Tono-Bungay

My aunt Susan seemed to be taking it in. She was then rather a pretty slender woman of twenty-three or four, I suppose, and I remember being struck by the blueness of her eyes and the clear freshness of her complexion. She had little features, a button nose, a pretty chin and a long graceful neck that stuck out of her pale blue cotton morning dress. There was a look of half-assumed perplexity on her face, a little quizzical wrinkle of the brow that suggested a faintly amused attempt to follow my uncle’s mental operations, a vain attempt and a certain hopelessness that had in succession become habitual. She seemed to be saying, “Oh Lord! What’s he giving me THIS time?” And as came to know her better I detected, as a complication of her effort of apprehension, a subsidiary riddle to “What’s he giving me?” and that was – to borrow a phrase from my schoolboy language “Is it keeps?” She looked at my mother and me, and back to her husband again.

“You know,” he said. “George.”

“Well,” she said to my mother, descending the last three steps of the staircase and holding out her hand! “you’re welcome. Though it’s a surprise… I can’t ask you to HAVE anything, I’m afraid, for there isn’t anything in the house.” She smiled, and looked at her husband banteringly. “Unless he makes up something with his old chemicals, which he’s quite equal to doing.”

My mother shook hands stiffly, and told me to kiss my aunt…

“Well, let’s all sit down,” said my uncle, suddenly whistling through his clenched teeth, and briskly rubbing his hands together. He put up a chair for my mother, raised the blind of the little window, lowered it again, and returned to his hearthrug. “I’m sure,” he said, as one who decides, “I’m very glad to see you.”

V

As they talked I gave my attention pretty exclusively to my uncle.

I noted him in great detail. I remember now his partially unbuttoned waistcoat, as though something had occurred to distract him as he did it up, and a little cut upon his chin. I liked a certain humour in his eyes. I watched, too, with the fascination that things have for an observant boy, the play of his lips – they were a little oblique, and there was something “slipshod,” if one may strain a word so far, about his mouth, so that he lisped and sibilated ever and again and the coming and going of a curious expression, triumphant in quality it was, upon his face as he talked. He fingered his glasses, which did not seem to fit his nose, fretted with things in his waistcoat pockets or put his hands behind him, looked over our heads, and ever and again rose to his toes and dropped back on his heels. He had a way of drawing air in at times through his teeth that gave a whispering zest to his speech It’s a sound I can only represent as a soft Zzzz.

He did most of the talking. My mother repeated what she had already said in the shop, “I have brought George over to you,” and then desisted for a time from the real business in hand. “You find this a comfortable house?” she asked; and this being affirmed: “It looks – very convenient… Not too big to be a trouble – no. You like Wimblehurst, I suppose?”

My uncle retorted with some inquiries about the great people of Bladesover, and my mother answered in the character of a personal friend of Lady Drew’s. The talk hung for a time, and then my uncle embarked upon a dissertation upon Wimblehurst.

“This place,” he began, “isn’t of course quite the place I ought to be in.”

My mother nodded as though she had expected that.

“It gives me no Scope,” he went on. “It’s dead-and-alive. Nothing happens.”

“He’s always wanting something to happen,” said my aunt Susan. “Some day he’ll get a shower of things and they’ll be too much for him.”

“Not they,” said my uncle, buoyantly.

“Do you find business – slack?” asked my mother.

“Oh! one rubs along. But there’s no Development – no growth. They just come along here and buy pills when they want ‘em – and a horseball or such. They’ve got to be ill before there’s a prescription. That sort they are. You can’t get ‘em to launch out, you can’t get ‘em to take up anything new. For instance, I’ve been trying lately – induce them to buy their medicines in advance, and in larger quantities. But they won’t look for it! Then I tried to float a little notion of mine, sort of an insurance scheme for colds; you pay so much a week, and when you’ve got a cold you get a bottle of Cough Linctus so long as you can produce a substantial sniff. See? But Lord! they’ve no capacity for ideas, they don’t catch on; no Jump about the place, no Life. Live! – they trickle, and what one has to do here is to trickle too – Zzzz.”

“Ah!” said my mother.

“It doesn’t suit me,” said my uncle. “I’m the cascading sort.”

“George was that,” said my mother after a pondering moment.

My aunt Susan took up the parable with an affectionate glance at her husband.

“He’s always trying to make his old business jump,” she said. “Always putting fresh cards in the window, or getting up to something. You’d hardly believe. It makes ME jump sometimes.”

“But it does no good,” said my uncle.

“It does no good,” said his wife. “It’s not his miloo…”

Presently they came upon a wide pause.

From the beginning of their conversation there had been the promise of this pause, and I pricked my ears. I knew perfectly what was bound to come; they were going to talk of my father. I was enormously strengthened in my persuasion when I found my mother’s eyes resting thoughtfully upon me in the silence, and than my uncle looked at me and then my aunt. I struggled unavailingly to produce an expression of meek stupidity.

“I think,” said my uncle, “that George will find it more amusing to have a turn in the market-place than to sit here talking with us. There’s a pair of stocks there, George – very interesting. Old-fashioned stocks.”

“I don’t mind sitting here,” I said.

My uncle rose and in the most friendly way led me through the shop. He stood on his doorstep and jerked amiable directions to me.

“Ain’t it sleepy, George, eh? There’s the butcher’s dog over there, asleep in the road-half an hour from midday! If the last Trump sounded I don’t believe it would wake. Nobody would wake! The chaps up there in the churchyard – they’d just turn over and say: ‘Naar – you don’t catch us, you don’t! See?’… Well, you’ll find the stocks just round that corner.”

He watched me out of sight.

So I never heard what they said about my father after all.

VI

When I returned, my uncle had in some remarkable way become larger and central. “Tha’chu, George?” he cried, when the shop-door bell sounded. “Come right through”; and I found him, as it were, in the chairman’s place before the draped grate.

The three of them regarded me.

“We have been talking of making you a chemist, George,” said my uncle.

My mother looked at me. “I had hoped,” she said, “that Lady Drew would have done something for him – ” She stopped.

“In what way?” said my uncle.

“She might have spoken to some one, got him into something perhaps…” She had the servant’s invincible persuasion that all good things are done by patronage.

“He is not the sort of boy for whom things are done,” she added, dismissing these dreams. “He doesn’t accommodate himself. When he thinks Lady Drew wishes a thing, he seems not to wish it. Towards Mr. Redgrave, too, he has been – disrespectful – he is like his father.”

“Who’s Mr. Redgrave?”

“The Vicar.”

“A bit independent?” said my uncle, briskly.

“Disobedient,” said my mother. “He has no idea of his place. He seems to think he can get on by slighting people and flouting them. He’ll learn perhaps before it is too late.”

My uncle stroked his cut chin and me. “Have you learnt any Latin?” he asked abruptly.

I said I had not.

“He’ll have to learn a little Latin,” he explained to my mother, “to qualify. H’m. He could go down to the chap at the grammar school here – it’s just been routed into existence again by the Charity Commissioners and have lessons.”

“What, me learn Latin!” I cried, with emotion.

“A little,” he said.

“I’ve always wanted” I said and; “LATIN!”