Tono Bungay | Page 4

the gentle-folk kept town-houses and did their greater shopping
under the magnificent shadow of the greatest of all fine gentlewomen,
the Queen. It seemed to be in the divine order. That all this fine
appearance was already sapped, that there were forces at work that
might presently carry all this elaborate social system in which my
mother instructed me so carefully that I might understand my "place,"
to Limbo, had scarcely dawned upon me even by the time that
Tono-Bungay was fairly launched upon the world.
There are many people in England to-day upon whom it has not yet
dawned. There are times when I doubt whether any but a very
inconsiderable minority of English people realise how extensively this
ostensible order has even now passed away. The great houses stand in
the parks still, the cottages cluster respectfully on their borders,
touching their eaves with their creepers, the English countryside--you
can range through Kent from Bladesover northward and see persists
obstinately in looking what it was. It is like an early day in a fine
October. The hand of change rests on it all, unfelt, unseen; resting for
awhile, as it were half reluctantly, before it grips and ends the thing for
ever. One frost and the whole face of things will be bare, links snap,
patience end, our fine foliage of pretences lie glowing in the mire.
For that we have still to wait a little while. The new order may have
gone far towards shaping itself, but just as in that sort of lantern show
that used to be known in the village as the "Dissolving Views," the
scene that is going remains upon the mind, traceable and evident, and

the newer picture is yet enigmatical long after the lines that are to
replace those former ones have grown bright and strong, so that the
new England of our children's children is still a riddle to me. The ideas
of democracy, of equality, and above all of promiscuous fraternity have
certainly never really entered into the English mind. But what IS
coming into it? All this book, I hope, will bear a little on that. Our
people never formulates; it keeps words for jests and ironies. In the
meanwhile the old shapes, the old attitudes remain, subtly changed and
changing still, sheltering strange tenants. Bladesover House is now let
furnished to Sir Reuben Lichtenstein, and has been since old Lady
Drew died; it was my odd experience to visit there, in the house of
which my mother had been housekeeper, when my uncle was at the
climax of Tono-Bungay. It was curious to notice then the little
differences that had come to things with this substitution. To borrow an
image from my mineralogical days, these Jews were not so much a new
British gentry as "pseudomorphous" after the gentry. They are a very
clever people, the Jews, but not clever enough to suppress their
cleverness. I wished I could have gone downstairs to savour the tone of
the pantry. It would have been very different I know. Hawksnest, over
beyond, I noted, had its pseudomorph too; a newspaper proprietor of
the type that hustles along with stolen ideas from one loud
sink-or-swim enterprise to another, had bought the place outright;
Redgrave was in the hands of brewers.
But the people in the villages, so far as I could detect, saw no
difference in their world. Two little girls bobbed and an old labourer
touched his hat convulsively as I walked through the village. He still
thought he knew his place--and mine. I did not know him, but I would
have liked dearly to have asked him if he remembered my mother, if
either my uncle or old Lichtenstein had been man enough to stand
being given away like that.
In that English countryside of my boyhood every human being had a
"place." It belonged to you from your birth like the colour of your eyes,
it was inextricably your destiny. Above you were your betters, below
you were your inferiors, and there were even an unstable questionable
few, cases so disputable that you might for the rough purposes of every

day at least, regard them as your equals. Head and centre of our system
was Lady Drew, her "leddyship," shrivelled, garrulous, with a
wonderful memory for genealogies and very, very old, and beside her
and nearly as old, Miss Somerville, her cousin and companion. These
two old souls lived like dried-up kernels in the great shell of
Bladesover House, the shell that had once been gaily full of fops, of
fine ladies in powder and patches and courtly gentlemen with swords;
and when there was no company they spent whole days in the corner
parlour just over the housekeeper's room, between reading and slumber
and caressing their two pet