Chapter 12

I remember certain phases of my indecisions very well.

I remember going home from our talk. I went down Farringdon Street to the Embankment because I thought to go home by Holborn and Oxford Street would be too crowded for thinking.... That piece of Embankment from Blackfriars to Westminster still reminds me of that momentous hesitation.

You know, from first to last, I saw the business with my eyes open, I saw its ethical and moral values quite clearly. Never for a moment do I remember myself faltering from my persuasion that the sale of Tono-Bungay was a thoroughly dishonest proceeding. The stuff was, I perceived, a mischievous trash, slightly stimulating, aromatic and attractive, likely to become a bad habit and train people in the habitual use of stronger tonics and insidiously dangerous to people with defective kidneys. It would cost about sevenpence the large bottle to make, including bottling, and we were to sell it at half a crown plus the cost of the patent medicine stamp. A thing that I will confess deterred me from the outset far more than the sense of dishonesty in this affair, was the supreme silliness of the whole concern. I still clung to the idea that the world of men was or should be a sane and just organisation, and the idea that I should set myself gravely, just at the fine springtime of my life, to developing a monstrous bottling and packing warehouse, bottling rubbish for the consumption of foolish, credulous and depressed people, had in it a touch of insanity. My early beliefs still clung to me. I felt assured that somewhere there must be a hitch in the fine prospect of ease and wealth under such conditions; that somewhere, a little overgrown, perhaps, but still traceable, lay a neglected, wasted path of use and honour for me.

My inclination to refuse the whole thing increased rather than diminished at first as I went along the Embankment. In my uncle’s presence there had been a sort of glamour that had prevented an outright refusal. It was a revival of affection for him I felt in his presence, I think, in part, and in part an instinctive feeling that I must consider him as my host. But much more was it a curious persuasion he had the knack of inspiring—a persuasion not so much of his integrity and capacity as of the reciprocal and yielding foolishness of the world. One felt that he was silly and wild, but in some way silly and wild after the fashion of the universe. After all, one must live somehow. I astonished him and myself by temporising.

“No,” said I, “I’ll think it over!”

And as I went along the embankment the first effect was all against my uncle. He shrank—for a little while he continued to shrink—in perspective until he was only a very small shabby little man in a dirty back street, sending off a few hundred bottles of rubbish to foolish buyers. The great buildings on the right of us, the Inns and the School Board place—as it was then—Somerset House, the big hotels, the great bridges, Westminster’s outlines ahead, had an effect of grey largeness that reduced him to the proportions of a busy black beetle in a crack in the floor.

And then my eye caught the advertisements on the south side of “Sorber’s Food,” of “Cracknell’s Ferric Wine,” very bright and prosperous signs, illuminated at night, and I realised how astonishingly they looked at home there, how evidently part they were in the whole thing.

I saw a man come charging out of Palace Yard—the policeman touched his helmet to him—with a hat and a bearing astonishingly like my uncle’s. After all,—didn’t Cracknell himself sit in the House?

Tono-Bungay shouted at me from a hoarding near Adelphi Terrace; I saw it afar off near Carfax Street; it cried out again upon me in Kensington High Street, and burst into a perfect clamour; six or seven times I saw it as I drew near my diggings. It certainly had an air of being something more than a dream.

Yes, I thought it over—thoroughly enough.... Trade rules the world. Wealth rather than trade! The thing was true, and true too was my uncle’s proposition that the quickest way to get wealth is to sell the cheapest thing possible in the dearest bottle. He was frightfully right after all. _Pecunia non olet_,—a Roman emperor said that. Perhaps my great heroes in Plutarch were no more than such men, fine now only because they are distant; perhaps after all this Socialism to which I had been drawn was only a foolish dream, only the more foolish because all its promises were conditionally true. Morris and these others played with it wittingly; it gave a zest, a touch of substance, to their aesthetic pleasures. Never would there be good faith enough to bring such things about. They knew it; every one, except a few young fools, knew it. As I crossed the corner of St. James’s Park wrapped in thought, I dodged back just in time to escape a prancing pair of greys. A stout, common-looking woman, very magnificently dressed, regarded me from the carriage with a scornful eye. “No doubt,” thought I, “a pill-vendor’s wife....”

