Герберт Джордж Уэллс
Tono-Bungay
The vicar introduced us sketchily, and the faded Victorian wife regarded my aunt with a mixture of conventional scorn and abject respect, and talked to her in a languid, persistent voice about people in the neighbourhood whom my aunt could not possibly know.
My aunt received these personalia cheerfully, with her blue eyes flitting from point to point, and coming back again and again to the pinched faces of the daughters and the cross upon the eldest’s breast. Encouraged by my aunt’s manner, the vicar’s wife grew patronising and kindly, and made it evident that she could do much to bridge the social gulf between ourselves and the people of family about us.
I had just snatches of that conversation. “Mrs. Merridew brought him quite a lot of money. Her father, I believe, had been in the Spanish wine trade – quite a lady though. And after that he fell off his horse and cracked his brain pan and took to fishing and farming. I’m sure you’ll like to know them. He’s most amusing… The daughter had a disappointment and went to China as a missionary and got mixed up in a massacre.”…
“The most beautiful silks and things she brought back, you’d hardly believe!”
“Yes, they gave them to propitiate her. You see, they didn’t understand the difference, and they thought that as they’d been massacring people, THEY’D be massacred. They didn’t understand the difference Christianity makes.”…
“Seven bishops they’ve had in the family!”
“Married a Papist and was quite lost to them.”…
“He failed some dreadful examination and had to go into the militia.”…
“So she bit his leg as hard as ever she could and he let go.”…
“Had four of his ribs amputated.”…
“Caught meningitis and was carried off in a week.”
“Had to have a large piece of silver tube let into his throat, and if he wants to talk he puts his finger on it. It makes him so interesting, I think. You feel he’s sincere somehow. A most charming man in every way.”
“Preserved them both in spirits very luckily, and there they are in his study, though of course he doesn’t show them to everybody.”
The silent lady, unperturbed by these apparently exciting topics, scrutinised my aunt’s costume with a singular intensity, and was visibly moved when she unbuttoned her dust cloak and flung it wide. Meanwhile we men conversed, one of the more spirited daughters listened brightly, and the youths lay on the grass at our feet. My uncle offered them cigars, but they both declined, – out of bashfulness, it seemed to me, whereas the vicar, I think, accepted out of tact. When we were not looking at them directly, these young men would kick each other furtively.
Under the influence of my uncle’s cigar, the vicar’s mind had soared beyond the limits of the district. “This Socialism,” he said, “seems making great headway.”
My uncle shook his head. “We’re too individualistic in this country for that sort of nonsense,” he said “Everybody’s business is nobody’s business. That’s where they go wrong.”
“They have some intelligent people in their ranks, I am told,” said the vicar, “writers and so forth. Quite a distinguished playwright, my eldest daughter was telling me – I forget his name.
“Milly, dear! Oh! she’s not here. Painters, too, they have. This Socialist, it seems to me, is part of the Unrest of the Age… But, as you say, the spirit of the people is against it. In the country, at any rate. The people down here are too sturdily independent in their small way – and too sensible altogether.”…
“It’s a great thing for Duffield to have Lady Grove occupied again,” he was saying when my wandering attention came back from some attractive casualty in his wife’s discourse. “People have always looked up to the house and considering all things, old Mr. Durgan really was extraordinarily good – extraordinarily good. You intend to give us a good deal of your time here, I hope.”
“I mean to do my duty by the Parish,” said my uncle.
“I’m sincerely glad to hear it – sincerely. We’ve missed – the house influence. An English village isn’t complete – People get out of hand. Life grows dull. The young people drift away to London.”
He enjoyed his cigar gingerly for a moment.
“We shall look to you to liven things up,” he said, poor man!
My uncle cocked his cigar and removed it from his mouth.
“What you think the place wants?” he asked.
He did not wait for an answer. “I been thinking while you been talking – things one might do. Cricket – a good English game – sports. Build the chaps a pavilion perhaps. Then every village ought to have a miniature rifle range.”
“Ye-ees,” said the vicar. “Provided, of course, there isn’t a constant popping.”…
“Manage that all right,” said my uncle. “Thing’d be a sort of long shed. Paint it red. British colour. Then there’s a Union Jack for the church and the village school. Paint the school red, too, p’raps. Not enough colour about now. Too grey. Then a maypole.”
“How far our people would take up that sort of thing – ” began the vicar.
