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Tono-Bungay Book 1 Chapter 1 - Parts 1-3 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Book the first chapter the first parts one through three
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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 A bladesover House and My Mother and
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  Speaker 1: the Constitution of Society, Part one. Most people in this
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  Speaker 1: world seem to live in character. They have a beginning,
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  Speaker 1: a middle, and an end, and the three are congruous
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  Speaker 1: one with another, and true to the rules of their type.
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  Speaker 1: You can speak of them as being of this sort
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  Speaker 1: of people. Of that they are as theatrical people, say
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  Speaker 1: no more and no less than character actors. They have
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  Speaker 1: a class, they have a place. They know what is
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  Speaker 1: becoming in them and what is due to them, and
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  Speaker 1: their proper size of tombstone tells at last how properly
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  Speaker 1: they have played the part. But there is also another
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  Speaker 1: kind of life that is not so much living as
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  Speaker 1: a miscellaneous tasting of life. One gets hit by some
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  Speaker 1: unusual transverse force. One is joked out of one's stratum
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  Speaker 1: and lives crosswise for the rest of the time, and
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  Speaker 1: as it were, in a succession of samples. That has
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  Speaker 1: been my lot, and that is what has set me
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  Speaker 1: at last writing something in the nature of a novel.
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  Speaker 1: I have got an unusual series of impressions that I
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  Speaker 1: want very urgently to tell. I have seen life at
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  Speaker 1: very different levels, and at all these levels, I have
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  Speaker 1: seen it with a sort of intimacy and in good faith.
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  Speaker 1: I have been a native in many social countries. I
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  Speaker 1: have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker, my
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  Speaker 1: cousin who has since died in the Chatham Infirmary. I
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  Speaker 1: have eaten illegal snacks, the unjustifiable gifts of footmen in pantries,
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  Speaker 1: and been despised for my want of style, and subsequently
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  Speaker 1: married and divorced by the daughter of a gas works clerk.
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  Speaker 1: And to go to the other extreme, I was once,
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  Speaker 1: oh glittering days, an item in the house party of
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  Speaker 1: a countess. She was, I admit, a countess with a
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  Speaker 1: financial aspect, but still you know a countess. I've seen
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  Speaker 1: these people at various angles at the dinner table. I've
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  Speaker 1: met Mark simply the titled, but the great On one
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  Speaker 1: occasion it is my brightest memory. I upset my Champagne
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  Speaker 1: over the trousers of the greatest statesman in the empire.
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  Speaker 1: Heaven forbid I should be so invidious as to name
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  Speaker 1: him in the warmth of our mutual admiration. And once,
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  Speaker 1: though it is the most incidental thing in my life,
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  Speaker 1: I murdered man. Yes, I've seen a curious variety of
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  Speaker 1: people and ways of living, altogether odd people. They all
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  Speaker 1: are great and small, very much alike at bottom, and
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  Speaker 1: curiously different on their surfaces. I wish I had ranged
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  Speaker 1: just a little further, both up and down. Seeing I
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  Speaker 1: have ranged so far, royalty must be worth knowing and
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  Speaker 1: very great fun. But my contacts with printers have been
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  Speaker 1: limited to quite public occasions. Nor at the other end
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  Speaker 1: of the scale, have I had what I should call
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  Speaker 1: an inside acquaintance with that dusty but attractive class of
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  Speaker 1: people who go about on the high roads, drunk but
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  Speaker 1: on famil so redeeming the minor lapse in the summer
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  Speaker 1: time with a perambulator lavender to sell sun, brown children
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  Speaker 1: a smell, and ambiguous bundles that fire the imagination. Navvies,
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  Speaker 1: farm laborers, sailormen and stokers. All such as sit in
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  Speaker 1: eighteen thirty four. Beer houses are beyond me also, and
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  Speaker 1: I suppose must remain so now forever. My intercourse with
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  Speaker 1: the ducal rank, too, has been negligible. I once went
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  Speaker 1: shooting with a duke, and, in an outburst of what
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  Speaker 1: was no doubt snobbishness, did my best to get him
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  Speaker 1: in the legs, but that failed. I'm sorry I haven't
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  Speaker 1: done the whole lot, though you will ask by what
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  Speaker 1: merit I achieved this remarkable social range, this extensive cross
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  Speaker 1: section of the British social organism. It was the accident
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  Speaker 1: of birth. It always is in England. Indeed, if I
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  Speaker 1: may make the remark, so cosmic everything is. But that
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  Speaker 1: is by the way. I was my uncle's nephew, and
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  Speaker 1: my uncle was no less a person than Edward Ponderavoux,
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  Speaker 1: who is comet like transit of the financial heavens happened
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  Speaker 1: it is now ten years ago. Do you remember the
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  Speaker 1: days of Ponderavoux, the great days I be of Ponderabo.
