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Tono-Bungay Book 1 Chapter 1 - Parts 4-6 · The H. G. Wells Library

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Speaker 1: Book The first chapter the first parts four through six
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Speaker 1: of Tono Bungay. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox
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Speaker 1: recordings are in the public domain. For more information or
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Speaker 1: to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Tono Bungay by H. G. Wells,
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Speaker 1: Book The First The Days before Tono Bungay was invented.
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Speaker 1: Chapter the first of Bladesover House and My Mother and
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Speaker 1: the Constitution of Society, Part four. I hated tea time
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Speaker 1: in the housekeeper's room more than anything else at blades Over,
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Speaker 1: and more particularly, I hated it when Missus Mackridge and
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Speaker 1: Missus Booch and Missus Latude Fernay were staying in the house.
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Speaker 1: They were all three of them pensant off servants. Old
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Speaker 1: friends of Lady Dru's had rewarded them posthumously for a
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Speaker 1: prolonged devotion to their minor comforts, and Missus Booch was
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Speaker 1: also trustee of a favorite sky terrier. Each year Lady
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Speaker 1: Drew gave them an invitation, a reward and encouragement of virtue,
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Speaker 1: with a special reference to my mother and miss Fison
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Speaker 1: the maid. They sat about in black and shiny and
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Speaker 1: flouncy clothing adorned with gimp and beads, eating great quantities
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Speaker 1: of cake, drinking much tea in a stately manner, and
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Speaker 1: reverberating remarks. I remember these women as immense, no doubt
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Speaker 1: they were of negotiable size. But I was only a
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Speaker 1: very little chap and they have assumed nightmare proportions in
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Speaker 1: my mind. They loomed, they bulged, they impended. Missus Mackridge
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Speaker 1: was large and dark. There was a marvel about her head.
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Speaker 1: Inasmuch as she was bald, she wore a dignified cap,
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Speaker 1: and in front of that upon her brow hair was painted.
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Speaker 1: I have never seen the like since she had been
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Speaker 1: made to the widow of Sir Roderick Blenderhasset Impi, some
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Speaker 1: sort of governor or such like portent in the East Indies.
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Speaker 1: And from her remains in Missus Mackridge, I judge Lady
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Speaker 1: Impy was a very stupendous and crushing creature. Indeed, Lady
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Speaker 1: Impy had been of the junotype haughty, unapproachable, given to irony,
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Speaker 1: and a caustic wit. Missus Mackridge had no wit, but
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Speaker 1: she had acquired the caustic voice and gestures along with
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Speaker 1: the old satins and trimmings of the great lady. When
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Speaker 1: she told you it was a fine morning, she seemed
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Speaker 1: also to be telling you you were a fool, and
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Speaker 1: a low fool to boot. When she was spoken to,
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Speaker 1: she had a way of acknowledging your poor tinkle of
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Speaker 1: utterance with a voluminous, scornful humph that made you want
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Speaker 1: to burn her alive, as she also had a way
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Speaker 1: of saying indeed, with a droop of the eyelids. Missus
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Speaker 1: Booch was a smaller woman, brown haired, with queer little
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Speaker 1: curls on either side of her face, large blue eyes,
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Speaker 1: and a small set of stereotyped remarks that constituted her
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Speaker 1: entire mental range. Missus Latude Fernay had left, oddly enough,
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Speaker 1: no memory at all except her name and the effect
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Speaker 1: of a green gray silk dress, all said with gold
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Speaker 1: and blue buttons. I fancy she was a large blonde.
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Speaker 1: Then there was Miss Fison, the maid who served both
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Speaker 1: the Lady Drew and Miss Somerville. And at the end
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Speaker 1: of the table opposite my mother sat rabbits the butler.
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Speaker 1: Rabbits that for a butler was an unassuming man, and
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Speaker 1: at tea he was not, as you know butlers but
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Speaker 1: in a morning coat and a black tie with blue spots.
