Latest / The H. G. Wells Library / Tono-Bungay Book 4 Chapter 3 - Parts 1-4

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Tono-Bungay Book 4 Chapter 3 - Parts 1-4 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Book, fourth Chapter, third parts one to four of Tono Bungay.
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  Speaker 1: This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
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  Speaker 1: the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
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  Speaker 1: visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by William Tomko Tono Bungay
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  Speaker 1: by H. G. Wells, Book, fourth Chapter, third parts one
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  Speaker 1: to four Chapter The Third Night and the Open Sea One.
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  Speaker 1: I have tried throughout all this story to tell things
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  Speaker 1: as they happen to me. In the beginning, the sheets
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  Speaker 1: are still here on the table, grimy and dog's eared
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  Speaker 1: and old looking, I said, I wanted to tell myself
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  Speaker 1: and the world in which I found myself. And I
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  Speaker 1: have done my best. But whether I have succeeded, I
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  Speaker 1: cannot imagine. All this writing is gray now and dead
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  Speaker 1: and trite and unmeaning to me. Some of it I
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  Speaker 1: know by heart. I am the last person to judge it.
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  Speaker 1: As I turn over the big pile of manuscript before me,
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  Speaker 1: certain things become clearer to me, and particularly the immense
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  Speaker 1: inconsequences of my experiences. It is I see now that
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  Speaker 1: I have it all before me, a story of activity
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  Speaker 1: and urgency and sterility. I have called it Tono Bungay.
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  Speaker 1: But I had far better have called it waste. I
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  Speaker 1: have told of childless Marion, of my childless aunt of Beatrice,
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  Speaker 1: wasted and wasteful and futile. What hope is there for
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  Speaker 1: a people whose women become fruitless? I think of all
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  Speaker 1: the energy I have given to vain things. I think
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  Speaker 1: of my industrious scheming, with my uncle of crest Hill's
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  Speaker 1: vast cessation, of his resonant, strenuous career. Ten thousand men
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  Speaker 1: have envied him and wished to live as he lived.
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  Speaker 1: It is all one spectacle of forces running to waste,
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  Speaker 1: of people who use and do not replace, the story
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  Speaker 1: of a country hectic with a wasting, aimless fever of
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  Speaker 1: trade and money making and pleasure seeking. And now I
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  Speaker 1: build destroyers. Other people may see this country in other terms.
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  Speaker 1: This is how I have seen it. In some early
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  Speaker 1: chapter in this heap, I compared all our present color
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  Speaker 1: and abundance to October foliage before the frosts nip down
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  Speaker 1: the leaves, that I still feel was a good image.
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  Speaker 1: Perhaps I see wrongly. It may be I see decay
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  Speaker 1: all about me, because I am, in a sense decay.
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  Speaker 1: To others. It may be a scene of achievement and
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  Speaker 1: construction radiant with hope. I too have a sort of hope,
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  Speaker 1: but it is a remote hope, a hope that finds
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  Speaker 1: no promise in its empire, or in any of the
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  Speaker 1: great things of our time. How they will look in history,
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  Speaker 1: I do not know how time and chance will prove them.
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  Speaker 1: I cannot guess. That is how they have mirrored themselves
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  Speaker 1: on one contemporary mind. Two. Concurrently with writing the last
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  Speaker 1: chapter of this book, I have been much engaged by
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  Speaker 1: the affairs of a new destroyer. We have completed. It
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  Speaker 1: has been an oddly complimentary alternation of occupations. Three weeks
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  Speaker 1: or so ago this novel had to be put aside
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  Speaker 1: in order that I might give all my time, day
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  Speaker 1: and night to the fitting and finishing of the engines.
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  Speaker 1: Last Thursday x two, for so we call her was done,
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  Speaker 1: and I took her down the Thames and went out
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  Speaker 1: nearly to Texel for a trial of speed. It is
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  Speaker 1: curious how at times one's impressions will all fuse and
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  Speaker 1: run together into a sort of unity, and become continuous
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  Speaker 1: with things that have hitherto been utterly alien and remote.
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  Speaker 1: That rush down the river became mysteriously connected with this book.
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  Speaker 1: As I passed down the Thames, I seemed, in a
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  Speaker 1: new and parallel manner to be passing all England in review.