Running through all my thoughts, surging out like a refrain, was my uncle’s master-stroke, his admirable touch of praise: “Make it all slick—and then make it go Woosh. I know you can! Oh! I _know_ you can!”

IV

Ewart as a moral influence was unsatisfactory. I had made up my mind to put the whole thing before him, partly to see how he took it, and partly to hear how it sounded when it was said. I asked him to come and eat with me in an Italian place near Panton Street where one could get a curious, interesting, glutting sort of dinner for eighteen-pence. He came with a disconcerting black-eye that he wouldn’t explain. “Not so much a black-eye,” he said, “as the aftermath of a purple patch.... What’s your difficulty?”

“I’ll tell you with the salad,” I said.

But as a matter of fact I didn’t tell him. I threw out that I was doubtful whether I ought to go into trade, or stick to teaching in view of my deepening socialist proclivities; and he, warming with the unaccustomed generosity of a sixteen-penny Chianti, ran on from that without any further inquiry as to my trouble.

His utterances roved wide and loose.

“The reality of life, my dear Ponderevo,” I remember him saying very impressively and punctuating with the nut-crackers as he spoke, “is Chromatic Conflict ... and Form. Get hold of that and let all these other questions go. The Socialist will tell you one sort of colour and shape is right, the Individualist another. What does it all amount to? What _does_ it all amount to? _Nothing!_ I have no advice to give anyone,—except to avoid regrets. Be yourself, seek after such beautiful things as your own sense determines to be beautiful. And don’t mind the headache in the morning.... For what, after all, is a morning, Ponderevo? It isn’t like the upper part of a day!”

He paused impressively.

“What Rot!” I cried, after a confused attempt to apprehend him.

“Isn’t it! And it’s my bedrock wisdom in the matter! Take it or leave it, my dear George; take it or leave it.”... He put down the nut-crackers out of my reach and lugged a greasy-looking note-book from his pocket. “I’m going to steal this mustard pot,” he said.

I made noises of remonstrance.

“Only as a matter of design. I’ve got to do an old beast’s tomb.

“Wholesale grocer. I’ll put it on his corners,—four mustard pots. I dare say he’d be glad of a mustard plaster now to cool him, poor devil, where he is. But anyhow,—here goes!”

V

It came to me in the small hours that the real moral touchstone for this great doubting of mind was Marion. I lay composing statements of my problem and imagined myself delivering them to her—and she, goddess-like and beautiful; giving her fine, simply-worded judgment.

“You see, it’s just to give one’s self over to the Capitalistic System,” I imagined myself saying in good Socialist jargon; “it’s surrendering all one’s beliefs. We _may_ succeed, we _may_ grow rich, but where would the satisfaction be?”

Then she would say, “No! That wouldn’t be right.”

“But the alternative is to wait!”

Then suddenly she would become a goddess. She would turn upon me frankly and nobly, with shining eyes, with arms held out. “No,” she would say, “we love one another. Nothing ignoble shall ever touch us. We love one another. Why wait to tell each other that, dear? What does it matter that we are poor and may keep poor?”

But indeed the conversation didn’t go at all in that direction. At the sight of her my nocturnal eloquence became preposterous and all the moral values altered altogether. I had waited for her outside the door of the Parsian-robe establishment in Kensington High Street and walked home with her thence. I remember how she emerged into the warm evening light and that she wore a brown straw hat that made her, for once not only beautiful but pretty.

“I like that hat,” I said by way of opening; and she smiled her rare delightful smile at me.

“I love you,” I said in an undertone, as we jostled closer on the pavement.

She shook her head forbiddingly, but she still smiled. Then—“Be sensible!”

The High Street pavement is too narrow and crowded for conversation and we were some way westward before we spoke again.

“Look here,” I said; “I want you, Marion. Don’t you understand? I want you.”

“Now!” she cried warningly.

I do not know if the reader will understand how a passionate lover, an immense admiration and desire, can be shot with a gleam of positive hatred. Such a gleam there was in me at the serene self-complacency of that “_Now!_” It vanished almost before I felt it. I found no warning in it of the antagonisms latent between us.