“I’m all for getting that good old English spirit back again,” said my uncle. “Merrymakings. Lads and lasses dancing on the village green. Harvest home. Fairings. Yule Log – all the rest of it.”
“How would old Sally Glue do for a May Queen?” asked one of the sons in the slight pause that followed.
“Or Annie Glassbound?” said the other, with the huge virile guffaw of a young man whose voice has only recently broken.
“Sally Glue is eighty-five,” explained the vicar, “and Annie Glassbound is well – a young lady of extremely generous proportions. And not quite right, you know. Not quite right – here.” He tapped his brow.
“Generous proportions!” said the eldest son, and the guffaws were renewed.
“You see,” said the vicar, “all the brisker girls go into service in or near London. The life of excitement attracts them. And no doubt the higher wages have something to do with it. And the liberty to wear finery. And generally – freedom from restraint. So that there might be a little difficulty perhaps to find a May Queen here just at present who was really young and er – pretty… Of course I couldn’t think of any of my girls – or anything of that sort.”
“We got to attract ‘em back,” said my uncle. “That’s what I feel about it. We got to Buck-Up the country. The English country is a going concern still; just as the Established Church – if you’ll excuse me saying it, is a going concern. Just as Oxford is – or Cambridge. Or any of those old, fine old things. Only it wants fresh capital, fresh idees and fresh methods. Light railways, f’rinstance – scientific use of drainage. Wire fencing machinery – all that.”
The vicar’s face for one moment betrayed dismay. Perhaps he was thinking of his country walks amids the hawthorns and honeysuckle.
“There’s great things,” said my uncle, “to be done on Mod’un lines with Village Jam and Pickles – boiled in the country.”
It was the reverberation of this last sentence in my mind, I think, that sharpened my sentimental sympathy as we went through the straggling village street and across the trim green on our way back to London. It seemed that afternoon the most tranquil and idyllic collection of creeper-sheltered homes you can imagine; thatch still lingered on a whitewashed cottage or two, pyracanthus, wall-flowers, and daffodils abounded, and an unsystematic orchard or so was white with blossom above and gay with bulbs below. I noted a row of straw beehives, beehive-shaped, beehives of the type long since condemned as inefficient by all progressive minds, and in the doctor’s acre of grass a flock of two whole sheep was grazing, – no doubt he’d taken them on account. Two men and one old woman made gestures of abject vassalage, and my uncle replied with a lordly gesture of his great motoring glove…
“England’s full of Bits like this,” said my uncle, leaning over the front seat and looking back with great satisfaction. The black glare of his goggles rested for a time on the receding turrets of Lady Grove just peeping over the trees.
“I shall have a flagstaff, I think,” he considered. “Then one could show when one is in residence. The villagers will like to know.”…
I reflected. “They will” I said. “They’re used to liking to know.”…
My aunt had been unusually silent. Suddenly she spoke. “He says Snap,” she remarked; “he buys that place. And a nice old job of Housekeeping he gives me! He sails through the village swelling like an old turkey. And who’ll have to scoot the butler? Me! Who’s got to forget all she ever knew and start again? Me! Who’s got to trek from Chiselhurst and be a great lady? Me! … You old Bother! Just when I was settling down and beginning to feel at home.”
My uncle turned his goggles to her. “Ah! THIS time it is home, Susan… We got there.”
VII
It seems to me now but a step from the buying of Lady Grove to the beginning of Crest Hill, from the days when the former was a stupendous achievement to the days when it was too small and dark and inconvenient altogether for a great financier’s use. For me that was a period of increasing detachment from our business and the great world of London; I saw it more and more in broken glimpses, and sometimes I was working in my little pavilion above Lady Grove for a fortnight together; even when I came up it was often solely for a meeting of the aeronautical society or for one of the learned societies or to consult literature or employ searchers or some such special business. For my uncle it was a period of stupendous inflation. Each time I met him I found him more confident, more comprehensive, more consciously a factor in great affairs. Soon he was no longer an associate of merely business men; he was big enough for the attentions of greater powers.
I grew used to discovering some item of personal news about him in my evening paper, or to the sight of a full-page portrait of him in a sixpenny magazine. Usually the news was of some munificent act, some romantic piece of buying or giving or some fresh rumour of reconstruction. He saved, you will remember, the Parbury Reynolds for the country. Or at times, it would be an interview or my uncle’s contribution to some symposium on the “Secret of Success,” or such-like topic. Or wonderful tales of his power of work, of his wonderful organisation to get things done, of his instant decisions and remarkable power of judging his fellow-men. They repeated his great mot: “Eight hour working day – I want eighty hours!”