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  Speaker 1: I saw it then, as I had wanted my readers
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  Speaker 1: to see it. The thought came to me slowly as
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  Speaker 1: I picked my way through the pool. It stood out
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  Speaker 1: clear as I went dreaming into the night out upon
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  Speaker 1: the wide north Sea. It wasn't so much thinking at
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  Speaker 1: the time, as a sort of photographic thought that came
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  Speaker 1: and grew clear. X two went ripping through the dirty
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  Speaker 1: oil water as scissors ripped through canvas, and the front
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  Speaker 1: of my mind was all intent with getting her through
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  Speaker 1: under the bridges and in and out among the steamboats
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  Speaker 1: and barges and rowing boats and piers. I lived with
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  Speaker 1: my hands and eyes hard ahead. I thought nothing then
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  Speaker 1: of any appearances but obstacles. But for all that, the
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  Speaker 1: back of my mind took the photographic memory of it
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  Speaker 1: complete and vivid. This, it came to me, is England.
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  Speaker 1: That is what I wanted to give in my book.
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  Speaker 1: This we started in the late afternoon. We throbbed out
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  Speaker 1: of our yard above Hammersmith Bridge, fussed about for a moment,
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  Speaker 1: and headed down stream. We came at an easy rush
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  Speaker 1: down Craven Reach, past Fulham and Hurlingham, passed a long
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  Speaker 1: stretches of muddy meadow and muddy suburb to Battersea and Chelsea.
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  Speaker 1: Round the cape of tidy frontage that a gross Veneer road,
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  Speaker 1: and under Vauxhall Bridge and Westminster opened before us. We
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  Speaker 1: cleared a string of coal barges, and there on the left,
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  Speaker 1: in the October sunshine stood the Parliament houses, and the
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  Speaker 1: flag was flying, and Parliament was sitting. I saw it
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  Speaker 1: at the time unseeingly. Afterwards it came into my mind
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  Speaker 1: as the center of the whole broad panoramic effect of
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  Speaker 1: that afternoon. The stiff square lace of Victorian Gothic, with
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  Speaker 1: its Dutch clock of a tower came upon me suddenly
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  Speaker 1: and stared, and whirled past in a slow half pirouette,
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  Speaker 1: and became still. I know behind me, as if watching
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  Speaker 1: me recede. Aren't you going to respect me? Then it
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  Speaker 1: seemed to say not I. There in that great pile
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  Speaker 1: of Victorian architecture, the landlords and the lawyers, the bishops,
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  Speaker 1: the railway men, and the magnates of commerce go to
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  Speaker 1: and fro in their incurable tradition of commercialized bladesovery of
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  Speaker 1: meretricious gentry and nobility sold for riches. I have been
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  Speaker 1: near enough to know the Irish and the labor men
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  Speaker 1: run about among their feet, making a fuss, effecting little.
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  Speaker 1: They've got no better plans than I can see. Respect it. Indeed,
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  Speaker 1: there's a certain paraphernalia of dignity. But whom does it deceive?
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  Speaker 1: The King comes down in a gilt coach to open
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  Speaker 1: the show, and wears long robes and a crown, and
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  Speaker 1: there's a display of stout and slender legs, and white stockings,
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  Speaker 1: and stout and slender legs, and black stockings and artful
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  Speaker 1: old gentleman in ermine. I was reminded of one congested
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  Speaker 1: afternoon I had spent with my aunt amidst a cluster
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  Speaker 1: of agitated women's hats in the royal gallery of the
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  Speaker 1: House of Lords. And how I saw the King going
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  Speaker 1: to open Parliament, and the Duke of Devonshire looking like
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  Speaker 1: a gorgeous peddler and terribly bored, with a cap of
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  Speaker 1: maintenance on a tray before him, hung by slings from
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  Speaker 1: his shoulder. A wonderful spectacle. It is quaint, no doubt,
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  Speaker 1: this England. It is even dignified in places, and full
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  Speaker 1: of mellow associations. That does not alter the quality of
