggestive. I can feel all that temptation now, and particularly the provocation of my collar. In an instant I was lost. I would – Just for a moment!
I dashed in, put down the cup on the keys of the grand piano and fled upstairs, softly, swiftly, three steps at a time, to the sanctuary of my uncle’s study, his snuggery. I arrived there breathless, convinced there was no return for me. I was very glad and ashamed of myself and desperate. By means of a penknife I contrived to break open his cabinet of cigars, drew a chair to the window, took off my coat, collar and tie, and remained smoking guiltily and rebelliously, and peeping through the blind at the assembly on the lawn until it was altogether gone….
The clergymen, I thought, were wonderful.
§3
A few such pictures of those early days at Beckenham stand out, and then I find myself among the Chislehurst memories. The Chislehurst mansion had ‘grounds’ rather than a mere garden, and there was a gardener’s cottage and a little lodge at the gate. The ascendant movement was always far more in evidence there than at Beckenham. The velocity was increasing.
One night picks itself out as typical, as in its way marking an epoch. I was there, I think, about some advertisement stuff, on some sort of business anyhow, and my uncle and aunt had come back in a fly from a dinner at the Runcorns. (Even then he was nibbling at Runcorn with the idea of our great Amalgamation budding in his mind.) I got down there, I suppose, about eleven. I found the two of them sitting in the study, my aunt on a chair-arm with a whimsical pensiveness on her face, regarding my uncle, and he, much extended and very rotund, in the low armchair drawn up to the fender.
‘Look here, George,’ said my uncle after my first greetings, ‘I just been saying: We aren’t Oh Fay!’5
‘Eh?’
‘Not Oh Fay! Socially!’
‘Old Fly, he means, George – French!’
‘Oh! Didn’t think of French. One never knows where to have him. What’s gone wrong tonight?’
‘I been thinking. It isn’t any particular thing. I ate too much of that fishy stuff at first, like salt frog spawn, and was a bit confused by olives; and – well, I didn’t know which wine was which. Had to say that each time. It puts your talk all wrong. And she wasn’t in evening dress, not like the others. We can’t go on in that style, George – not a proper ad!’
‘I’m not sure you were right,’ I said, ‘in having a fly.’ 6
‘We got to do it all better,’ said my uncle, ‘we got to do it in Style. Smart business, smart men. She tries to pass it off as humorous’ – my aunt pulled a grimace – ‘it isn’t humorous! See! We’re on the up-grade now, fair and square. We’re going to be big. We aren’t going to be laughed at as Poovenoos, 7 see!’
‘Nobody laughed at you,’ said my aunt. ‘Old Bladder!’
‘Nobody isn’t going to laugh at me,’ said my uncle, glancing at his contours and suddenly sitting up.
My aunt raised her eyebrows slightly, swung her foot, and said nothing.