He became modestly but resolutely “public.” They cartooned him in Vanity Fair. One year my aunt, looking indeed a very gracious, slender lady, faced the portrait of the King in the great room at Burlington House, and the next year saw a medallion of my uncle by Ewart, looking out upon the world, proud and imperial, but on the whole a trifle too prominently convex, from the walls of the New Gallery.
I shared only intermittently in his social experiences. People knew of me, it is true, and many of them sought to make through me a sort of flank attack upon him, and there was a legend, owing, very unreasonably, partly to my growing scientific reputation and partly to an element of reserve in my manner, that I played a much larger share in planning his operations than was actually the case. This led to one or two very intimate private dinners, to my inclusion in one or two house parties and various odd offers of introductions and services that I didn’t for the most part accept. Among other people who sought me in this way was Archie Garvell, now a smart, impecunious soldier of no particular distinction, who would, I think, have been quite prepared to develop any sporting instincts I possessed, and who was beautifully unaware of our former contact. He was always offering me winners; no doubt in a spirit of anticipatory exchange for some really good thing in our more scientific and certain method of getting something for nothing…
In spite of my preoccupation with my experiments, work, I did, I find now that I come to ransack my impressions, see a great deal of the great world during those eventful years; I had a near view of the machinery by which an astounding Empire is run, rubbed shoulders and exchanged experiences with bishops and statesmen, political women and women who were not political, physicians and soldiers, artists and authors, the directors of great journals, philanthropists and all sorts of eminent, significant people. I saw the statesmen without their orders and the bishops with but a little purple silk left over from their canonicals, inhaling, not incensen but cigar smoke. I could look at them all the better because, for the most part, they were not looking at me but at my uncle, and calculating consciously or unconsciously how they might use him and assimilate him to their system, the most unpremeditated, subtle, successful and aimless plutocracy that ever encumbered the destinies of mankind. Not one of them, so far as I could see, until disaster overtook him, resented his lies, his almost naked dishonesty of method, the disorderly disturbance of this trade and that, caused by his spasmodic operations. I can see them now about him, see them polite, watchful, various; his stiff compact little figure always a centre of attention, his wiry hair, his brief nose, his under-lip, electric with self-confidence. Wandering marginally through distinguished gatherings, I would catch the whispers: “That’s Mr. Ponderevo!”
“The little man?”
“Yes, the little bounder with the glasses.”
“They say he’s made – “…
Or I would see him on some parterre of a platform beside my aunt’s hurraying hat, amidst titles and costumes, “holding his end up,” as he would say, subscribing heavily to obvious charities, even at times making brief convulsive speeches in some good cause before the most exalted audiences. “Mr. Chairman, your Royal Highness, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen,” he would begin amidst subsiding applause and adjust those obstinate glasses and thrust back the wings of his frock-coat and rest his hands upon his hips and speak his fragment with ever and again an incidental Zzzz. His hands would fret about him as he spoke, fiddle his glasses, feel in his waistcoat pockets; ever and again he would rise slowly to his toes as a sentence unwound jerkily like a clockwork snake, and drop back on his heels at the end. They were the very gestures of our first encounter when he had stood before the empty fireplace in his minute draped parlour and talked of my future to my mother.
In those measurelessly long hot afternoons in the little shop at Wimblehurst he had talked and dreamt of the Romance of Modern Commerce. Here, surely, was his romance come true.
VIII
People say that my uncle lost his head at the crest of his fortunes, but if one may tell so much truth of a man one has in a manner loved, he never had very much head to lose. He was always imaginative, erratic, inconsistent, recklessly inexact, and his inundation of wealth merely gave him scope for these qualities. It is true, indeed, that towards the climax he became intensely irritable at times and impatient of contradiction, but that, I think, was rather the gnawing uneasiness of sanity than any mental disturbance. But I find it hard either to judge him or convey the full development of him to the reader. I saw too much of him; my memory is choked with disarranged moods and aspects. Now he is distended with megalomania, now he is deflated, now he is quarrelsome, now impenetrably self-satisfied, but always he is sudden, jerky, fragmentary, energetic, and – in some subtle fundamental way that I find difficult to define – absurd.