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Speaker 1: Still he was large with side whiskers, even if his
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Speaker 1: clean shaven mouth was weak. And little I sat among
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Speaker 1: these peas on a high, hard early Gregorian chair, trying
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Speaker 1: to exist like a feeble seedling amidst great rocks, and
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Speaker 1: my mother sat with an eye upon me, resolute to
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Speaker 1: suppress the slightest manifestation of vitality. It was hard on me,
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Speaker 1: but perhaps it was also hard upon these rather over fed, aging,
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Speaker 1: pretending people, that my youthful restlessness and rebellious, unbelieving eyes
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Speaker 1: should be thrust in among their dignities. Tea lasted for
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Speaker 1: nearly three quarters of an hour, and I sat it
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Speaker 1: out perforce, and day after day the talk was exactly
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Speaker 1: the same. Sugar, Missus Mackridge. My mother used to ask sugar,
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Speaker 1: missus Letude Fernay. The word sugar would stir the mind
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Speaker 1: of Missus Mackridge, LI say she would begin issuing her proclamation.
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Speaker 1: At least half her sentences began. They say sugar is fattening. Nowadays, Betty,
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Speaker 1: of the best people do not take it at all,
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Speaker 1: not with their tea, ma'am, said Rabbits intelligently, not with anything,
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Speaker 1: said Missus Mackridge, with an air of crushing repartee, and drank.
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Speaker 1: What won't they say next, said miss Fisson. They do
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Speaker 1: say such things, said Missus Booch. This is said Missus Mackridge, inflexibly.
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Speaker 1: The doctors are not recommending it now, my mother, no, ma'am,
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Speaker 1: Missus Mackridge, no, ma'am. Then to the table at large.
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Speaker 1: Poor Sir Roderick, before he died, consumed great quantaties of sugar.
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Speaker 1: I have sometimes fancied it may have hastened his end.
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Speaker 1: This ended the first skirmish. A certain gloom of manner
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Speaker 1: and pause was considered due to the sacred memory of
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Speaker 1: Sir Roderick George. My mother said, they'll kick the chair. Then,
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Speaker 1: perhaps Missus Butch would produce a favorite piece from her repertoire.
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Speaker 1: The evenings are drawing out nicely, she would say, Or
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Speaker 1: if the season was decadent, how the evenings draw in.
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Speaker 1: It was an invaluable remark to her. I do not
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Speaker 1: know how she would have got along without it. My mother,
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Speaker 1: who sat with her back to the window, would always
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Speaker 1: consider it due to Missus Booch, to turn around and
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Speaker 1: regard the evening in the act of elongation or contraction,
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Speaker 1: whichever phase it might be. A brisk discussion of how
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Speaker 1: long we were to the longest or shortest day would
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Speaker 1: ensue and die away. At last, exhausted, Missus Mackridge perhaps
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Speaker 1: would reopen. She had many intelligent habits. Among others, she
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Speaker 1: read the paper, the Morning Post. The other ladies would
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Speaker 1: at times tackle that sheet, but only to read the births,
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Speaker 1: marriages and deaths on the front page. It was, of course,
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Speaker 1: the old Morning Post that coursed rapience, not the brisk,
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Speaker 1: coruscating young thing of to day. They say she would
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Speaker 1: open that Lord Tweedam's is to go to Canada. Ah,
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Speaker 1: said mister Rabbits, do they isn't he said my mother,
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Speaker 1: the Earl of Slumgold's cousin. She knew he was. It
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Speaker 1: was an entirely irrelevant and unnecessary remark, but still something
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Speaker 1: to say the same, ma'am, said Missus Mackreage. They say
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Speaker 1: he was extremely popular in New South Wales. They looked
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Speaker 1: up to him greatly. I knew him, ma'am as a
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Speaker 1: young man, a very nice, pleasant young fellow. Interlude of
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Speaker 1: respect his predecessor, said Rabbits, who had acquired from some
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Speaker 1: clerical model, a precise emphatic articulation without acquiring at the
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Speaker 1: same time the aspirates that would have greased it got
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Speaker 1: into trouble at Sydney. Hoh, said Missus Makeridge scornfully. So
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Speaker 1: I'm told he came to Temple Morton after he came back,
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Speaker 1: and I remember that talking him over after he'd gone again. Hoh,
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Speaker 1: said Missus Makeridge, interrogatibly. Is Fuss was quoting poetry, ma'am.
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Speaker 1: He said, what was it? He shad day they left
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Speaker 1: their country for their country's good, which in some way
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Speaker 1: was took to remind them of their being originally convicts,
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Speaker 1: No now reformed. Every one I heard speak agreed it
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Speaker 1: was of him. The sluderith used to say, said Missus
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Speaker 1: Mackridge that the first thing here Missus Mackridge paused and
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Speaker 1: looked dreadfully at me, and the second thing here she
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Speaker 1: fixed me again. And the third thing, now, I was
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Speaker 1: released needed in the colonial governor is tact. She became
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Speaker 1: aware of my doubts again and added predominantly. It has
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Speaker 1: always struck me that that was a singularly a true remark.