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  Speaker 1: Perhaps you had a trifle in some world shaking enterprise,
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  Speaker 1: then you know him only too well. A straddle on
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  Speaker 1: Tono Bungay. He flashed athwart the empty heavens like a comet,
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  Speaker 1: rather like a stupendous rocket, and overawed investors spoke of
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  Speaker 1: his star. At his zenith, he burst into a cloud
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  Speaker 1: of the most magnificent promotions. What a time that was,
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  Speaker 1: the Napoleon of domestic conveniences. I was his nevulee, his
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  Speaker 1: peculiar and intimate nevulee. I was hanging on to his
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  Speaker 1: coat tails all the way through. I made pills with
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  Speaker 1: him in the chemist's shop at Wimblehurst. Before he began,
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  Speaker 1: I was, you might say, the stick of his rocket.
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  Speaker 1: And after our tremendous soar, after he had played with
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  Speaker 1: millions a golden rain in the sky, after my bird's
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  Speaker 1: eye view of the modern world, I fell again, a
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  Speaker 1: little scarred and blistered prat two and twenty years older,
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  Speaker 1: with my youth gone, my manhood eaten in upon, but
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  Speaker 1: greatly edified, into this Thameside yard, into these white heats
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  Speaker 1: and hammerings, amidst the fine realities of steel, to think,
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  Speaker 1: get all over in my leisure, and drop down the
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  Speaker 1: notes and inconsecutive observations that make this book. It was more,
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  Speaker 1: you know, than a figurative sore. The zenith of that
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  Speaker 1: career was surely our flight across the Channel in the
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  Speaker 1: Lord Robert's b I warn you this book is going
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  Speaker 1: to be something of an agglomeration. I want to trace
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  Speaker 1: my social trajectory and my uncle's as the main line
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  Speaker 1: of my story. But as this is my first novel
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  Speaker 1: and almost certainly my last, I want to get into
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  Speaker 1: all sorts of things that struck me, things that amused me,
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  Speaker 1: and impressions I got, even though they don't minister directly
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  Speaker 1: to the narrative at all. I want to set out
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  Speaker 1: my own queer love experiences, too, such as they are,
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  Speaker 1: for they troubled and distressed and swayed me hugely, and
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  Speaker 1: they still seem to me to contain all sorts of
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  Speaker 1: irrational and debatable elements that I shall be the clearer
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  Speaker 1: headed for getting on paper. And possibly I may even
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  Speaker 1: flow into descriptions of people who are really no more
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  Speaker 1: than people seen in transit, just because it amuses me
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  Speaker 1: to recall what they said and did to us, and
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  Speaker 1: more particularly how they behaved In the brief but splendid
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  Speaker 1: glare of Tono Bungay and its still more glaring offspring,
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  Speaker 1: it lit some of them up. I can assure you, indeed,
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  Speaker 1: I want to get in all sorts of things. My
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  Speaker 1: ideas of a novel all through are comprehensive rather than austere.