There stands out – because of the tranquil beauty of its setting perhaps – a talk we had in the veranda of the little pavilion near my worksheds behind Crest Hill in which my aeroplanes and navigable balloons were housed. It was one of many similar conversations, and I do not know why it in particular should survive its fellows. It happens so. He had come up to me after his coffee to consult me about a certain chalice which in a moment of splendour and under the importunity of a countess he had determined to give to a deserving church in the east-end. I, in a moment of even rasher generosity, had suggested Ewart as a possible artist. Ewart had produced at once an admirable sketch for the sacred vessel surrounded by a sort of wreath of Millies with open arms and wings and had drawn fifty pounds on the strength of it. After that came a series of vexatious delays. The chalice became less and less of a commercial man’s chalice, acquired more and more the elusive quality of the Holy Grail, and at last even the drawing receded.
My uncle grew restive… “You see, George, they’ll begin to want the blasted thing!”
“What blasted thing?”
“That chalice, damn it! They’re beginning to ask questions. It isn’t Business, George.”
“It’s art,” I protested, “and religion.”
“That’s all very well. But it’s not a good ad for us, George, to make a promise and not deliver the goods… I’ll have to write off your friend Ewart as a bad debt, that’s what it comes to, and go to a decent firm.”…
We sat outside on deck chairs in the veranda of the pavilion, smoked, drank whisky, and, the chalice disposed of, meditated. His temporary annoyance passed. It was an altogether splendid summer night, following a blazing, indolent day. Full moonlight brought out dimly the lines of the receding hills, one wave beyond another; far beyond were the pin-point lights of Leatherhead, and in the foreground the little stage from which I used to start upon my gliders gleamed like wet steel. The season must have been high June, for down in the woods that hid the lights of the Lady Grove windows, I remember the nightingales thrilled and gurgled…
“We got here, George,” said my uncle, ending a long pause. “Didn’t I say?”
“Say! – when?” I asked.
“In that hole in the To’nem Court Road, eh? It’s been a Straight Square Fight, and here we are!”
I nodded.
“‘Member me telling you – Tono-Bungay?.. Well… I’d just that afternoon thought of it!”
“I’ve fancied at times;” I admitted.
“It’s a great world, George, nowadays, with a fair chance for every one who lays hold of things. The career ouvert to the Talons – eh? Tono-Bungay. Think of it! It’s a great world and a growing world, and I’m glad we’re in it – and getting a pull. We’re getting big people, George. Things come to us. Eh? This Palestine thing.”…
He meditated for a time and Zzzzed softly. Then he became still.
His theme was taken up by a cricket in the grass until he himself was ready to resume it. The cricket too seemed to fancy that in some scheme of its own it had got there. “Chirrrrrrup” it said; “chirrrrrrup.”
“Lord, what a place that was at Wimblehurst!” he broke out. “If ever I get a day off we’ll motor there, George, and run over that dog that sleeps in the High Street. Always was a dog asleep there – always. Always… I’d like to see the old shop again. I daresay old Ruck still stands between the sheep at his door, grinning with all his teeth, and Marbel, silly beggar! comes out with his white apron on and a pencil stuck behind his ear, trying to look awake… Wonder if they know it’s me? I’d like ‘em somehow to know it’s me.”
“They’ll have had the International Tea Company and all sorts of people cutting them up,” I said. “And that dog’s been on the pavement this six years – can’t sleep even there, poor dear, because of the motor-horns and its shattered nerves.”
“Movin’ everywhere,” said my uncle. “I expect you’re right… It’s a big time we’re in, George. It’s a big Progressive On-coming Imperial Time. This Palestine business – the daring of it… It’s, it’s a Process, George. And we got our hands on it. Here we sit – with our hands on it, George. Entrusted.
“It seems quiet to – night. But if we could see and hear.” He waved his cigar towards Leatherhead and London.
“There they are, millions, George. Jes’ think of what they’ve been up to to-day – those ten millions – each one doing his own particular job. You can’t grasp it. It’s like old Whitman says – what is it he says? Well, anyway it’s like old Whitman. Fine chap, Whitman! Fine old chap! Queer, you can’t quote him. … And these millions aren’t anything. There’s the millions over seas, hundreds of millions, Chinese, M’rocco, Africa generally, ‘Merica… Well, here we are, with power, with leisure, picked out – because we’ve been energetic, because we’ve seized opportunities, because we’ve made things hum when other people have waited for them to hum. See? Here we are – with our hands on it. Big people. Big growing people. In a sort of way, – Forces.”
