I have tried throughout all this story to tell things as they happened to me. In the beginning—the sheets are still here on the table, grimy and dogs-eared and old-looking—I said I wanted to tell myself and the world in which I found myself, and I have done my best. But whether I have succeeded I cannot imagine. All this writing is grey now and dead and trite1 and unmeaning to me; some of it I know by heart. I am the last person to judge it.
As I turn over the big pile of manuscript before me certain things become clearer to me, and particularly the immense inconsequences of my experiences. It is, I see now that I have it all before me, a story of activity and urgency and sterility2. I have called it Tono-Bungay, but I had far better have called it Waste. I have told of childless Marion, of my childless aunt, of Beatrice wasted and wasteful3 and futile4. What hope is there for a people whose women become fruitless? I think of all the energy I have given to vain things. I think of my industrious5 scheming with my uncle, of Crest6 Hill’s vast cessation, of his resonant7 strenuous8 career. Ten thousand men have envied him and wished to live as he lived. It is all one spectacle of forces running to waste, of people who use and do not replace, the story of a country hectic9 with a wasting aimless fever of trade and money-making and pleasure-seeking. And now I build destroyers!
Other people may see this country in other terms; this is how I have seen it. In some early chapter in this heap I compared all our present colour and abundance to October foliage10 before the frosts nip down the leaves. That I still feel was a good image. Perhaps I see wrongly. It may be I see decay all about me because I am, in a sense, decay. To others it may be a scene of achievement and construction radiant with hope. I, too, have a sort of hope, but it is a remote hope, a hope that finds no promise in this Empire or in any of the great things of our time.
How they will look in history I do not know, how time and chance will prove them I cannot guess; that is how they have mirrored themselves on one contemporary mind.
II
Concurrently11 with writing the last chapter of this book I have been much engaged by the affairs of a new destroyer we have completed. It has been an oddly complementary alternation of occupations. Three weeks or so ago this novel had to be put aside in order that I might give all my time day and night to the fitting and finishing of the engines. Last Thursday X 2, for so we call her, was done and I took her down the Thames and went out nearly to Texel for a trial of speed.
It is curious how at times one’s impressions will all fuse and run together into a sort of unity12 and become continuous with things that have hitherto been utterly13 alien and remote. That rush down the river became mysteriously connected with this book.
As I passed down the Thames I seemed in a new and parallel manner to be passing all England in review. I saw it then as I had wanted my readers to see it. The thought came to me slowly as I picked my way through the Pool; it stood out clear as I went dreaming into the night out upon the wide North Sea.
It wasn’t so much thinking at the time as a sort of photographic thought that came and grew clear. X2 went ripping through the dirty oily water as scissors rip through canvas, and the front of my mind was all intent with getting her through under the bridges and in and out among the steam-boats and barges14 and rowing-boats and piers15. I lived with my hands and eyes hard ahead. I thought nothing then of any appearances but obstacles, but for all that the back of my mind took the photographic memory of it complete and vivid....
“This,” it came to me, “is England. That is what I wanted to give in my book. This!”
We started in the late afternoon. We throbbed16 out of our yard above Hammersmith Bridge, fussed about for a moment, and headed down stream. We came at an easy rush down Craven Reach, past Fulham and Hurlingham, past the long stretches of muddy meadow And muddy suburb to Battersea and Chelsea, round the cape17 of tidy frontage that is Grosvenor Road and under Vauxhall Bridge, and Westminster opened before us. We cleared a string of coal barges and there on the left in the October sunshine stood the Parliament houses, and the flag was flying and Parliament was sitting.
I saw it at the time unseeingly; afterwards it came into my mind as the centre of the whole broad panoramic18 effect of that afternoon. The stiff square lace of Victorian Gothic with its Dutch clock of a tower came upon me suddenly and stared and whirled past in a slow half pirouette and became still, I know, behind me as if watching me recede19. “Aren’t you going to respect me, then?” it seemed to say.
Not I! There in that great pile of Victorian architecture the landlords and the lawyers, the bishops20, the railway men and the magnates of commerce go to and fro—in their incurable21 tradition of commercialised Bladesovery, of meretricious22 gentry24 and nobility sold for riches. I have been near enough to know. The Irish and the Labour-men run about among their feet, making a fuss, effecting little, they’ve got no better plans that I can see. Respect it indeed! There’s a certain paraphernalia25 of dignity, but whom does it deceive? The King comes down in a gilt26 coach to open the show and wears long robes and a crown; and there’s a display of stout27 and slender legs in white stockings and stout and slender legs in black stockings and artful old gentlemen in ermine. I was reminded of one congested afternoon I had spent with my aunt amidst a cluster of agitated28 women’s hats in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords and how I saw the King going to open Parliament, and the Duke of Devonshire looking like a gorgeous pedlar and terribly bored with the cap of maintenance on a tray before him hung by slings29 from his shoulder. A wonderful spectacle!
It is quaint30, no doubt, this England—it is even dignified31 in places—and full of mellow32 associations. That does not alter the quality of the realities these robes conceal33. The realities are greedy trade, base profit—seeking, bold advertisement; and kingship and chivalry34, spite of this wearing of treasured robes, are as dead among it all as that crusader my uncle championed against the nettles35 outside the Duffield church.
I have thought much of that bright afternoon’s panorama36.
To run down the Thames so is to run one’s hand over the pages in the book of England from end to end. One begins in Craven Reach and it is as if one were in the heart of old England. Behind us are Kew and Hampton Court with their memories of Kings and Cardinals37, and one runs at first between Fulham’s episcopal garden parties and Hurlingham’s playground for the sporting instinct of our race. The whole effect is English. There is space, there are old trees and all the best qualities of the home-land in that upper reach. Putney, too, looks Anglican on a dwindling38 scale. And then for a stretch the newer developments slop over, one misses Bladesover and there come first squalid stretches of mean homes right and left and then the dingy39 industrialism of the south side, and on the north bank the polite long front of nice houses, artistic40, literary, administrative41 people’s residences, that stretches from Cheyne Walk nearly to Westminster and hides a wilderness42 of slums. What a long slow crescendo43 that is, mile after mile, with the houses crowding closelier, the multiplying succession of church towers, the architectural moments, the successive bridges, until you come out into the second movement of the piece with Lambeth’s old palace under your quarter and the houses of Parliament on your bow! Westminster Bridge is ahead of you then, and through it you flash, and in a moment the round-faced clock tower cranes up to peer at you again and New Scotland Yard squares at you, a fat beef-eater of a policeman disguised miraculously44 as a Bastille.
For a stretch you have the essential London; you have Charing45 Cross railway station, heart of the world, and the Embankment on the north side with its new hotels overshadowing its Georgian and Victorian architecture, and mud and great warehouses46 and factories, chimneys, shot towers, advertisements on the south. The northward47 skyline grows more intricate and pleasing, and more and more does one thank God for Wren48. Somerset House is as picturesque49 as the civil war, one is reminded again of the original England, one feels in the fretted50 sky the quality of Restoration Lace.
And then comes Astor’s strong box and the lawyers’ Inns.
(I had a passing memory of myself there, how once I had trudged51 along the Embankment westward52, weighing my uncle’s offer of three hundred pounds a year....)
Through that central essential London reach I drove, and X2 bored her nose under the foam53 regardless of it all like a black hound going through reeds—on what trail even I who made her cannot tell.
And in this reach, too, one first meets the seagulls and is reminded of the sea. Blackfriars one takes—just under these two bridges and just between them is the finest bridge moment in the world—and behold55, soaring up, hanging in the sky over a rude
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