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Speaker 1: I resolved that if ever I found this polypus of
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Speaker 1: tact growing up in my soul. I would tear it
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Speaker 1: out by the roots, throw it forth and stamp on it.
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Speaker 1: They're queer people, colonials, said rabbits, very queer. When I
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Speaker 1: was at Templemorton, I see something of them, queer fellows.
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Speaker 1: Some of em very respectful, of course, free with their money,
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Speaker 1: and us pamsomate sort away. But some of them, I
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Speaker 1: must confess me me nervous. They have an eye on you,
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Speaker 1: They watch you as you wait, They let themselves appear
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Speaker 1: to be looking at you. My mother said nothing in
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Speaker 1: that discussion. The word colonies always upset her. She was afraid,
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Speaker 1: I think that if she turned her mind in that direction,
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Speaker 1: my errant father might suddenly and shockingly be discovered, no doubt,
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Speaker 1: conspicuously bigamic, and altogether offensive and revolutionary. She did not
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Speaker 1: want to rediscover my father at all. It is curious that,
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Speaker 1: when I was a little listening boy, I had such
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Speaker 1: an idea of our colonies that I jeered in my
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Speaker 1: heart at Missus Macbridge's colonial ascendency. These brave, emancipated sun
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Speaker 1: bird English of the open, I thought, suffer these aristocratic
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Speaker 1: invaders as a quaint anachronism. But as for being gratified,
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Speaker 1: I don't jeer. Now I'm not so sure. Part five.
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Speaker 1: It is a little difficult to explain why I did
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Speaker 1: not come to do what was the natural thing for
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Speaker 1: any one in my circumstances to do, and take my
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Speaker 1: world for granted. And a certain innate skepticism, I think
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Speaker 1: explains it, and a certain inaptitude for sympathetic assimilation. My father,
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Speaker 1: I believe, was a skeptic. My mother was certainly a
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Speaker 1: hard woman. I was an only child, and to this
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Speaker 1: day I do not know whether my father is living
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Speaker 1: or dead. He fled my mother's virtues before my distinct
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Speaker 1: memories began. He left no traces in his flight, and she,
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Speaker 1: in her indignation, destroyed every vestige that she could of him,
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Speaker 1: Never a photograph nor a scrap of his handwriting of
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Speaker 1: I seen. And it was I know, only the accepted
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Speaker 1: code of virtue and discretion that prevented her destroying her
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Speaker 1: marriage certificate and me, and so making a clean sweep
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Speaker 1: of her matrimonial humiliation. I suppose I must inherit something
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Speaker 1: of the moral stupidity that would enable her to make
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Speaker 1: a holocaust of every little personal thing she had of him.
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Speaker 1: There must have been presents made by him as a lover,
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Speaker 1: for example, books with kindly inscriptions, letters, perhaps a flattened flower,
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Speaker 1: a ring or such like gage. She kept her wedding ring,
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Speaker 1: of course, but all the others she destroyed. She never
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Speaker 1: told me his Christian name, or indeed spoke a word
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Speaker 1: to me of him, though at times I came near
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Speaker 1: daring to ask her, and what I have of him?
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Speaker 1: It isn't much I got from his brother, my hero,
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Speaker 1: my uncle Ponderevo. She wore her ring, marriage certificate she
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Speaker 1: kept in a sealed envelope in the very bottom of
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Speaker 1: her largest trunk. And me she sustained at a private
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Speaker 1: school among the Kentish Hills. You must not think I
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Speaker 1: was always at Bladesover, even in my holidays. If at
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Speaker 1: the time these came round Lady Drew was vexed by
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Speaker 1: recent company, or for any other reason wished to take
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Speaker 1: it out of my mother, then she used to ignore
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Speaker 1: the customary reminder. My mother gave her that I stayed
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Speaker 1: on at the school, But such occasions were rare, and
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Speaker 1: I suppose that between ten and fourteen I averaged fifty
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Speaker 1: days a year at Bladesover. Don't imagine, I deny that
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Speaker 1: was a fine thing for me. Bladesover, in absorbing the
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Speaker 1: whole countryside, had not altogether missed greatness. The Bladesover system
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Speaker 1: has at least on one good thing for England. It
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Speaker 1: has abolished the peasant habit of mind. If many of
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Speaker 1: us still live and breathe pantry and housekeeper's room, we
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Speaker 1: are quit of the dream of living by economizing parasitically
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Speaker 1: on hens and pigs. About that park there were some
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Speaker 1: elements of a liberal education. There was a great space
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Speaker 1: of greensward not given over to manure and food grubbing.