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  Speaker 1: Tono Bungay still figures on the hoardings, It stands in
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  Speaker 1: rows in every chemist's store room. It still assuages the
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  Speaker 1: coughs of age, and brightens the elderly eye and loosens
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  Speaker 1: the elderly tongue. But its social glory, its financial illumination,
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  Speaker 1: have faded from the world forever, and I sole scorched
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  Speaker 1: survivor from the blaze, sit writing of it here in
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  Speaker 1: an air that is never still for the clang and
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  Speaker 1: thunder of machines, on a table littered with working drawings
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  Speaker 1: and amid fragments of models and notes about velocities and
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  Speaker 1: air and water pressure and trajectories of an altogether different
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  Speaker 1: sort from that of Tono Bungay. Part two. I write
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  Speaker 1: that much, and look at it and wonder whether, after all,
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  Speaker 1: this is any fair statement of what I am attempting
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  Speaker 1: in this book. I've given icy an impression that I
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  Speaker 1: want to make simply a hutch potch of anecdotes and
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  Speaker 1: experiences of my uncle swimming in the middle as the
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  Speaker 1: largest lump of victual I'll own that here, with the
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  Speaker 1: pen already started, I realize what a fermenting mass of
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  Speaker 1: things learnt and emotions experienced and theories formed I've got
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  Speaker 1: to deal with, and how in a sense hopeless my
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  Speaker 1: book must be. From the very outset, I suppose what
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  Speaker 1: I'm really trying to render is nothing more nor less
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  Speaker 1: than life as one man has found it. I want
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  Speaker 1: to tell myself and my impressions of the thing as
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  Speaker 1: a whole, to say things I have come to feel
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  Speaker 1: intensely of the laws, traditions, usages, and ideas we call society,
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  Speaker 1: and how we poor individuals get driven and lured and
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  Speaker 1: stranded among these windy, perplexing shoals and channels I've got.
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  Speaker 1: I suppose to a time of life when things begin
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  Speaker 1: to take on shapes that have an air of reality
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  Speaker 1: and become no longer material for dreaming, but interesting in themselves.
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  Speaker 1: I've reached the criticizing novel writing age, and here I
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  Speaker 1: am writing mine, my one novel, without having any of
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  Speaker 1: the discipline to refrain and admit that, I suppose the
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  Speaker 1: regular novel writer acquires. I've read an average share of
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  Speaker 1: novels and made some starts before this beginning, and I've
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  Speaker 1: found the restraints and rules of the art as I
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  Speaker 1: made them out, impossible for me. I like to write.
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  Speaker 1: I am keenly interested in writing, but it is not
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  Speaker 1: my technique. I'm an engineer with a patent or two
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  Speaker 1: and a set of ideas. Most of whatever artist there
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  Speaker 1: is in me has been given to turbine machines and
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  Speaker 1: boat building and the problem of flying. And to do
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  Speaker 1: what I will. I fail to see how I can
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  Speaker 1: be other than a lax on disciplined story teller. I
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  Speaker 1: must sprawl and flounder, comment and theorize if I am
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  Speaker 1: to get the thing out I have in mind. And
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  Speaker 1: it isn't a constructed tale I have to tell, but
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  Speaker 1: I managible realities my love story. And if only I
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  Speaker 1: can keep up the spirit of truth telling all through
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  Speaker 1: as strongly as I have now, you shall have. It
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  Speaker 1: all falls into no sort of neat scheme of telling.
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  Speaker 1: It involves three separate feminine persons. It's all mixed up
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  Speaker 1: with the other things. But I've said enough. I hope
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  Speaker 1: to excuse myself for the method or want of method
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  Speaker 1: in what follows. And I think I had better tell
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  Speaker 1: without further delay, of my boyhood and my early impressions
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  Speaker 1: In the Shadow of Bladesover House, Part three. There came
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  Speaker 1: a time when I realized that Bladesover House was not
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  Speaker 1: all it seemed. But when I was a little boy,
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  Speaker 1: I took the place with the entirest faith as a complete,
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  Speaker 1: authentic microcosm. I believed that the Bladesover system was a
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  Speaker 1: little working model, and not so very little either of
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  Speaker 1: the whole world. Let me try and give you the
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  Speaker 1: effect of it. Bladesover lies upon the Kentish Downs, eight
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  Speaker 1: miles perhaps from Ashborough, and its old pavilion, a little
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  Speaker 1: wooden parody of the Temple of Vesta at Tiber Upon
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  Speaker 1: the hill crest behind the house commands, in theory at
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  Speaker 1: least a view of either sea of the Channel southward
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  Speaker 1: and the Thames to the northeast. The park is the
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  Speaker 1: second largest in Kent, finely wooded, with well placed beaches,
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  Speaker 1: many elms and some sweet chestnuts, abounding in little valleys
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  Speaker 1: and hollows of bracken, with springs and a stream of