“Marion,” I said, “this isn’t a trifling matter to me. I love you; I would die to get you.... Don’t you care?”

“But what is the good?”

“You don’t care,” I cried. “You don’t care a rap!”

“You know I care,” she answered. “If I didn’t—If I didn’t like you very much, should I let you come and meet me—go about with you?”

“Well then,” I said, “promise to marry me!”

“If I do, what difference will it make?”

We were separated by two men carrying a ladder who drove between us unawares.

“Marion,” I asked when we got together again, “I tell you I want you to marry me.”

“We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“We can’t marry—in the street.”

“We could take our chance!”

“I wish you wouldn’t go on talking like this. What is the good?”

She suddenly gave way to gloom. “It’s no good marrying” she said. “One’s only miserable. I’ve seen other girls. When one’s alone one has a little pocket-money anyhow, one can go about a little. But think of being married and no money, and perhaps children—you can’t be sure....”

She poured out this concentrated philosophy of her class and type in jerky uncompleted sentences, with knitted brows, with discontented eyes towards the westward glow—forgetful, it seemed, for a moment even of me.

“Look here, Marion,” I said abruptly, “what would you marry on?”

“What _is_ the good?” she began.

“Would you marry on three hundred a year?”

She looked at me for a moment. “That’s six pounds a week,” she said. “One could manage on that, easily. Smithie’s brother—No, he only gets two hundred and fifty. He married a typewriting girl.”

“Will you marry me if I get three hundred a year?”

She looked at me again, with a curious gleam of hope.

“_If!_” she said.

I held out my hand and looked her in the eyes. “It’s a bargain,” I said.

She hesitated and touched my hand for an instant. “It’s silly,” she remarked as she did so. “It means really we’re—” She paused.

“Yes?” said I.

“Engaged. You’ll have to wait years. What good can it do you?”

“Not so many years.” I answered.

For a moment she brooded.

Then she glanced at me with a smile, half-sweet, half-wistful, that has stuck in my memory for ever.

“I like you!” she said. “I shall like to be engaged to you.”

And, faint on the threshold of hearing, I caught her ventured “dear!” It’s odd that in writing this down my memory passed over all that intervened and I feel it all again, and once again I’m Marion’s boyish lover taking great joy in such rare and little things.

VI

At last I went to the address my uncle had given me in Gower Street, and found my aunt Susan waiting tea for him.

Directly I came into the room I appreciated the change in outlook that the achievement of Tono-Bungay had made almost as vividly as when I saw my uncle’s new hat. The furniture of the room struck upon my eye as almost stately. The chairs and sofa were covered with chintz which gave it a dim, remote flavour of Bladesover; the mantel, the cornice, the gas pendant were larger and finer than the sort of thing I had grown accustomed to in London. And I was shown in by a real housemaid with real tails to her cap, and great quantities of reddish hair. There was my aunt too looking bright and pretty, in a blue-patterned tea-wrap with bows that seemed to me the quintessence of fashion. She was sitting in a chair by the open window with quite a pile of yellow-labelled books on the occasional table beside her. Before the large, paper-decorated fireplace stood a three-tiered cake-stand displaying assorted cakes, and a tray with all the tea equipage except the teapot, was on the large centre-table. The carpet was thick, and a spice of adventure was given it by a number of dyed sheep-skin mats.

“Hel-_lo!_” said my aunt as I appeared. “It’s George!”

“Shall I serve the tea now, Mem?” said the real housemaid, surveying our greeting coldly.

“Not till Mr. Ponderevo comes, Meggie,” said my aunt, and grimaced with extraordinary swiftness and virulence as the housemaid turned her back.

“Meggie she calls herself,” said my aunt as the door closed, and left me to infer a certain want of sympathy.

“You’re looking very jolly, aunt,” said I.

“What do you think of all this old Business he’s got?” asked my aunt.

“Seems a promising thing,” I said.

“I suppose there is a business somewhere?”

“Haven’t you seen it?”