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Speaker 1: There was mystery, there was matter for the imagination. It
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Speaker 1: was still a park of deer. I saw something of
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Speaker 1: the life of these dappled creatures. Heard the belling of stags,
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Speaker 1: came upon young fawns. Among the bracken, found bones, skulls
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Speaker 1: and antlers. In lonely places. There were corners that gave
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Speaker 1: a gleam of meaning to the word forest, glimpses of
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Speaker 1: unstudied natural splendor. There was a slope of bluebells in
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Speaker 1: the broken sunlight, under the newly green beaches in the
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Speaker 1: westwood that is now precious sapphire in my memory. It
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Speaker 1: was the first time that I knowingly met beauty. And
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Speaker 1: in the house there were books the rubbish old lady
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Speaker 1: drew read. I never saw stuff of the Mariah Monk type.
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Speaker 1: I have since gathered had a fascination for her. But
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Speaker 1: back in the past there had been a drew of
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Speaker 1: intellectual enterprise, Sir Cuthbert, the son of Sir Matthew, who
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Speaker 1: built the house and thrust away neglected and despised. In
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Speaker 1: an old room upstairs were books and treasures of his
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Speaker 1: that my mother let me rout among during a spell
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Speaker 1: of wintry wet. Sitting under a dormer window on a
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Speaker 1: shelf above great stores of tea and spices, I became
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Speaker 1: familiar with much of Hogarth. In a big portfolio with Raphael,
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Speaker 1: there was a great book of engravings from the Stanzas
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Speaker 1: of Raphael in the Vatican, and with most of the
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Speaker 1: capitals of Europe as they looked about seventeen eighty by
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Speaker 1: means of several pig iron molded books of view. There
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Speaker 1: was also a broad eighteenth century atlas with huge wandering
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Speaker 1: maps that instructed me mightily. It had splendid adornments about
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Speaker 1: each map. Title Holland showed a fisherman and his boat, Russia,
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Speaker 1: a cossack, Japan, remarkable people attired in pagods. I say
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Speaker 1: it deliberately pagodas there were terrae incognitai in every continent,
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Speaker 1: then Poland, Sarmatia, lands since lost, and many a voyage
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Speaker 1: I made with a blunted pin about that large, incorrect
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Speaker 1: and dignified world. The books in that little old closet
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Speaker 1: had been banished, I suppose, from the saloon during the
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Speaker 1: Victorian revival of good taste and emasculated orthodoxy. But my
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Speaker 1: mother had no suspicion of their character. So I read
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Speaker 1: and understood the good sound rhetoric of Tom Payne's Rights
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Speaker 1: of Man and his common sense, excellent books, once praised
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Speaker 1: by bishops, and since sedulously lied about Gulliver? Was there
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Speaker 1: unexpurgated strong meat for a boy, perhaps, but not too strong?
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Speaker 1: I hold. I have never regretted that I escaped niceness
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Speaker 1: in these affairs. The satire of trial dragdub made my
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Speaker 1: blood boil, as it was meant to do. But I
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Speaker 1: hated swift for the winnings, and never quite liked a
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Speaker 1: horse afterwards. Then I remember also a translation of Voltaire's
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Speaker 1: Candide and Razalus, and vast book though it was, I
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Speaker 1: really believe, I read in a muzzy sort of way,
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Speaker 1: of course, from end to end, and even with some
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Speaker 1: reference now and then to the Atlas Gibbon in twelve volumes.
