Tono Bungay | Page 3

unmanageable realities. My love-story--and if only I can
keep up the spirit of truth-telling all through as strongly as I have now,
you shall have it all--falls into no sort of neat scheme of telling. It
involves three separate feminine persons. It's all mixed up with the
other things....
But I've said enough, I hope, to excuse myself for the method or want
of method in what follows, and I think I had better tell without further
delay of my boyhood and my early impressions in the shadow of
Bladesover House.
III
There came a time when I realised that Bladesover House was not all it
seemed, but when I was a little boy I took the place with the entirest
faith as a complete authentic microcosm. I believed that the Bladesover
system was a little working-model--and not so very little either--of the
whole world.
Let me try and give you the effect of it.
Bladesover lies up on the Kentish Downs, eight miles perhaps from
Ashborough; and its old pavilion, a little wooden parody of the temple
of Vesta at Tibur, upon the hill crest behind the house, commands in
theory at least a view of either sea, of the Channel southward and the
Thames to the northeast. The park is the second largest in Kent, finely
wooded with well-placed beeches, many elms and some sweet
chestnuts, abounding in little valleys and hollows of bracken, with
springs and a stream and three fine ponds and multitudes of fallow deer.
The house was built in the eighteenth century, it is of pale red brick in
the style of a French chateau, and save for one pass among the crests

which opens to blue distances, to minute, remote, oast-set farm-houses
and copses and wheat fields and the occasional gleam of water, its
hundred and seventeen windows look on nothing but its own wide and
handsome territories. A semi-circular screen of great beeches masks the
church and village, which cluster picturesquely about the high road
along the skirts of the great park. Northward, at the remotest corner of
that enclosure, is a second dependent village, Ropedean, less fortunate
in its greater distance and also on account of a rector. This divine was
indeed rich, but he was vindictively economical because of some
shrinkage of his tithes; and by reason of his use of the word Eucharist
for the Lord's Supper he had become altogether estranged from the
great ladies of Bladesover. So that Ropedean was in the shadows
through all that youthful time.
Now the unavoidable suggestion of that wide park and that fair large
house, dominating church, village and the country side, was that they
represented the thing that mattered supremely in the world, and that all
other things had significance only in relation to them. They represented
the Gentry, the Quality, by and through and for whom the rest of the
world, the farming folk and the labouring folk, the trades-people of
Ashborough, and the upper servants and the lower servants and the
servants of the estate, breathed and lived and were permitted. And the
Quality did it so quietly and thoroughly, the great house mingled so
solidly and effectually earth and sky, the contrast of its spacious hall
and saloon and galleries, its airy housekeeper's room and warren of
offices with the meagre dignities of the vicar, and the pinched and
stuffy rooms of even the post-office people and the grocer, so enforced
these suggestions, that it was only when I was a boy of thirteen or
fourteen and some queer inherited strain of scepticism had set me
doubting whether Mr. Bartlett, the vicar, did really know with certainty
all about God, that as a further and deeper step in doubting I began to
question the final rightness of the gentlefolks, their primary necessity in
the scheme of things. But once that scepticism had awakened it took
me fast and far. By fourteen I had achieved terrible blasphemies and
sacrilege; I had resolved to marry a viscount's daughter, and I had
blacked the left eye--I think it was the left--of her half-brother, in open
and declared rebellion.

But of that in its place.
The great house, the church, the village, and the labourers and the
servants in their stations and degrees, seemed to me, I say, to be a
closed and complete social system. About us were other villages and
great estates, and from house to house, interlacing, correlated, the
Gentry, the fine Olympians, came and went. The country towns seemed
mere collections of ships, marketing places for the tenantry, centres for
such education as they needed, as entirely dependent on the gentry as
the village and scarcely less directly so. I thought this was the order of
the whole world. I thought London was only a greater country town
where