Tono-Bungay - H. G. Wells (my reading book txt) 📗

she take it? It filled me with astonishment to realise how little I could tell.⁠ ⁠…

Should I perhaps presently happen upon her?

I went on through the plantations and out upon the downs, and thence I saw Cothope with a new glider of his own design soaring down wind to my old familiar “grounding” place. To judge by its long rhythm it was a very good glider. “Like Cothope’s cheek,” thought I, “to go on with the research. I wonder if he’s keeping notes.⁠ ⁠… But all this will have to stop.”

He was sincerely glad to see me. “It’s been a rum go,” he said.

He had been there without wages for a month, a man forgotten in the rush of events.

“I just stuck on and did what I could with the stuff. I got a bit of money of my own⁠—and I said to myself, ‘Well, here you are with the gear and no one to look after you. You won’t get such a chance again, my boy, not in all your born days. Why not make what you can with it?’ ”

“How’s Lord Roberts β?”

Cothope lifted his eyebrows. “I’ve had to refrain,” he said. “But he’s looking very handsome.”

“Gods!” I said, “I’d like to get him up just once before we smash. You read the papers? You know we’re going to smash?”

“Oh! I read the papers. It’s scandalous, sir, such work as ours should depend on things like that. You and I ought to be under the State, sir, if you’ll excuse me.”

“Nothing to excuse,” I said. “I’ve always been a Socialist⁠—of a sort⁠—in theory. Let’s go and have a look at him. How is he? Deflated?”

“Just about quarter full. That last oil glaze of yours holds the gas something beautiful. He’s not lost a cubic metre a week.”⁠ ⁠…

Cothope returned to Socialism as we went toward the sheds.

“Glad to think you’re a Socialist, sir,” he said, “it’s the only civilised state. I been a Socialist some years⁠—off the Clarion. It’s a rotten scramble, this world. It takes the things we make and invent and it plays the silly fool with ’em. We scientific people, we’ll have to take things over and stop all this financing and advertisement and that. It’s too silly. It’s a noosance. Look at us!”

Lord Roberts β, even in his partially deflated condition in his shed, was a fine thing to stare up at. I stood side by side with Cothope regarding him, and it was borne in upon me more acutely than ever that all this had to end. I had a feeling just like the feeling of a boy who wants to do wrong, that I would use up the stuff while I had it before the creditors descended. I had a queer fancy, too, I remember, that if I could get into the air it would advertise my return to Beatrice.

“We’ll fill her,” I said concisely.

“It’s all ready,” said Cothope, and added as an afterthought, “unless they cut off the gas.”⁠ ⁠…

I worked and interested myself with Cothope all the morning and for a time forgot my other troubles. But the thought of Beatrice flooded me slowly and steadily. It became an unintelligent sick longing to see her. I felt that I could not wait for the filling of Lord Roberts β, that I must hunt her up and see her soon. I got everything forward and lunched with Cothope, and then with the feeblest excuses left him in order to prowl down through the woods towards Bedley Corner. I became a prey to wretched hesitations and diffidence. Ought I to go near her now? I asked myself, reviewing all the social abasements of my early years. At last, about five, I called at the Dower House. I was greeted by their Charlotte⁠—with a forbidding eye and a cold astonishment.

Both Beatrice and Lady Osprey were out.

There came into my head some prowling dream of meeting her. I went along the lane towards Woking, the lane down which we had walked five months ago in the wind and rain.

I mooned for a time in our former footsteps, then swore and turned back across the fields, and then conceived a distaste for Cothope and went Downward. At last I found myself looking down on the huge abandoned masses of the Crest Hill house.

That gave my mind a twist into a new channel. My uncle came uppermost again. What a strange, melancholy emptiness of intention that stricken enterprise seemed in the even evening sunlight, what vulgar magnificence and crudity and utter absurdity! It was as idiotic as the pyramids. I sat down on the stile, staring at it as though I had never seen that forest of scaffold poles, that waste of walls and bricks and plaster and shaped stones, that wilderness of broken soil and wheeling tracks and dumps before. It struck me suddenly as the compactest image and sample of all that passes for Progress, of all the advertisement-inflated spending, the aimless building up and pulling down, the enterprise and promise of my age. This was our fruit, this was what he had done, I and my uncle, in the fashion of our time. We were its leaders and exponents, we were the thing it most flourishingly produced. For this futility in its end, for an epoch of such futility, the solemn scroll of history had unfolded.⁠ ⁠…

“Great God!” I cried, “but is this Life?”

For this the armies drilled, for this the Law was administered and the prisons did their duty, for this the millions toiled and perished in suffering, in order that a few of us should build palaces we never finished, make billiard-rooms under ponds, run imbecile walls round irrational estates, scorch about the world in motorcars, devise flying-machines, play golf and a dozen such foolish games of ball, crowd into chattering dinner parties, gamble and make our lives one vast, dismal spectacle of witless waste! So it struck me then, and for a time I could think of no other