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  Speaker 1: the realities. These robes conceal. The realities are greedy trade,
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  Speaker 1: base profit seeking, bold advertisement, and kingship and chivalry spite
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  Speaker 1: of this wearing of treasured robes are as dead among
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  Speaker 1: it all as that crusader my uncle championed against the
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  Speaker 1: nettles outside the Duffield Church. I have thought much of
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  Speaker 1: that bright afternoon's panorama. To me down the Thames, so
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  Speaker 1: is to run one's hand over the pages in the
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  Speaker 1: Book of England from end to end. One begins in
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  Speaker 1: Craven Reach, and it is as if one were in
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  Speaker 1: the heart of old England. Behind us are Kew and
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  Speaker 1: Hampton Court, with their memories of kings and cardinals, and
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  Speaker 1: one runs at first between Fulham's episcopal garden parties and
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  Speaker 1: Hurlingham's playground for the sporting instinct of our race. The
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  Speaker 1: whole effect is English. There is space, there are old
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  Speaker 1: trees and all the best qualities of the home land
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  Speaker 1: in that upper reach. Putney too looks Anglican on a
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  Speaker 1: dwindling scale, and then for a stretch the newer developments
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  Speaker 1: slop over one missus blades over and there come first
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  Speaker 1: squalid stretches of mean homes right and left, and then
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  Speaker 1: the dingy industrialism of the south side, and on the
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  Speaker 1: north bank the polite long front of nice houses, artistic, literary,
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  Speaker 1: administrative people's residences that stretches from Shane Walk nearly to
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  Speaker 1: Westminster and hides a wilderness of slums. What a long,
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  Speaker 1: slow crescendo that is, mile after mile, with the houses crowding,
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  Speaker 1: closier and multiplying succession of church towers, the architectural moments,
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  Speaker 1: the successive bridges, until you come out into the second
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  Speaker 1: movement of the piece, with Lambeth's old Palace under your
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  Speaker 1: quarter and the houses of Parliament on your bow. Westminster
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  Speaker 1: Bridge is ahead of you then and through it you flash,
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  Speaker 1: and in a moment the round faced clock tower cranes
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  Speaker 1: up to peer at you again, and New Scotland Yard
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  Speaker 1: squares at you, a fat beef eater of a policeman
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  Speaker 1: disguised miraculously as a bastille. For a stretch you have
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  Speaker 1: the essential London. You have charing Cross railway station, heart
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  Speaker 1: of the world, and the embankment on the north side
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  Speaker 1: with its new hotels overshadowing its Georgian and Victorian architecture
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  Speaker 1: and mud, and great warehouses and factories, chimneys, shot towers, advertisements.
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  Speaker 1: On the south the northward skyline grows more intricate and pleasing,
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  Speaker 1: and more and more does one thank God for wren
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  Speaker 1: Somerset House is as picturesque as the Civil War. One
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  Speaker 1: is reminded again of the original England. One feels in
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  Speaker 1: the fretted sky the quality of restoration lace, and then
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  Speaker 1: comes Astor's strong box and the Lawyer's inns. I had
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  Speaker 1: a passing memory of myself there. How once I had
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  Speaker 1: trudged along the embankment westward, weighing my uncle's offer of
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  Speaker 1: three hundred pounds a year. Through that central essential London reach,
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  Speaker 1: I drove and X two board her nose under the foam,
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  Speaker 1: regardless of it all, like a black hound going through
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  Speaker 1: reeds on what trail even I, who made her, cannot tell.
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  Speaker 1: And in this reach too, one first meets the sea
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  Speaker 1: gulls and is reminded of the sea blackfriars. One takes
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  Speaker 1: just under theach two bridges, and just between them is
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  Speaker 1: the finest bridge moment in the world, and behold soaring
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  Speaker 1: up hanging in the sky, over a rude tumult of warehouses,
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  Speaker 1: over a jostling competition of traders, irrelevantly beautiful and altogether remote.
