Tono-Bungay

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Герберт Уэллс. Tono-Bungay

BOOK THE FIRST. THE DAYS BEFORE TONO-BUNGAY WAS INVENTED

CHAPTER THE FIRST

CHAPTER THE SECOND

CHAPTER THE THIRD

BOOK THE SECOND. THE RISE OF TONO-BUNGAY

CHAPTER THE FIRST

CHAPTER THE SECOND

CHAPTER THE THIRD

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

BOOK THE THIRD. THE GREAT DAYS OF TONO-BUNGAY

CHAPTER THE FIRST

CHAPTER THE SECOND

CHAPTER THE THIRD

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

BOOK THE FOURTH. THE AFTERMATH OF TONO-BUNGAY

CHAPTER THE FIRST

CHAPTER THE SECOND

CHAPTER THE THIRD

Отрывок из книги

Most people in this world seem to live “in character”; they have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one with another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak of them as being of this sort of people or that. They are, as theatrical people say, no more (and no less) than “character actors.” They have a class, they have a place, they know what is becoming in them and what is due to them, and their proper size of tombstone tells at last how properly they have played the part. But there is also another kind of life that is not so much living as a miscellaneous tasting of life. One gets hit by some unusual transverse force, one is jerked out of one’s stratum and lives crosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a succession of samples. That has been my lot, and that is what has set me at last writing something in the nature of a novel. I have got an unusual series of impressions that I want very urgently to tell. I have seen life at very different levels, and at all these levels I have seen it with a sort of intimacy and in good faith. I have been a native in many social countries. I have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker, my cousin, who has since died in the Chatham infirmary; I have eaten illegal snacks – the unjustifiable gifts of footmen – in pantries, and been despised for my want of style (and subsequently married and divorced) by the daughter of a gasworks clerk; and – to go to my other extreme – I was once – oh, glittering days! – an item in the house-party of a countess. She was, I admit, a countess with a financial aspect, but still, you know, a countess. I’ve seen these people at various angles. At the dinner-table I’ve met not simply the titled but the great. On one occasion – it is my brightest memory – I upset my champagne over the trousers of the greatest statesman in the empire – Heaven forbid I should be so invidious as to name him! – in the warmth of our mutual admiration.

And once (though it is the most incidental thing in my life) I murdered a man…

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The elders talked in their formal dull way – telling Nannie the trite old things about the park and the village that they told every one, and Beatrice watched me across the table with a pitiless little curiosity that made me uncomfortable.

“Nannie,” she said, pointing, and Nannie left a question of my mother’s disregarded to attend to her; “is he a servant boy?”

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