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  Speaker 1: three fine ponds and multitudes of fallowed deer. The house
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  Speaker 1: was built in the eighteenth century. It is a pale
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  Speaker 1: red brick in the style of a French chateau, and
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  Speaker 1: save for one pass among the crests, which opens to
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  Speaker 1: the blue distances, to minute remote ostseet farm houses and
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  Speaker 1: and wheat fields, and the occasional gleam of water, its
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  Speaker 1: hundred and seventeen windows look on nothing but its own
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  Speaker 1: wide and handsome territories. A semi circular screen of great
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  Speaker 1: beaches masks the church and village, which cluster picturesquely along
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  Speaker 1: the high road. Along the skirts of the great park. Northward,
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  Speaker 1: at the remotest corner of that enclosure is a second
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  Speaker 1: dependent village, rope Dean, less fortunate in its greater distance,
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  Speaker 1: and also on account of a rector. This divine was
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  Speaker 1: indeed rich, but he was vindictively economical. Because of some
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  Speaker 1: shrinkage of his tires, and by reason of his youth
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  Speaker 1: of the word Eucharist for the Lord's supper, he had
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  Speaker 1: become altogether estranged from the great ladies of bladesover so
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  Speaker 1: that rope Dean was in the shadows through all that
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  Speaker 1: youthful time. Now, the unavoidable suggestion of that wide park
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  Speaker 1: and that fair large house, dominating church, village and the countryside,
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  Speaker 1: was that they represented the things that mattered supremely in
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  Speaker 1: the world, and that all other things had significance only
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  Speaker 1: in relation to them. They represented the gentry, the quality,
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  Speaker 1: by and through and for whom the rest of the world,
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  Speaker 1: the farming folk and the laboring folk, the tradespeople of Asheville,
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  Speaker 1: and the upper servants and the lower servants, and the
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  Speaker 1: servants of the estate breathed and lived and were permitted.
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  Speaker 1: And the quality did it so quietly and thoroughly. The
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  Speaker 1: Great House mingled so solidly and effectually earth and sky.
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  Speaker 1: The contrast of its spacious hall and saloon and galleries,
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  Speaker 1: its area, housekeeper's room, and warren of offices, with the
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  Speaker 1: meager dignities of the vicar, and the pinched and stuffy
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  Speaker 1: rooms of even the post office people and the grocer,
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  Speaker 1: so enforced these suggestions that it was only when I
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  Speaker 1: was a boy of thirteen or fourteen, and some queer
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: inherited strain of skepticism had set me doubting whether mister Bartlet,
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  Speaker 1: the vicar, did really know with certainty all about God,
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  Speaker 1: that as a further and deeper step in doubting, I
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  Speaker 1: began to question the final rightness of the gentle folks,
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  Speaker 1: their primary necessity in the scheme of things. But once
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  Speaker 1: that skepticism had awakened, it took me fast and far.
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  Speaker 1: By fourteen I had achieved terrible blasphemy, some sacrilege. I
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  Speaker 1: had resolved to marry a viscount's daughter, and I had
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  Speaker 1: blackened the left eye. I think it was left of
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  Speaker 1: her half brother in open and declared rebellion. But of that,
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  Speaker 1: in its place, the great house, the church, the village,
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  Speaker 1: and the laborers and the servants in their stations and degrees,
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  Speaker 1: seemed to me, I say, to be a closed and
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  Speaker 1: complete social system. About us were other villages and great estates,
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  Speaker 1: and from house to house interlacing correlated the gentry. The
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  Speaker 1: fine Olympians came and went. The country towns seemed mere
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  Speaker 1: collections of ships, marketing places for the tenantry, centers for
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  Speaker 1: such education as they needed, as entirely dependent on the
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  Speaker 1: gentry as the village, and scarcely less directly. So. I
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  Speaker 1: thought this was the order of the whole world. I
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  Speaker 1: thought London was only a greater country town, where the
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  Speaker 1: gentlefolk kept town houses and did their greater shopping under
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  Speaker 1: the magnificent shadow of the greatest of all fine gentlewomen,
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  Speaker 1: the Queen. It seemed to me in the divine order,
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  Speaker 1: that all his fine appearance was already sapped, that there
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  Speaker 1: were forces at work that might presently carry all. This
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  Speaker 1: elaborate social system in which my mother instructed me so
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  Speaker 1: carefully that I might understand my place to Limbo, had
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  Speaker 1: scarcely dawned upon me, even by the time that Tono
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  Speaker 1: Bungay was fairly launched upon the world. There are many
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  Speaker 1: people in England to day upon whom it has not
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  Speaker 1: yet dawned. There are times when I doubt whether any
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  Speaker 1: but a very inconsiderable minority of English people realize how
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  Speaker 1: extensively this ostensible order has even now passed away. The
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  Speaker 1: great houses stand in the park still, the cottages cluster
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  Speaker 1: respectfully on their borders, touching their eaves with their creepers.