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  Speaker 1: Saint Paul's. Of course, one says, Saint Paul's. It is
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  Speaker 1: the very figure of whatever fineness the old Anglican culture achieved, detached,
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  Speaker 1: a more dignified and chastened Saint Peter's, colder, grayer, but
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  Speaker 1: still ornate. It has never been overthrown, never disavowed. Only
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  Speaker 1: the tall warehouses and all the roar of traffic have
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  Speaker 1: forgotten it. Everyone has forgotten it. The steamships, the barge
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  Speaker 1: is go heedlessly by regardless of it. Intricacies of telephone
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  Speaker 1: wires and poles cut blackly into its thin mysteries. And presently,
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  Speaker 1: when in a moment the traffic permits you and you
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  Speaker 1: look round for it, it has dissolved, like a cloud
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  Speaker 1: into the gray blues of the London sky. And then
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: the traditional and ostensible England falls from you altogether. The
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  Speaker 1: third movement begins, the last great movement in the London Symphony,
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  Speaker 1: in which the trim scheme of the old order is
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  Speaker 1: altogether dwarfed and swallowed. Up comes London Bridge and the
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  Speaker 1: great warehouses tower up about you, waving stupendous cranes. The
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  Speaker 1: gull circle and scream in your ears. Large ships lie
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  Speaker 1: among their lighters, and one is in the port of
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  Speaker 1: the world. Again and again in this book I have
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  Speaker 1: written of England as a feudal scheme overtaken by fatty,
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  Speaker 1: degeneration and stupendous accidents of hypertrophy. For the lane plus
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  Speaker 1: time I must strike that note as the memory of
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  Speaker 1: the dear neat little sunlit ancient tower of London, lying
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  Speaker 1: away in a gap among the warehouses, comes back to
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  Speaker 1: me that little accumulation of buildings so provincially pleasant and dignified,
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  Speaker 1: overshadowed by the vulgarest, most typical exploit of modern England,
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  Speaker 1: the sham Gothic casings to the iron work of the
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  Speaker 1: tower bridge. That tower bridge is the very balance and
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  Speaker 1: confirmation of Westminster's dull pinnacles and tower, that Sham Gothic bridge,
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  Speaker 1: and the very gates of our mother of change the sea.
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  Speaker 1: But after that one is a world of accident and nature.
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  Speaker 1: For the third part of the panorama of London is
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  Speaker 1: beyond all law, order and precedence. It is the seaport
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  Speaker 1: and the sea, One goes down the widening reaches through
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  Speaker 1: a monstrous variety of shipping, great steamers, great sailing ships,
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  Speaker 1: trading the flags of all world, A monstrous confusion of lighters,
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  Speaker 1: which is conferences of brown sailed barges, wallowing tugs, a
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  Speaker 1: tumultuous crowding and jostling of cranes and spars and wharves
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  Speaker 1: and stores and assertive inscriptions, huge vistas of dock open
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  Speaker 1: right and left of one, and here and there beyond,
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  Speaker 1: and amidst at all are church towers, little patches of
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  Speaker 1: indescribably old fashioned and worn out houses, riverside pubs, and
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  Speaker 1: the like vestiges of townships that were long since torn
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  Speaker 1: to fragments and submerged in these new growths. And amidst
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  Speaker 1: at all, no plan appears, no intention, no comprehensive desire,
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  Speaker 1: that is the very key of it all. Each day
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: one feels that the pressure of commerce and traffic grew,
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: grew insensibly monstrous. And first this man made a wharf,
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  Speaker 1: and that erected a crane, and then this company set
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  Speaker 1: to work, and then that, and so they jostled together
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  Speaker 1: to make this unassimilable enormity of traffic through it, we
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: dodged and drove eager for the high seas. I remember
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: how I laughed aloud at the glimpse of the name
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  Speaker 1: of a London County consul steamboat that ran across me.
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  Speaker 1: Caxton it was called, and another was Peppis, and another
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  Speaker 1: was Shakespeare. They seemed so wildly out of place, splashing
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: about in that confusion. One wanted to take them out
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  Speaker 1: and wipe them and put them back in some English
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: gentleman's library. Everything was alive about them, flashing, splashing and
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: passing ships, moving tugs, panting hawsers, taut barges, going down,
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  Speaker 1: with men toiling at the sweeps. The water all a swirl,
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: with the wash of shipping scaling into millions of little wavelets,
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  Speaker 1: curling and frothing under the whip of the unceasing wind.
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  Speaker 1: Past it all we drove, and at Greenwich, to the south,
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: you know, there stands a fine stone frontage where all
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  Speaker 1: the victories are recorded in a painted hall, and beside
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: it is the ship where once upon a time those
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: gentlemen of Westminster used to have an annual dinner, before
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: the Port of London got too much for them. Altogether,
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: the old facade of the hospital were just swarming to
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  Speaker 1: the sunset as we went by. And after that, right
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  Speaker 1: and left the river opened, the sense of the sea
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  Speaker 1: increased and prevailed. Reach after reach, from Northfleet to the nore,
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  Speaker 1: and out you come, at last, with the sun behind you,
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: into the Eastern Sea. You speed up and tear the
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  Speaker 1: oily waters louder and faster, sir Roux, sir rous swish,
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: sir rou and the hills of Kent over which I
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: once fled from the Christian teachings of Nicodemus Frapp fell
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: away on the right hand, and Essex on the left.
