TONO-BUNGAY

by H.G Wells

BOOK THE FIRST

THE DAYS BEFORE TONO-BUNGAY WAS INVENTED

CHAPTER THE FIRST

OF BLADESOVER HOUSE, AND MY MOTHER; AND THE CONSTITUTION OF SOCIETY

I

Most people in this world seem to live "in character"; they have

a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one

with another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak

of them as being of this sort of people or that. They are, as

theatrical people say, no more (and no less) than "character

actors." They have a class, they have a place, they know what is

becoming in them and what is due to them, and their proper size

of tombstone tells at last how properly they have played the

part. But there is also another kind of life that is not so much

living as a miscellaneous tasting of life. One gets hit by some

unusual transverse force, one is jerked out of one's stratum and

lives crosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a

succession of samples. That has been my lot, and that is what

has set me at last writing something in the nature of a novel. I

have got an unusual series of impressions that I want very

urgently to tell. I have seen life at very different levels, and

at all these levels I have seen it with a sort of intimacy and in

good faith. I have been a native in many social countries. I

have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker, my cousin, who

has since died in the Chatham infirmary; I have eaten illegal

snacks--the unjustifiable gifts of footmen--in pantries, and been

despised for my want of style (and subsequently married and

divorced) by the daughter of a gasworks clerk; and--to go to my

other extreme--I was once--oh, glittering days!--an item in the

house-party of a countess. She was, I admit, a countess with a

financial aspect, but still, you know, a countess. I've seen

these people at various angles. At the dinner-table I've met not

simply the titled but the great. On one occasion--it is my

brightest memory--I upset my champagne over the trousers of the

greatest statesman in the empire--Heaven forbid I should be so

invidious as to name him!--in the warmth of our mutual

admiration.

And once (though it is the most incidental thing in my life) I

murdered a man....

Yes, I've seen a curious variety of people and ways of living

altogether. Odd people they all are great and small, very much

alike at bottom and curiously different on their surfaces. I

wish I had ranged just a little further both up and down, seeing

I have ranged so far. Royalty must be worth knowing and very

great fun. But my contacts with princes have been limited to

quite public occasions, nor at the other end of the scale have I

had what I should call an inside acquaintance with that dusty but

attractive class of people who go about on the high-roads drunk

but enfamille (so redeeming the minor lapse), in the summertime,

with a perambulator, lavender to sell, sun-brown children, a

smell, and ambiguous bundles that fire the imagination. Navvies,

farm-labourers, sailormen and stokers, all such as sit in 1834

beer-houses, are beyond me also, and I suppose must remain so now

for ever. My intercourse with the ducal rank too has been

negligible; I once went shooting with a duke, and in an outburst

of what was no doubt snobbishness, did my best to get him in the

legs. But that failed.