Tono-Bungay. Герберт Уэллс
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to be essentially England; I have already told how its airy spaciousness, its wide dignity, seemed to thrust village, church, and vicarage into corners, into a secondary and conditional significance. Here one gathered the corollary of that. Since the whole wide country of Kent was made up of contiguous Bladesovers and for the gentlefolk, the surplus of population, all who were not good tenants nor good labourers, Church of England, submissive and respectful, were necessarily thrust together, jostled out of sight, to fester as they might in this place that had the colours and even the smells of a well-packed dustbin. They should be grateful even for that; that, one felt, was the theory of it all.
And I loafed about this wilderness of crowded dinginess, with young, receptive, wide-open eyes, and through the blessing (or curse) of some fairy godmother of mine, asking and asking again: “But after all, WHY – ”
I wandered up through Rochester once, and had a glimpse of the Stour valley above the town, all horrible with cement works and foully smoking chimneys and rows of workmen’s cottages, minute, ugly, uncomfortable, and grimy. So I had my first intimation of how industrialism must live in a landlord’s land. I spent some hours, too, in the streets that give upon the river, drawn by the spell of the sea. But I saw barges and ships stripped of magic and mostly devoted to cement, ice, timber, and coal. The sailors looked to me gross and slovenly men, and the shipping struck me as clumsy, ugly, old, and dirty. I discovered that most sails don’t fit the ships that hoist them, and that there may be as pitiful and squalid a display of poverty with a vessel as with a man. When I saw colliers unloading, watched the workers in the hold filling up silly little sacks and the succession of blackened, half-naked men that ran to and fro with these along a plank over a thirty-foot drop into filth and mud, I was first seized with admiration of their courage and toughness and then, “But after all, WHY – ?” and the stupid ugliness of all this waste of muscle and endurance came home to me. Among other things it obviously wasted and deteriorated the coal… And I had imagined great things of the sea!
Well, anyhow, for a time that vocation was stilled.
But such impressions came into my leisure, and of that I had no excess. Most of my time was spent doing things for Uncle Frapp, and my evenings and nights perforce in the company of the two eldest of my cousins. He was errand boy at an oil shop and fervently pious, and of him I saw nothing until the evening except at meals; the other was enjoying the midsummer holidays without any great elation; a singularly thin and abject, stunted creature he was, whose chief liveliness was to pretend to be a monkey, and who I am now convinced had some secret disease that drained his vitality away. If I met him now I should think him a pitiful little creature and be extremely sorry for him. Then I felt only a wondering aversion. He sniffed horribly, he was tired out by a couple of miles of loafing, he never started any conversation, and he seemed to prefer his own company to mine. His mother, poor woman, said he was the “thoughtful one.”
Serious trouble came suddenly out of a conversation we held in bed one night. Some particularly pious phrase of my elder cousin’s irritated me extremely, and I avowed outright my entire disbelief in the whole scheme of revealed religion. I had never said a word about my doubts to any one before, except to Ewart who had first evolved them. I had never settled my doubts until at this moment when I spoke. But it came to me then that the whole scheme of salvation of the Frappes was not simply doubtful, but impossible. I fired this discovery out into the darkness with the greatest promptitude.
My abrupt denials certainly scared my cousin amazingly.
At first they could not understand what I was saying, and when they did I fully believe they expected an instant answer in thunderbolts and flames. They gave me more room in the bed forthwith, and then the elder sat up and expressed his sense of my awfulness. I was already a little frightened at my temerity, but when he asked me categorically to unsay what I had said, what could I do but confirm my repudiation?
“There’s no hell,” I said, “and no eternal punishment. No God would be such a fool as that.”
My elder cousin cried aloud in horror, and the younger lay scared, but listening. “Then you mean,” said my elder cousin, when at last he could bring himself to argue, “you might do just as you liked?”
“If you were cad enough,” said I.
Our little voices went on interminably, and at one stage my cousin got out of bed and made his brother do likewise, and knelt in the night dimness and prayed at me. That I found trying, but I held out valiantly. “Forgive him,” said my cousin, “he knows not what he sayeth.”
“You can pray if you like,” I said, “but if you’re going to cheek me in your prayers I draw the line.”
The last I remember of that great discussion was my cousin deploring the fact that he “should ever sleep in the same bed with an Infidel!”
The next day he astonished me by telling the whole business to his father. This was quite outside all my codes. Uncle Nicodemus sprang it upon me at the midday meal.
“You been sayin’ queer things, George,” he said abruptly. “You better mind what you’re saying.”
“What did he say, father?” said Mrs. Frapp.
“Things I couldn’t’ repeat,” said he.
“What things?” I asked hotly.
“Ask ‘IM,” said my uncle, pointing with his knife to his informant, and making me realise the nature of my offence. My aunt looked at the witness. “Not – ?” she framed a question.
“Wuss,” said my uncle. “Blarsphemy.”
My aunt couldn’t touch another mouthful. I was already a little troubled in my conscience by my daring, and now I began to feel the black enormity of the course upon which I had embarked.
“I was only talking sense,” I said.
I had a still more dreadful moment when presently I met my cousin in the brick alley behind the yard, that led back to his grocer’s shop.
“You sneak!” I said, and smacked his face hard forthwith. “Now then,” said I.
He started back, astonished and alarmed. His eyes met mine, and I saw a sudden gleam of resolution. He turned his other cheek to me.
“‘It ‘it,” he said. “‘It ‘it. I’LL forgive you.”
I felt I had never encountered a more detestable way of evading a licking. I shoved him against the wall and left him there, forgiving me, and went back into the house.
“You better not speak to your cousins, George,” said my aunt, “till you’re in a better state of mind.”
I became an outcast forthwith. At supper that night a gloomy silence was broken by my cousin saying,
“‘E ‘it me for telling you, and I turned the other cheek, muvver.”
“‘E’s got the evil one be’ind ‘im now, a ridin’ on ‘is back,” said my aunt, to the grave discomfort of the eldest girl, who sat beside me.
After supper my uncle, in a few ill-chosen words, prayed me to repent before I slept.
“Suppose you was took in your sleep, George,” he said; “where’d you be then? You jest think of that me boy.” By this time I was thoroughly miserable and frightened, and this suggestion unnerved me dreadfully but I kept up an impenitent front. “To wake in ‘ell,” said Uncle Nicodemus, in gentle tones. “You don’t want to wake in ‘ell, George, burnin’ and screamin’ for ever, do you? You wouldn’t like that?”
He tried very hard to get me to “jest ‘ave a look at the bake’ouse fire” before I retired. “It might move you,” he said.
I was awake longest that night. My cousins slept, the sleep of faith on either side of me. I decided I would whisper my prayers, and stopped midway because I was ashamed, and perhaps also because I had an idea one didn’t square God like that.
“No,” I said, with a sudden confidence, “damn me if you’re coward enough… But you’re not. No! You couldn’t be!”
I woke my cousins up with emphatic digs,