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  Speaker 1: The English countryside, you can range through Kent from blades
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  Speaker 1: over northward and see persists obstinately in looking what it was.
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  Speaker 1: It is like an early day in the fine October.
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  Speaker 1: The hand of change rests on it, all unfelt, unseen,
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  Speaker 1: resting for a while, as it were, half reluctantly, before
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  Speaker 1: it grips and ends the thing forever one frost, and
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  Speaker 1: the whole face of things will be bare links, snap
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  Speaker 1: patients end. Our fine foliage of pretenses lie glowing in
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  Speaker 1: the mire. For that we have still to wait a
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  Speaker 1: little while. The new order may have gone far toward
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  Speaker 1: shaping itself. But just as in that sort of lantern
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: show that used to be known in the village as
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: the dissolving views, the scene that is going remains upon
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  Speaker 1: the mind traceable and evident, and the newer picture is
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  Speaker 1: yet enigmatical, long after the lines that are to replace
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  Speaker 1: those former ones have grown bright and strong, so that
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: the new England of our children's children is still a
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: riddle to me. The ideas of democracy, of equality, and
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: above all of promiscuous fraternity have certainly never really entered
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: into the English mind. But what is coming into it all?
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  Speaker 1: This book, I hope will bear a little on that
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: our people never formulate. It keeps words for jests and ironies.
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  Speaker 1: In the meantime, the old shapes, the old attitudes remained
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: subtly changed and changing, still sheltering strange tenants. Bladesover House
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  Speaker 1: is now let furnished to Sir Reuben Liechtenstein, and has
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: been since old Lady Drew died. It was my odd
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: experience to visit there in the house of which my
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  Speaker 1: mother had been housekeeper when my uncle was at the
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: climax of Tono Bungay. It was curious to notice then
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: the little differences that had come to things with this substitution.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: To borrow an image from my mineralogical days, these Jews
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: were not so much a New British gentry as pseudomorphous
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: after the gentry. They are very clever people, the Jews,
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  Speaker 1: but not clever enough to suppress their cleverness. I wished
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  Speaker 1: I could have gone downstairs to save the tone of
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  Speaker 1: the pantry. It would have been very different. I know,
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  Speaker 1: Hawk's nest over beyond, I noted, had its pseudomorph too.
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  Speaker 1: A newspaper proprietor of the type that hustles along with
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  Speaker 1: stolen ideas from one loud sink or swim enterprise to another,
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  Speaker 1: had bought the place outright. Redgrave was in the hands
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  Speaker 1: of brewers. But the people in the villages, so far
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  Speaker 1: as I could detect, saw no difference in their world.
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  Speaker 1: Two little girls bobbed, and an old laborer touched his
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  Speaker 1: hat convulsively. As I walked through the village. He still
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  Speaker 1: thought he knew his place and mine. I did not
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  Speaker 1: know him, but I would have liked dearly to have
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: asked him if he remembered my mother, if either my
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  Speaker 1: uncle or old Liechtenstein had been man enough to stand
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  Speaker 1: being given away like that. In that English countryside of
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  Speaker 1: my boyhood, every human being had a place. It belonged
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  Speaker 1: to you from your birth, like the color of your eyes.