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  Speaker 1: They fall away and vanish into blue haze, and the tall,
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  Speaker 1: slow ships behind the tugs, scarce moving ships and wallowing
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  Speaker 1: sturdy tugs are all wrought of wet gold. As one
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  Speaker 1: goes frothing by, they stand out bound on strange missions
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  Speaker 1: of life and death, to the killing of men in
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  Speaker 1: unfamiliar lands. And now behind us is blue mystery and
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  Speaker 1: the phantom flash of unseen lights. And presently even these
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  Speaker 1: are gone, and I and my destroyer tear out to
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  Speaker 1: the unknown across a great gray space. We tear into
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: the great spaces of the future, and the turbans fall
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  Speaker 1: to talking in unfamiliar tongues. Out to the open, we
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  Speaker 1: go to windy freedom and trackless ways. Light after light
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  Speaker 1: goes down England and the Kingdom, Britain and the Empire,
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: the old prides and the old devotions glide a beam,
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: Astern sink down upon the horizon, pass pass, the river passes,
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  Speaker 1: London passes, England passes three. This is the note I
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: have tried to emphasize, the note that sounds clear in
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: my mind when I think of anything beyond the purely
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: personal aspects of my story. It is a note of
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: crumbling and confusion, of change and seemingly aimless swelling, of
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: a bubbling up and mentally of feudal loves and sorrows.
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  Speaker 1: But through the confusion sounds another note. Through the confusion,
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: something drives, something that is at once human achievement and
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: the most inhuman of all existing things. Something comes out
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: of it. How can I express the values of a
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: thing at once so essential and so immaterial. It is
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: something that calls upon such men as I with an
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: irresistible appeal. I have figured it in my last section
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: by the symbol of my destroyer, stark and swift, irrelevant,
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: to most human interests. Sometimes I call this reality science,
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: sometimes I call it truth. But it is something we draw,
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: by pain and effort, out of the heart of life,
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: that we disentangle and may clear. Other men serve it.
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  Speaker 1: I know in art, in literature, in social invention, and
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: see it in a thousand different figures under a hundred names.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: I see it always as austerity, as beauty. This thing
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: we make clear is the heart of life. It is
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  Speaker 1: the one enduring thing. Men and nations, epochs, and civilization pass,
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  Speaker 1: each making its contribution. I do not know what it is,
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  Speaker 1: this something, except that it is supreme. It is a something,
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  Speaker 1: a quality, an element. One may find now in colors,
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  Speaker 1: now in norms, now in sounds, now in thoughts. It
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: emerges from life with each year one lives and feels,
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  Speaker 1: and generation by generation and age by age. But the
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  Speaker 1: how and why of it are all beyond the compass
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: of my mind. Yet the full sense of it was
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  Speaker 1: with me all that night, as I drove lonely above
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  Speaker 1: the rush and murmur of my engines out upon the
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: weltering circle of the sea. Far out to the northeast,
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: there came the flicker of a squadron of warships waving
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: white swords of light about the sky. I kept them
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: hulled down, and presently they were mere summer lightning over
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: the watery edge of the globe. I fell into thought
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: that was nearly formless, into doubts and dreams that have
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: no words, and it seemed good to me to drive
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: ahead and on and or through the windy starlight over
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: the long black waves. Four it was morning and day
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: before I returned with the four sick and starving journalists
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: who had got permission to come with me up the
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: Shining River and past the old Gray Tower. I recalled
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: the back views of those journalists very distinctly, going with
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: a certain damp weariness of movement along a side street
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  Speaker 1: away from the river. They were good men and bore
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: me no malice, and they served me up to the
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: public in turgid, degenerate Kiplingese, as a modest button on
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: the complacent stomach of the Empire. Though as a matter
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: of fact, X two isn't intended for the Empire, or
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: indeed for the hands of any European power. We offered
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: it to our own people first, but they would have
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: nothing to do with me, and I have long since
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: ceased to trouble much about such questions. I have come
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: to see myself from the outside, my country, from the outside,
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: without illusions. We make and pass. We are all things
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: that make and pass, striving upon a hidden mission out
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: to the open sea. And of book fourth chapter, third
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: parts one to four. End of Tonobangay by H. G. Wells.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: Recording by William tom Coe