Tono-Bungay by H. G. Wells (diy ebook reader txt) 📕

man who has been diving in darkness, clutching at a new resolve for which he had groped desperately and long.

I came into the inner office suddenly one day⁠—it must have been just before the time of Marion’s suit for restitution⁠—and sat down before my uncle.

“Look here,” I said, “I’m sick of this.”

“Hullo!” he answered, and put some papers aside.

“What’s up, George?”

“Things are wrong.”

“As how?”

“My life,” I said, “it’s a mess, an infinite mess.”

“She’s been a stupid girl, George,” he said; “I partly understand. But you’re quit of her now, practically, and there’s just as good fish in the sea⁠—”

“Oh! it’s not that!” I cried. “That’s only the part that shows. I’m sick⁠—I’m sick of all this damned rascality.”

“Eh? Eh?” said my uncle. “What⁠—rascality?”

“Oh, you know. I want some stuff, man. I want something to hold on to. I shall go amok if I don’t get it. I’m a different sort of beast from you. You float in all this bunkum. I feel like a man floundering in a universe of soapsuds, up and down, east and west. I can’t stand it. I must get my foot on something solid or⁠—I don’t know what.”

I laughed at the consternation in his face.

“I mean it,” I said. “I’ve been thinking it over. I’ve made up my mind. It’s no good arguing. I shall go in for work⁠—real work. No! this isn’t work; it’s only laborious cheating. But I’ve got an idea! It’s an old idea⁠—I thought of years ago, but it came back to me. Look here! Why should I fence about with you? I believe the time has come for flying to be possible. Real flying!”

“Flying!”

I stuck to that, and it helped me through the worst time in my life. My uncle, after some halfhearted resistance and a talk with my aunt, behaved like the father of a spoilt son. He fixed up an arrangement that gave me capital to play with, released me from too constant a solicitude for the newer business developments⁠—this was in what I may call the later Moggs period of our enterprises⁠—and I went to work at once with grim intensity.

But I will tell of my soaring and flying machines in the proper place. I’ve been leaving the story of my uncle altogether too long. I wanted merely to tell how it was I took to this work. I took to these experiments after I had sought something that Marion in some indefinable way had seemed to promise. I toiled and forgot myself for a time, and did many things. Science too has been something of an irresponsive mistress since, though I’ve served her better than I served Marion. But at the time Science, with her order, her inhuman distance, yet steely certainties, saved me from despair.

Well, I have still to fly; but incidentally I have invented the lightest engines in the world.

I am trying to tell of all the things that happened to me. It’s hard enough simply to get it put down in the remotest degree right. But this is a novel, not a treatise. Don’t imagine that I am coming presently to any sort of solution of my difficulties. Here among my drawings and hammerings now, I still question unanswering problems. All my life has been at bottom, seeking, disbelieving always, dissatisfied always with the thing seen and the thing believed, seeking something in toil, in force, in danger, something whose name and nature I do not clearly understand, something beautiful, worshipful, enduring, mine profoundly and fundamentally, and the utter redemption of myself; I don’t know⁠—all I can tell is that it is something I have ever failed to find.

XI

But before I finish this chapter and book altogether and go on with the great adventure of my uncle’s career. I may perhaps tell what else remains to tell of Marion and Effie, and then for a time set my private life behind me.

For a time Marion and I corresponded with some regularity, writing friendly but rather uninforming letters about small business things. The clumsy process of divorce completed itself.

She left the house at Ealing and went into the country with her aunt and parents, taking a small farm near Lewes in Sussex. She put up glass, she put in heat for her father, happy man! and spoke of figs and peaches. The thing seemed to promise well throughout a spring and summer, but the Sussex winter after London was too much for the Ramboats. They got very muddy and dull; Mr. Ramboat killed a cow by improper feeding, and that disheartened them all. A twelvemonth saw the enterprise in difficulties. I had to help her out of this, and then they returned to London and she went into partnership with Smithie at Streatham, and ran a business that was intimated on the firm’s stationery as “Robes.” The parents and aunt were stowed away in a cottage somewhere. After that the letters became infrequent. But in one I remember a postscript that had a little stab of our old intimacy: “Poor old Miggles is dead.”

Nearly eight years slipped by. I grew up. I grew in experience, in capacity, until I was fully a man, but with many new interests, living on a larger scale in a wider world than I could have dreamt of in my Marion days. Her letters become rare and insignificant. At last came a gap of silence that made me curious. For eighteen months or more I had nothing from Marion save her quarterly receipts through the bank. Then I damned at Smithie, and wrote a card to Marion.

“Dear Marion,” I said, “how goes it?”

She astonished me tremendously by telling me she had married again⁠—“a Mr. Wachorn, a leading agent in the paper-pattern trade.” But she still wrote on the Ponderevo and Smith (Robes) notepaper, from the Ponderevo and Smith address.

And that, except for a little difference of opinion about the continuance of alimony which gave me some passages of anger, and the use of my name by the