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  Speaker 1: It was inextricably your destiny. Above you were your betters,
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: below you were your inferiors. And there were even an unstable, questionable,
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  Speaker 1: few cases so disputable that you might, for the rough
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  Speaker 1: purposes of every day at least regard them as your equals.
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  Speaker 1: Head and center of our system was Lady Drew, her leddyship, shriveled, garrulous,
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: with a wonderful memory for genealogies, and very very old.
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: And beside her, and nearly as old, Miss Somerville, her
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: cousin and companion, these two old souls lived like dried
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: up colonels in the great shell of bladesover house. The
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: shell had once been gaily full of fops, of fine
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: ladies in powder and patches, and courtly gentlemen with swords,
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: And when there was no company, they spent whole days
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: in the corner parlor, just over the housekeepers room, between
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: reading and slumber and caressing their two pet dogs. When
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: I was a boy, I used always to think of
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: these two poor old creatures as superior beings, living like
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: God somewhere through the ceiling. Occasionally they bumped about a bit,
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: and won't even heard them overhead, which gave them a
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: greater effect of reality, without mitigating their vertical predominance. Sometimes too,
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: I saw them, of course, if I came upon them
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: in the park or in the shrubbery where I was
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: a trespasser, I hid or fled in pious horror. But
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: I was, upon due occasion taken into the presence by request.
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: I remember her ladyship then as a thing of black
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: silks and a golden chain, a quavering injunction to me
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: to be a good boy, a very shrunken, loose skinned
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: face and neck, and a ropey hand that trembled a
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: half crown into mine. Miss Somerville hovered behind a paler
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: thing of broken lavender and white and black. We screwed
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: up sandy lashed eyes. Her hair was yellow and her
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: color bright, And when we sat in the housekeeper's room
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: of a winter's night, warming our toes and sipping elder wine.
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: Her maid would tell us the simple secrets of that
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: belated flush. After my fight with young Garvell, I was
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: of course banished, and I never saw those poor old
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: painted goddesses again. Then there came and went on these
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: floors over our respectful heads, the company, people I rarely saw,
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: but whose tricks and manners were imitated and discussed by
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: their maids and valets in the housekeeper's room and the
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: steward's room, so that I had them through a medium.
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: At second hand, I gathered that none of the company
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: were really Lady Drew's equals. They were great and lesser
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: after the manner of all things in our world. Once
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: I remembered there was a prince with a real live
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: gentleman in attendance, and that was a little above our
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: customary levels, and excited us all and perhaps raised our
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: expectations unduly. Afterwards, Rabbits, the butler, came into my mother's
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: room downstairs, red with indignation and with tears in his eyes.
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: Look at that, gasped Rabbits. My mother was speechless with horror.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: That was a sovereign, a mere sovereign such as you,
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: might get from a commoner. After company, I remember, came
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: anxious days for the poor old women upstairs were left
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: tired and cross and vindictive, and in a state of
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: physical and emotional indigestion after their social efforts. On the
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: lowest wrong of these real olympians hung the vicarage people,
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: and next to them came those ambiiguous beings who are
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: neither quality nor subjects. The vicarage people certainly hold a
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: place by themselves in the typical English scheme. Nothing is
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: more remarkable than the progress the Church has made socially
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: in the last two hundred years. In the early eighteenth century,
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: the vicar was rather under than over the house steward,
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: and was deemed a fitting match for the housekeeper or
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: any not too morally discredited discard. The eighteenth century literature
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: is full of his complaints that he might not remain
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: at table to share the pie. He rows above these
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: indignities because of the abundance of younger sons. When I
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: meet the large assumptions of the contemporary cleric, I am
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: apt to think of these things. It is curious to
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: note that to day that downtrodden Orden playing creature the
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: Church of England village schoolmaster holds much the same position
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: as the seventeenth century parson. The doctor in Bladesover, ranked
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: below the vicar but above the vet artist, and summer
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: visitors squeezed in above or below this point according to
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: their appearance and expenditure. And then, in a carefully arranged scale,
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: came the tenantry, the butler and housekeeper, the village shopkeeper,
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: the headkeeper, the cook, the publican, the second keeper, the blacksmith,
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: whose status was complicated by his daughter keeping the post office,
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: and a fine hash used to make up telegrams too,
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: The village shopkeeper's eldest son, the first footman, younger sons
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: of the village shopkeeper, his first assistant, and so forth.
