Tono Bungay | Page 8

acquired from some clerical
model a precise emphatic articulation without acquiring at the same
time the aspirates that would have graced it, "got into trouble at
Sydney."
"Haw!" said Mrs. Mackridge, scornfully, "so am tawled."
"'E came to Templemorton after 'e came back, and I remember them
talking 'im over after 'e'd gone again."
"Haw?" said Mrs. Mackridge, interrogatively.
"'Is fuss was quotin' poetry, ma'am. 'E said--what was it 'e said--'They
lef' their country for their country's good,'--which in some way was
took to remind them of their being originally convic's, though now
reformed. Every one I 'eard speak, agreed it was takless of 'im."
"Sir Roderick used to say," said Mrs. Mackridge, "that the First
Thing,"--here Mrs. Mackridge paused and looked dreadfully at
me--"and the Second Thing"--here she fixed me again--"and the Third
Thing"--now I was released--"needed in a colonial governor is Tact."
She became aware of my doubts again, and added predominantly, "It
has always struck me that that was a Singularly True Remark."
I resolved that if ever I found this polypus of Tact growing up in my
soul, I would tear it out by the roots, throw it forth and stamp on it.
"They're queer people--colonials," said Rabbits, "very queer. When I
was at Templemorton I see something of 'em. Queer fellows, some of
'em. Very respectful of course, free with their money in a spasammy
sort of way, but-- Some of 'em, I must confess, make me nervous. They
have an eye on you. They watch you--as you wait. They let themselves
appear to be lookin' at you..."
My mother said nothing in that discussion. The word colonies always
upset her. She was afraid, I think, that if she turned her mind in that

direction my errant father might suddenly and shockingly be
discovered, no doubt conspicuously bigamic and altogether offensive
and revolutionary. She did not want to rediscover my father at all.
It is curious that when I was a little listening boy I had such an idea of
our colonies that I jeered in my heart at Mrs. Mackridge's colonial
ascendancy. These brave emancipated sunburnt English of the open, I
thought, suffer these aristocratic invaders as a quaint anachronism, but
as for being gratified--!
I don't jeer now. I'm not so sure.
V
It is a little difficult to explain why I did not come to do what was the
natural thing for any one in my circumstances to do, and take my world
for granted. A certain innate scepticism, I think, explains it and a
certain inaptitude for sympathetic assimilation. My father, I believe,
was a sceptic; my mother was certainly a hard woman.
I was an only child, and to this day I do not know whether my father is
living or dead. He fled my mother's virtues before my distincter
memories began. He left no traces in his flight, and she, in her
indignation, destroyed every vestige that she could of him. Never a
photograph nor a scrap of his handwriting have I seen; and it was, I
know, only the accepted code of virtue and discretion that prevented
her destroying her marriage certificate and me, and so making a clean
sweep of her matrimonial humiliation. I suppose I must inherit
something of the moral stupidity that would enable her to make a
holocaust of every little personal thing she had of him. There must have
been presents made by him as a lover, for example--books with kindly
inscriptions, letters perhaps, a flattened flower, a ring, or such-like gage.
She kept her wedding-ring, of course, but all the others she destroyed.
She never told me his christian name or indeed spoke a word to me of
him; though at times I came near daring to ask her: add what I have of
him--it isn't much--I got from his brother, my hero, my uncle
Ponderevo. She wore her ring; her marriage certificate she kept in a
sealed envelope in the very bottom of her largest trunk, and me she

sustained at a private school among the Kentish hills. You must not
think I was always at Bladesover--even in my holidays. If at the time
these came round, Lady Drew was vexed by recent Company, or for
any other reason wished to take it out of my mother, then she used to
ignore the customary reminder my mother gave her, and I "stayed on"
at the school.
But such occasions were rare, and I suppose that between ten and
fourteen I averaged fifty days a year at Bladesover.
Don't imagine I deny that was a fine thing for me. Bladesover, in
absorbing the whole countryside, had not altogether missed greatness.
The Bladesover system has at least done one good thing for England, it
has abolished the peasant habit of mind. If many of us