He paused. “It’s wonderful, George,” he said.
“Anglo-Saxon energy,” I said softly to the night.
“That’s it, George – energy. It’s put things in our grip – threads, wires, stretching out and out, George, from that little office of ours, out to West Africa, out to Egypt, out to Inja, out east, west, north and south. Running the world practically. Running it faster and faster. Creative. There’s that Palestine canal affair. Marvellous idee! Suppose we take that up, suppose we let ourselves in for it, us and the others, and run that water sluice from the Mediterranean into the Dead Sea Valley – think of the difference it will make! All the desert blooming like a rose, Jericho lost for ever, all the Holy Places under water… Very likely destroy Christianity.”…
He mused for a space. “Cuttin’ canals,” murmured my uncle. “Making tunnels… New countries… New centres… Zzzz… Finance… Not only Palestine.
“I wonder where we shall get before we done, George? We got a lot of big things going. We got the investing public sound and sure. I don’t see why in the end we shouldn’t be very big. There’s difficulties but I’m equal to them. We’re still a bit soft in our bones, but they’ll harden all right… I suppose, after all, I’m worth something like a million, George, cleared up and settled. If I got out of things now. It’s a great time, George, a wonderful time!”…
I glanced through the twilight at his convexity and I must confess it struck me that on the whole he wasn’t particularly good value.
“We got our hands on things, George, us big people. We got to hang together, George run the show. Join up with the old order like that mill-wheel of Kipling’s. (Finest thing he ever wrote, George; I jes’ been reading it again. Made me buy Lady Grove.) Well, we got to run the country, George. It’s ours. Make it a Scientific Organised Business Enterprise. Put idees into it. ‘Lectrify it. Run the Press. Run all sorts of developments. All sorts of developments. I been talking to Lord Boom. I been talking to all sorts of people. Great things. Progress. The world on business lines. Only jes’ beginning.”…
He fell into a deep meditation.
He Zzzzed for a time and ceased.
“YES,” he said at last in the tone of a man who has at last emerged with ultimate solutions to the profoundest problems.
“What?” I said after a seemly pause.
My uncle hung fire for a moment and it seemed to me the fate of nations trembled in the balance. Then he spoke as one who speaks from the very bottom of his heart – and I think it was the very bottom of his heart.
“I’d jes’ like to drop into the Eastry Arms, jes’ when all those beggars in the parlour are sittin’ down to whist, Ruck and Marbel and all, and give ‘em ten minutes of my mind, George. Straight from the shoulder. Jes’ exactly what I think of them. It’s a little thing, but I’d like to do it jes’ once before I die.”…
He rested on that for some time Zzzz-ing.
Then he broke out at a new place in a tone of detached criticism.
“There’s Boom,” he reflected.
“It’s a wonderful system this old British system, George. It’s staid and stable and yet it has a place for new men. We come up and take our places. It’s almost expected. We take a hand. That’s where our Democracy differs from America. Over there a man succeeds; all he gets is money. Here there’s a system open to every one – practically… Chaps like Boom – come from nowhere.”
His voice ceased. I reflected upon the spirit of his words. Suddenly I kicked my feet in the air, rolled on my side and sat up suddenly on my deck chair with my legs down.
“You don’t mean it!” I said.
“Mean what, George?”
“Subscription to the party funds. Reciprocal advantage. Have we got to that?”
“Whad you driving at, George?”
“You know. They’d never do it, man!”
“Do what?” he said feebly; and, “Why shouldn’t they?”
“They’d not even go to a baronetcy. NO!.. And yet, of course, there’s Boom! And Collingshead and Gorver. They’ve done beer, they’ve done snippets! After all Tono-Bungay – it’s not like a turf commission agent or anything like that!.. There have of course been some very gentlemanly commission agents. It isn’t like a fool of a scientific man who can’t make money!”
My uncle grunted; we’d differed on that issue before.
A malignant humour took possession of me. “What would they call you?” I speculated. “The vicar would like Duffield. Too much like Duffer! Difficult thing, a title.” I ran my mind over various possibilities. “Why not take a leaf from a socialist tract I came upon yesterday. Chap says we’re all getting delocalised. Beautiful word – delocalised! Why not be the first delocalised peer? That gives you – Tono-Bungay! There is a Bungay, you know. Lord Tono of Bungay – in bottles everywhere. Eh?”
