Tono-Bungay. H. G. Wells
I remember something, but not so much of it as I should like to recall, of my long tramp to Bladesover House. The distance from Chatham is almost exactly seventeen miles, and it took me until nearly one. It was very interesting and I do not think I was very fatigued, though I got rather pinched by one boot.
The morning must have been very clear, because I remember that near Itchinstow Hall I looked back and saw the estuary of the Thames, that river that has since played so large a part in my life. But at the time I did not know it was the Thames, I thought this great expanse of mud flats and water was the sea, which I had never yet seen nearly. And out upon it stood ships, sailing ships and a steamer or so, going up to London or down out into the great seas of the world. I stood for a long time watching these and thinking whether after all I should not have done better to have run away to sea.
The nearer I drew to Bladesover, the more doubtful I grew of the duality of my reception, and the more I regretted that alternative. I suppose it was the dirty clumsiness of the shipping I had seen nearly, that put me out of mind of that. I took a short cut through the Warren across the corner of the main park to intercept the people from the church. I wanted to avoid meeting any one before I met my mother, and so I went to a place where the path passed between banks, and without exactly hiding, stood up among the bushes. This place among other advantages eliminated any chance of seeing Lady Drew, who would drive round by the carriage road.
Standing up to waylay in this fashion I had a queer feeling of brigandage, as though I was some intrusive sort of bandit among these orderly things. It is the first time I remember having that outlaw feeling distinctly, a feeling that has played a large part in my subsequent life. I felt there existed no place for me that I had to drive myself in.
Presently, down the hill, the servants appeared, straggling by twos and threes, first some of the garden people and the butler’s wife with them, then the two laundry maids, odd inseparable old creatures, then the first footman talking to the butler’s little girl, and at last, walking grave and breathless beside old Ann and Miss Fison, the black figure of my mother.
My boyish mind suggested the adoption of a playful form of appearance. “Coo-ee, mother” said I, coming out against the sky,“Coo-ee!”
My mother looked up, went very white, and put her hand to her bosom.
I suppose there was a fearful fuss about me. And of course I was quite unable to explain my reappearance. But I held out stoutly, “I won’t go back to Chatham; I’ll drown myself first.” The next day my mother carried me off to Wimblehurst, took me fiercely and aggressively to an uncle I had never heard of before, near though the place was to us. She gave me no word as to what was to happen, and I was too subdued by her manifest wrath and humiliation at my last misdemeanour to demand information. I don’t for one moment think Lady Drew was “nice” about me. The finality of my banishment was endorsed and underlined and stamped home. I wished very much now that I had run away to sea, in spite of the coal dust and squalour Rochester had revealed to me. Perhaps over seas one came to different lands.
IV
I do not remember much of my journey to Wimblehurst with my mother except the image of her as sitting bolt upright, as rather disdaining the third-class carriage in which we traveled, and how she looked away from me out of the window when she spoke of my uncle. “I have not seen your uncle,” she said, “since he was a boy….” She added grudgingly, “Then he was supposed to be clever.”
She took little interest in such qualities as cleverness.
“He married about three years ago, and set up for himself in Wimblehurst…. So I suppose she had some money.”
She mused on scenes she had long dismissed from her mind. “Teddy,” she said at last in the tone of one who has been feeling in the dark and finds. “He was called Teddy… about your age…. Now he must be twenty-six or seven.”
I thought of my uncle as Teddy directly I saw him; there was something in his personal appearance that in the light of that memory phrased itself at once as Teddiness — a certain Teddidity. To describe it in and other terms is more difficult. It is nimbleness without grace, and alertness without intelligence. He whisked out of his shop upon the pavement, a short figure in grey and wearing grey carpet slippers; one had a sense of a young fattish face behind gilt glasses, wiry hair that stuck up and forward over the forehead, an irregular nose that had its aquiline moments, and that the body betrayed an equatorial laxity, an incipient “bow window” as the image goes. He jerked out of the shop, came to a stand on the pavement outside, regarded something in the window with infinite appreciation, stroked his chin, and, as abruptly, shot sideways into the door again, charging through it as it were behind an extended hand.
“That must be him,” said my mother, catching at her breath.
We came past the window whose contents I was presently to know by heart, a very ordinary chemist’s window except that there was a frictional electrical machine, an air pump and two or three tripods and retorts replacing the customary blue, yellow, and red bottles above. There was a plaster of Paris horse to indicate veterinary medicines among these breakables, and below were scent packets and diffusers and sponges and soda-water syphons and suchlike things. Only in the middle there was a rubricated card, very neatly painted by hand, with these words —
Buy Ponderevo’s Cough Linctus NOW.
NOW!
WHY?
Twopence Cheaper than in Winter.
You Store apples! why not the Medicine
You are Bound to Need?
in which appeal I was to recognise presently my uncle’s distinctive note.
My uncle’s face appeared above a card of infant’s comforters in the glass pane of the door. I perceived his eyes were brown, and that his glasses creased his nose. It was manifest he did not know us from Adam. A stare of scrutiny allowed an expression of commercial deference to appear in front of it, and my uncle flung open the door.
“You don’t know me?” panted my mother.
My uncle would not own he did not, but his curiosity was manifest. My mother sat down on one of the little chairs before the soap and patent medicine-piled counter, and her lips opened and closed.
“A glass of water, madam,” said my uncle, waved his hand in a sort of curve and shot away.
My mother drank the water and spoke. “That boy,” she said, “takes after his father. He grows more like him every day…. And so I have brought him to you.”
“His father, madam?”
“George.”
For a moment the chemist was still at a loss. He stood behind the counter with the glass my mother had returned to him in his hand. Then comprehension grew.
“By Gosh!” he said. “Lord!” he cried. His glasses fell off. He disappeared replacing them, behind a pile of boxed-up bottles of blood mixture. “Eleven thousand virgins!” I heard him cry. The glass was banged down. “O-ri-ental Gums!”
He shot away out of the shop through some masked door. One heard his voice. “Susan! Susan!”
Then he reappeared with an extended hand. “Well, how are you?” he said. “I was never so surprised in my life. Fancy!… You!”
He shook my mother’s impassive hand and then mine very warmly holding his glasses on with his left forefinger.
“Come right in!” he cried — “come right in! Better late than never!” and led the way into the parlour behind the shop.
After Bladesover that apartment struck me as stuffy and petty, but it was very comfortable in comparison with the Frapp livingroom. It had a faint, disintegrating smell of meals about it, and my most immediate impression was of the remarkable fact that something was hung about or wrapped round or draped over everything. There was bright-patterned