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: All these conceptions and applications of a universal precedence, and
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: much else I drank in at Bladesover as I listened
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: to the talk of ballots, ladies, maids, rabbits, the butler,
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: and my mother in the much cupboarded, white painted chintz
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: brightened housekeeper's room, where the upper servants assembled, or a
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: footman and rabbits, and a statemen of all sorts, among
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: the green bays and windsor chairs of the pantry, where rabbits,
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: being above the law, sold beer without a license or
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: any compunction. Or of housemaids and still room maids in
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: the bleak matting carpeted still room, or of the cook
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: and her kitchen maids and casual friends among the bright
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: copper and hot glow of the kitchens. Of course, our
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: own ranks and places came by implication to these people,
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: and it was with the ranks and places of the
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: Olympians that the talk mainly concerned itself. There was an
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: old peerage and a Crockford, together with the books of recipes,
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: the Whitaker's Almanac, the Old Moor's Almanac, and the eighteenth
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: century dictionary on the little dresser that broke the cupboards.
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: On one side of my mother's room. There was another
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: peerage with the covers off in the pantry. There was
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: a new peerage in the billiard room. And I seem
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: to remember another in the anomalous apartment that held the
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: upper servant's bagatelle board, and in which after the whole
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: dinner they partook of the luxury of sweets. And if
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: you had asked any of those upper servants, how such
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: and such a prince of Battenberg was related to let
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: us say, mister Cunningham, Graham or the Duke of Argyle,
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: you would have been told upon the nail. As a boy,
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: I heard a great deal of that sort of thing.
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: And if to this day I am a little vague
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: about courtesy titles and the exact application of honorifics, ah
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: it is, I can assure you because I hardened my heart,
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: and not from any lack of adequate opportunity of mastering
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: these succulent particulars. Dominating all these memories is the figure
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: of my mother, My mother who did not love me
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: because I grew like her my father every day, and
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: who knew, with inflexible decision, her place and the place
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: of every one in the world, except the place that
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: concealed my father. And in some details mine subtle points
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: were put to her. I can see and hear her saying, now, no,
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: miss Fison, peers of England go in before peers of
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: the United Kingdom, and he is merely a peer of
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: the United Kingdom. She had much exercise in placing people's
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: servants about her tea table, where the etiquette was very strict.
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: I wonder sometimes if the etiquette of housekeeper's rooms is
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: as strict to day and what my mother would have
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: made of a chauffeur. On the whole, I am glad
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: that I saw so much as I did of Bladesover,
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: if for no other reason than because seeing it when
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: I did, quite naively, believing in it thoroughly, and then
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: coming to analyze it, has enabled me to understand much
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: that would be absolutely in comprehensible in the structure of
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: English society. Bladesover is. I am convinced the clue to
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: almost all that is distinctively British and perplexing to the
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: foreign inquirer in England, and the English speaking peoples grasp
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: firmly that England was all blades Over two hundred years ago,
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: that it has had reform acts, indeed, and such like
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: changes a formula, but no essential revolution since then. That
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: all that is modern and different has come in as
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: a thing intruded or is a gloss upon this predominant formula,
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: either impertinently or apologetically, and you will perceive at once
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: the reasonableness the necessity of that snobbishness, which is the
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: distinctive quality of English thought. Everybody who is not actually
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: in the shadow of a bladesover is, as it were,
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: perpetually seeking after lost orientations. We have never broken with
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: our tradition, never even symbolically hewed it to pieces, as
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: the French did in Quivering Fact in the Terror. But
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: all the organizing ideas have slackened, the old habitual bonds
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: have relaxed or altogether become undone. And America too, as
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: it were, a detached outlying part of that estate, which
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: has expanded in queer ways. George Washington, esquire was of
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: the gentlefolk, and he came near being a king. It
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: was Plutarch, you know, and nothing intrinsically American that prevented
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: George Washington being a king. End of book, the first chapter,
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: the first parts one through three