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Speaker 1: These readings whetted my taste for more answeroly I raded
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Speaker 1: the bookcases in the big Saloon. I got through quite
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Speaker 1: a number of books before my sacrilegious temerity was discovered
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Speaker 1: by Anne, the old head housemaid. I remember that, among others,
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Speaker 1: I tried a translation of Plato's Republic then, and found
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Speaker 1: extraordinary little interest in it. I was much too young
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Speaker 1: for that. But Vathek Vathek was glorious stuff, that kicking
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Speaker 1: affair when everybody had to kick. The thought of Vathek
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Speaker 1: always brings back with it my boyish memory of the
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Speaker 1: Big Saloon in Bladesover. It was a huge, long room
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Speaker 1: with many windows opening upon the park, and each window
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Speaker 1: there were a dozen or more reaching from the floor up,
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Speaker 1: had its elaborate silk or satin curtains, heavily fringed a canopy.
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Speaker 1: Is it above? It's completely white shutters folding into the
18:58
Speaker 1: deep thickness of the wall. At either end of that
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Speaker 1: great steel place was an immense marble chimney piece. The
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Speaker 1: end by the bookcase showed the Wolf and Romulus and Remus,
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Speaker 1: with Homer and Virgil for supporters. The design at the
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Speaker 1: other end I have forgotten. Frederick, Prince of Wales, swaggered
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Speaker 1: flatly over the one, twice life size, but mellowed by
19:22
Speaker 1: the surface gleam of oil. And over the other was
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Speaker 1: an equally colossal group of departed druze as Sylvan deities,
19:32
Speaker 1: scantily clad against a storm rent sky. Down the center
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Speaker 1: of the elaborate ceiling were three chandeliers, each bearing some
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Speaker 1: hundreds of dangling glass lusters, and over the interminable carpet
19:47
Speaker 1: it impressed me as about as big as Sarmatia. In
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Speaker 1: the store room Atlas, where islands and archipelagos of chintz
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Speaker 1: covered chairs and couches, tables, great sevres, vases or pedestals,
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Speaker 1: a bronze man and a horse. Somewhere in this wilderness
20:05
Speaker 1: one came, I remember, upon a big harp beside a
20:09
Speaker 1: lyre shaped music stand and a grand piano. The book
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Speaker 1: borrowing raid was one of extraordinary dash and danger. One
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Speaker 1: came down the main service stairs that was legal, and
20:24
Speaker 1: illegality began in a little landing, where very cautiously one
20:29
Speaker 1: went through a red baized door. A little passage led
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Speaker 1: to the hall, and here one reconnoitered for Anne, the
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Speaker 1: old head housemaid. The younger housemaids were friendly and did
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Speaker 1: not count and located. Came a dash across the open
20:44
Speaker 1: space at the foot of that great staircase that has
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Speaker 1: never been properly descended since powder went out of fashion.
20:51
Speaker 1: And so to the saloon door. A beast of an
20:55
Speaker 1: oscillating chinaman in China, as large as life, grimaced and
20:59
Speaker 1: quivered to one's lightest steps. That door was the perilous place.
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Speaker 1: It was double, with the thickness of the wall between,
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Speaker 1: so that one could not listen beforehand for the whisk
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Speaker 1: of the feather brush on the other side. Oddly rat like,
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Speaker 1: is it not, This darting into enormous places and pursuit
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Speaker 1: of the abandoned crumbs of thought. And I found Langhorne's
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Speaker 1: Plutarch too. I remember on those shelves achieves squeer to
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Speaker 1: me now to think that I acquired pride and self respect,
21:31
Speaker 1: The idea of a state and the germ of public
21:34
Speaker 1: spirit in such a furtive fashion. Queer too that it
21:38
Speaker 1: should rest with an old Greek dad these eighteen hundred
21:42
Speaker 1: years to teach that part six. The school I went
21:49
Speaker 1: to was the sort of school the Bladesover system permitted.
21:52
Speaker 1: The public schools that add comic into existence in the
21:56
Speaker 1: brief glow of the Renaissance had been taken possession of
21:59
Speaker 1: by the ruling. The lower classes were not supposed to
22:03
Speaker 1: stand in need of schools, and our middle stratum got
22:06
Speaker 1: the schools it deserved, private schools, schools any unqualified pretender
22:12
Speaker 1: was free to establish. Mine was kept by a man
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Speaker 1: who had had the energy to get himself a college
22:18
Speaker 1: of preceptors to Ploba, and considering how cheap his charges were,
22:24
Speaker 1: I will readily admit the place might have been worse.
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Speaker 1: The building was a dingy yellow brick residence outside the village,
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Speaker 1: with the school room as an outbuilding of lath and plaster.
