Tono Bungay | Page 9

still live and
breathe pantry and housekeeper's room, we are quit of the dream of
living by economising parasitically on hens and pigs.... About that park
there were some elements of a liberal education; there was a great
space of greensward not given over to manure and food grubbing; there
was mystery, there was matter for the imagination. It was still a park of
deer. I saw something of the life of these dappled creatures, heard the
belling of stags, came upon young fawns among the bracken, found
bones, skulls, and antlers in lonely places. There were corners that gave
a gleam of meaning to the word forest, glimpses of unstudied natural
splendour. There was a slope of bluebells in the broken sunlight under
the newly green beeches in the west wood that is now precious sapphire
in my memory; it was the first time that I knowingly met Beauty.
And in the house there were books. The rubbish old Lady Drew read I
never saw; stuff of the Maria Monk type, I have since gathered, had a
fascination for her; but back in the past there had been a Drew of
intellectual enterprise, Sir Cuthbert, the son of Sir Matthew who built
the house; and thrust away, neglected and despised, in an old room
upstairs, were books and treasures of his that my mother let me rout
among during a spell of wintry wet. Sitting under a dormer window on
a shelf above great stores of tea and spices, I became familiar with
much of Hogarth in a big portfolio, with Raphael, there was a great
book of engravings from the stanzas of Raphael in the Vatican--and

with most of the capitals of Europe as they had looked about 1780, by
means of several pig iron-moulded books of views. There was also a
broad eighteenth century atlas with huge wandering maps that
instructed me mightily. It had splendid adornments about each map title;
Holland showed a fisherman and his boat; Russia a Cossack; Japan,
remarkable people attired in pagodas--I say it deliberately, "pagodas."
There were Terrae Incognitae in every continent then, Poland, Sarmatia,
lands since lost; and many a voyage I made with a blunted pin about
that large, incorrect and dignified world. The books in that little old
closet had been banished, I suppose, from the saloon during the
Victorian revival of good taste and emasculated orthodoxy, but my
mother had no suspicion of their character. So I read and understood
the good sound rhetoric of Tom Paine's "Rights of Man," and his
"Common Sense," excellent books, once praised by bishops and since
sedulously lied about. Gulliver was there unexpurgated, strong meat for
a boy perhaps but not too strong I hold--I have never regretted that I
escaped niceness in these affairs. The satire of Traldragdubh made my
blood boil as it was meant to do, but I hated Swift for the Houyhnhnms
and never quite liked a horse afterwards. Then I remember also a
translation of Voltaire's "Candide," and "Rasselas;" and, vast book
though it was, I really believe I read, in a muzzy sort of way of course,
from end to end, and even with some reference now and then to the
Atlas, Gibbon--in twelve volumes.
These readings whetted my taste for more, and surreptitiously I raided
the bookcases in the big saloon. I got through quite a number of books
before my sacrilegious temerity was discovered by Ann, the old
head-housemaid. I remember that among others I tried a translation of
Plato's "Republic" then, and found extraordinarily little interest in it; I
was much too young for that; but "Vathek"--"Vathek" was glorious
stuff. That kicking affair! When everybody HAD to kick!
The thought of "Vathek" always brings back with it my boyish memory
of the big saloon at Bladesover.
It was a huge long room with many windows opening upon the park,
and each window--there were a dozen or more reaching from the floor

up--had its elaborate silk or satin curtains, heavily fringed, a canopy (is
it?) above, its completely white shutters folding into the deep thickness
of the wall. At either end of that great still place was an immense
marble chimney-piece; the end by the bookcase showed the wolf and
Romulus and Remus, with Homer and Virgil for supporters; the design
of the other end I have forgotten. Frederick, Prince of Wales,
swaggered flatly over the one, twice life-size, but mellowed by the
surface gleam of oil; and over the other was an equally colossal group
of departed Drews as sylvan deities, scantily clad, against a storm-rent
sky. Down the centre of the elaborate ceiling were three chandeliers,
each bearing some hundreds of dangling glass lustres, and over the
interminable carpet--it impressed me as about as big as Sarmatia in the
store-room Atlas--were islands and