My uncle astonished me by losing his temper.
“Damn it. George, you don’t seem to see I’m serious! You’re always sneering at Tono-Bungay! As though it was some sort of swindle. It was perfec’ly legitimate trade, perfec’ly legitimate. Good value and a good article… When I come up here and tell you plans and exchange idees – you sneer at me. You do. You don’t see – it’s a big thing. It’s a big thing. You got to get used to new circumstances. You got to face what lies before us. You got to drop that tone.”
IX
My uncle was not altogether swallowed up in business and ambition. He kept in touch with modern thought. For example, he was, I know, greatly swayed by what he called “This Overman idee, Nietzsche – all that stuff.”
He mingled those comforting suggestions of a potent and exceptional human being emancipated from the pettier limitations of integrity with the Napoleonic legend. It gave his imagination a considerable outlet. That Napoleonic legend! The real mischief of Napoleon’s immensely disastrous and accidental career began only when he was dead and the romantic type of mind was free to elaborate his character. I do believe that my uncle would have made a far less egregious smash if there had been no Napoleonic legend to misguide him. He was in many ways better and infinitely kinder than his career. But when in doubt between decent conduct and a base advantage, that cult came in more and more influentially: “think of Napoleon; think what the inflexibly-wilful Napoleon would have done with such scruples as yours;” that was the rule, and the end was invariably a new step in dishonour.
My uncle was in an unsystematic way a collector of Napoleonic relics; the bigger the book about his hero the more readily he bought it; he purchased letters and tinsel and weapons that bore however remotely upon the Man of Destiny, and he even secured in Geneva, though he never brought home, an old coach in which Buonaparte might have ridden; he crowded the quiet walls of Lady Grove with engravings and figures of him, preferring, my aunt remarked, the more convex portraits with the white vest and those statuettes with the hands behind the back which threw forward the figure. The Durgans watched him through it all, sardonically.
And he would stand after breakfast at times in the light of the window at Lady Grove, a little apart, with two fingers of one hand stuck between his waistcoat-buttons and his chin sunken, thinking, – the most preposterous little fat man in the world. It made my aunt feel, she said, “like an old Field Marshal – knocks me into a cocked hat, George!”
Perhaps this Napoleonic bias made him a little less frequent with his cigars than he would otherwise have been, but of that I cannot be sure, and it certainly caused my aunt a considerable amount of vexation after he had read Napoleon and the Fair Sex, because for a time that roused him to a sense of a side of life he had in his commercial preoccupations very largely forgotten. Suggestion plays so great a part in this field. My uncle took the next opportunity and had an “affair”!
It was not a very impassioned affair, and the exact particulars never of course reached me. It is quite by chance I know anything of it at all. One evening I was surprised to come upon my uncle in a mixture of Bohemia and smart people at an At Home in the flat of Robbert, the R.A. who painted my aunt, and he was standing a little apart in a recess, talking or rather being talked to in undertones by a plump, blond little woman in pale blue, a Helen Scrymgeour who wrote novels and was organising a weekly magazine. I elbowed a large lady who was saying something about them, but I didn’t need to hear the thing she said to perceive the relationship of the two. It hit me like a placard on a hoarding. I was amazed the whole gathering did not see it. Perhaps they did. She was wearing a remarkably fine diamond necklace, much too fine for journalism, and regarding him with that quality of questionable proprietorship, of leashed but straining intimacy, that seems inseparable from this sort of affair. It is so much more palpable than matrimony. If anything was wanted to complete my conviction it was my uncles’s eyes when presently he became aware of mine, a certain embarrassment and a certain pride and defiance. And the next day he made an opportunity to praise the lady’s intelligence to me concisely, lest I should miss the point of it all.
After that I heard some gossip – from a friend of the lady’s. I was much too curious to do anything but listen. I had never in all my life imagined my uncle in an amorous attitude. It would appear that she called him her “God in the Car” – after the hero in a novel of Anthony Hope’s. It was essential to the convention of their relations that he should go relentlessly whenever business called, and it was generally arranged that it did call. To him women were an incident, it was understood between them; Ambition was the master-passion. A great world called him and the noble hunger for Power. I have never been able to discover just how honest Mrs. Scrymgeour was in all this, but it is quite possible the immense glamour of his financial largeness prevailed with her and that she did bring a really romantic feeling to their encounters. There must have been some extraordinary moments…