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Speaker 1: I do not remember that my school days were unhappy. Indeed,
22:41
Speaker 1: I recall a good lot of fine mixed fun in them.
22:44
Speaker 1: But I cannot, without grave risk of misinterpretation, declare that
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Speaker 1: we were at all nice and refined. We fought much
22:54
Speaker 1: not sound formal fighting, but scrapping of a sincere and
22:58
Speaker 1: murderous kind into which one might bring one's boots. It
23:03
Speaker 1: made us tough at any rate, and several of us
23:06
Speaker 1: were the sons of London publicans, who distinguished scraps where
23:11
Speaker 1: one meant to hurt from ordered pugilism, practicing both arts
23:16
Speaker 1: and having moreover precocious linguistic gifts. Our cricket field was
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Speaker 1: bald about the wickets, and we played without style and
23:25
Speaker 1: disputed with the umpire. And the teaching was chiefly in
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Speaker 1: the hands of a lout of nineteen who wore already
23:32
Speaker 1: made clothes and taught despicably. The head master and proprietor
23:37
Speaker 1: taught us arithmetic, algebra and euclid and to the older
23:42
Speaker 1: boys even trigonometry. Himself he had a strong mathematical bias,
23:47
Speaker 1: and I think now that by the standard of a
23:50
Speaker 1: British public school he did rather well by us. We
23:55
Speaker 1: had one inestimable privilege at that school, and that was
23:58
Speaker 1: spiritual nigga le. We dealt with one another with the
24:02
Speaker 1: forcible simplicity of natural boys. We cheaked and punched and clouted.
24:08
Speaker 1: We thought ourselves read Indians and cowboys and suchlike honorable things,
24:13
Speaker 1: and not young English gentlemen. We never felt the strain
24:17
Speaker 1: of onward Christian soldiers, nor were swayed by any premature piety.
24:22
Speaker 1: In the cold oak pew of our Sunday devotions. All
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Speaker 1: that was good. We spent our rare pennies in the
24:31
Speaker 1: uncensored reading matter of the village Dame's Shop on the
24:35
Speaker 1: Boys of England, and honest penny dreadfuls ripping stuff, stuff
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Speaker 1: that anticipated Haggard in Stevenson, badly printed and queerly illustrated,
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Speaker 1: and very very good for us. On our half holidays,
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Speaker 1: we were allowed the unusual freedom of rambling in twos
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Speaker 1: and threes, wide and far about the lad talking experimentally,
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Speaker 1: dreaming wildly. There was much in those walks to this day,
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Speaker 1: the landscape of the Kentish world, with its low, broad distances,
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Speaker 1: its hop gardens and golden stretches of wheat, its oasts
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Speaker 1: and square church towers, its background of downland and hangars.
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Speaker 1: As for me, a faint sense of adventure added to
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Speaker 1: the pleasure of its beauty. We smoked on occasion, but
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Speaker 1: nobody put us up to the proper boyish things to do.
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Speaker 1: We never robbed an orchard, for example, though there were
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Speaker 1: orchards all about us, we thought stealing was sinful. We
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Speaker 1: stole incidental apples and turnips of strawberries from the fields indeed,
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Speaker 1: but in a criminal, inglorious fashion, and afterwards we were ashamed.
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Speaker 1: We had our days of adventure, but they were natural accidents,
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Speaker 1: our own adventures. There was one hot day whence several
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Speaker 1: of us, walking out towards Maidstone, were incited by the
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Speaker 1: devil to despise ginger beer, and we fuddled ourselves dreadfully
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Speaker 1: with ale, and a time when our young minds were
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Speaker 1: infected to the pitch of buying pistols by the legend
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Speaker 1: of the wild West. Young Roots from Highbury came back
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Speaker 1: with a revolver and cartridges, and we went off six
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Speaker 1: strong to live a free wild life. One holiday afternoon,
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Speaker 1: we fired our first shot deep in the old flint
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Speaker 1: mine at Chiselstead, and nearly burst our ear drums. Then
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Speaker 1: we fired at primrose studded wood by picthorn Green, and
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Speaker 1: I gave a false alarm of keeper, and we fled
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Speaker 1: in disorder for a mile, after which Roots suddenly shot
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Speaker 1: at a pheasant in the high road by chiselstead, and
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Speaker 1: then young Barker told lies about the severity of the
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Speaker 1: game laws and made Roots sore afraid, and we hid
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Speaker 1: the pistol in a dry ditch outside the school field.
