"GL1" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol06)

had required some travelling-expenses).
Well, there it is. All things come to an end. Evening came on.
Bag-end was left empty and gloomy. People went away - haggling
and arguing, most of them. You could hear their voices coming up
the Hill in the dusk. Very few gave a thought to Bingo. They
decided he had gone mad, and run off, and that was one Baggins
the less, and that was that. They were annoyed about the legend-
ary money, of course, but meanwhile there was tea waiting for
them. There were some, of course, who regretted his sudden
disappearance - a few of his younger friends were really dis-
tressed. But not all of them had said good-bye to him. That is
easily explained, and soon will be.

Bingo stepped out of the cupboard. It was getting dim. His
watch said six. The door was open, as he had kept the key in his
pocket. He went out, locked the door (leaving the key), and looked
at the sky. Stars were coming out.
'It is going to be a fine night,' he said. 'What a lark! Well, I must
not keep them waiting. Now we're off. Goodbye!' He trotted
down the garden, jumped the fence, and took to the fields, and
passed like an invisible rustle in the grasses.

NOTES.

1. I find it difficult to believe this, yet if it is not so the coincidence is
strange. If Bingo Baggins did get his name from this source, I can
only suppose that the demonic character (composed of monomaniac
religious despotism and a lust for destruction through high explosive)
of the chief Bingo (not to mention that of his appalling wife), by
which my sister and I now remember them, developed somewhat
later.
2. The substitution was not made in the first draft, but in pencilled
corrections to the end of the second version (p. 27).
3. The change of 'fifty-fifth' to 'seventy-second' was made at the same
time as the 16 years during which Bingo lived at Bag End after his



parents' departure were changed to 33 (note 6). These changes were
made before the chapter was finished, since later in it, in Bingo's
farewell speech, the revised figures are present from the first writing.
When at the outset he wrote 'fifty-fifth birthday' and '16 years' my
father was presumably intending to get rid of the idea, appearing in
rewriting of the second version (see p. 27), that the number of
144 guests was chosen for an inner reason, since on Bingo's 55th
birthday his father Bilbo would have been 127 (having left the Shire
16 years before at the age of x x i, when Bingo was 39).
4. Primula was first written Amalda. In the first version (p. 16) Amalda
was the name of Mrs Sackville-Baggins. In the fourth version of 'A
long-expected party', when Bilbo had returned to his bachelor state,