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Speaker 1: A day or so after we got in again, and
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Speaker 1: ignoring a certain fowling and rusting of the barrel, tried
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Speaker 1: for a rabbit at three hundred yards. Young Roots blew
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Speaker 1: a mole hill at twenty paces into a dust cloud,
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Speaker 1: burnt his fingers and scorched his face, and the weapon,
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Speaker 1: having once displayed this strange disposition to flame back upon
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Speaker 1: the shooter, was not subsequently fired. One main source of
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Speaker 1: excitement for us was cheeking people in vans and carts
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Speaker 1: upon the Goodhurst Road, and getting myself into a monstrous
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Speaker 1: white mess in the chalk pits beyond the village, and
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Speaker 1: catching yellow jaundice as a sequel to bathing Stark naked
27:46
Speaker 1: with three other adamites. Old you are't leading that function
27:50
Speaker 1: in the rivulet across Hickson's meadows are among my memorabilia.
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Speaker 1: Those free imaginative afternoons. How much they were for us,
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Speaker 1: how much they did for us. All streams came from
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Speaker 1: the then undiscovered sources of the Nile. In those days
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Speaker 1: all thickets were Indian jungles, and our best game, I say,
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Speaker 1: with pride eye invented. I got it out of the
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Speaker 1: blades over saloon we found a wood where trespassing was forbidden,
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Speaker 1: and did the retreat of the ten thousand threw it
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Speaker 1: from end to end, cutting our way bravely through a
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Speaker 1: host of nettled beds that barred our path, and not
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Speaker 1: forgetting to weep and kneel when at last we emerged
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Speaker 1: within sight of the high road sea. So we have
28:37
Speaker 1: burst at times weeping and rejoicing upon startled wayfarers. Usually
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Speaker 1: I took the part of that distinguished general Zenophen. And
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Speaker 1: please note the quantity of the O. I have all
28:51
Speaker 1: my classical names like that. So Crates rhymes with baits
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Speaker 1: for me, And except when the bleak eye of some
28:57
Speaker 1: scholar warns me of his standards of judgment, I use
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Speaker 1: those dear old mispronunciations. Still. The little splash into Latin
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Speaker 1: made during my days as a chemist washed off nothing
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Speaker 1: of the habit. Well, if I met those great gentlemen
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Speaker 1: in the past, with their accents carelessly adjusted, I did
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Speaker 1: at least meet them alive as an equal and in
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Speaker 1: a living tongue. Altogether, my school might easily have been
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Speaker 1: worse for me, And among other good things, it gave
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Speaker 1: me a friend who has lasted my life out. This
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Speaker 1: was Uart, who is now a monumental artist at Walking
29:38
Speaker 1: after many vicissitudes. Dear Chap, how he did stick out
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Speaker 1: of his clothes to be sure. He was a long
29:46
Speaker 1: limbed lout, ridiculously tall beside my more youthful compactness. And
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Speaker 1: except that there was no black mustache under his nose blob.
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Speaker 1: He had the same round, knobby face as he has
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Speaker 1: to day, the same bright and active hazel brown eyes.
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Speaker 1: The stare, the meditative moment, the insinuating reply. Surely, no
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Speaker 1: boy ever played the fool as Bob Eat used to
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Speaker 1: play it. No boy had a readier knack of mantling
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Speaker 1: the world with wonder. Commonness vanished before Art and his
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Speaker 1: expository touch, all things became memorable and rare from him.
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Speaker 1: I first heard Tale of Love, but only after its
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Speaker 1: barbs were already sticking in my heart. He was, I
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Speaker 1: know now, the bastard of the great improvident artist rickmann Ewart.
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Speaker 1: He brought the light of a lax world that at
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Speaker 1: least had not turned its back upon beauty into the
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Speaker 1: growing fermentation of my mind. I won his heart by
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Speaker 1: aversion of Vathck, and after that we were inseparable, yarning friends.
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Speaker 1: We merged our intellectual stalk so completely that I wonder
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Speaker 1: sometimes how much I did not become ewut, how much
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Speaker 1: Ewat is not vicariously and derivatively me end of book,
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Speaker 1: the first chapter, the first parts four through six,