“‘Fraid I’d say something AT it George, if I did. So he won’t let me. It came on quite suddenly. Brooding he was and writing letters and sizzling something awful—like a chestnut going to pop. Then he came home one day saying Tono-Bungay till I thought he was clean off his onion, and singing—what was it?”

“‘I’m afloat, I’m afloat,’” I guessed.

“The very thing. You’ve heard him. And saying our fortunes were made. Took me out to the Ho’burm Restaurant, George,—dinner, and we had champagne, stuff that blows up the back of your nose and makes you go _So_, and he said at last he’d got things worthy of me—and we moved here next day. It’s a swell house, George. Three pounds a week for the rooms. And he says the Business’ll stand it.”

She looked at me doubtfully.

“Either do that or smash,” I said profoundly.

We discussed the question for a moment mutely with our eyes. My aunt slapped the pile of books from Mudie’s.

“I’ve been having such a Go of reading, George. You never did!”

“What do you think of the business?” I asked.

“Well, they’ve let him have money,” she said, and thought and raised her eyebrows.

“It’s been a time,” she went on. “The flapping about! Me sitting doing nothing and him on the go like a rocket. He’s done wonders. But he wants you, George—he wants you. Sometimes he’s full of hope—talks of when we’re going to have a carriage and be in society—makes it seem so natural and topsy-turvy, I hardly know whether my old heels aren’t up here listening to him, and my old head on the floor.... Then he gets depressed. Says he wants restraint. Says he can make a splash but can’t keep on. Says if you don’t come in everything will smash—But you are coming in?”

She paused and looked at me.

“Well—”

“You don’t say you won’t come in!”

“But look here, aunt,” I said, “do you understand quite?... It’s a quack medicine. It’s trash.”

“There’s no law against selling quack medicine that I know of,” said my aunt. She thought for a minute and became unusually grave. “It’s our only chance, George,” she said. “If it doesn’t go...”

There came the slamming of a door, and a loud bellowing from the next apartment through the folding doors. “Here-er Shee _Rulk_ lies _Poo_ Tom Bo—oling.”

“Silly old Concertina! Hark at him, George!” She raised her voice. “Don’t sing that, you old Walrus, you! Sing ‘I’m afloat!’”

One leaf of the folding doors opened and my uncle appeared.

“Hullo, George! Come along at last? Gossome tea-cake, Susan?”

“Thought it over George?” he said abruptly.

“Yes,” said I.

“Coming in?”

I paused for a last moment and nodded yes.

“Ah!” he cried. “Why couldn’t you say that a week ago?”

“I’ve had false ideas about the world,” I said. “Oh! they don’t matter now! Yes, I’ll come, I’ll take my chance with you, I won’t hesitate again.”

And I didn’t. I stuck to that resolution for seven long years.

CHAPTER THE THIRD HOW WE MADE TONO-BUNGAY HUM

I

So I made my peace with my uncle, and we set out upon this bright enterprise of selling slightly injurious rubbish at one-and-three-halfpence and two-and-nine a bottle, including the Government stamp. We made Tono-Bungay hum! It brought us wealth, influence, respect, the confidence of endless people. All that my uncle promised me proved truth and understatement; Tono-Bungay carried me to freedoms and powers that no life of scientific research, no passionate service of humanity could ever have given me....

It was my uncle’s genius that did it. No doubt he needed me,—I was, I will admit, his indispensable right hand; but his was the brain to conceive. He wrote every advertisement; some of them even he sketched. You must remember that his were the days before the Time took to enterprise and the vociferous hawking of that antiquated _Encyclopædia_. That alluring, button-holing, let-me-just-tell-you-quite-soberly-something-you-ought-to-know style of newspaper advertisement, with every now and then a convulsive jump of some attractive phrase into capitals, was then almost a novelty. “Many people who are MODERATELY well think they are QUITE well,” was one of his early efforts. The jerks in capitals were, “DO NOT NEED DRUGS OR MEDICINE,” and “SIMPLY A PROPER REGIMEN TO GET YOU IN TONE.” One was warned against the chemist or druggist who pushed “much-advertised nostrums” on one’s attention. That trash did more harm than good. The thing needed was regimen—and Tono-Bungay!

Very early, too, was that bright little quarter column, at least it was usually a quarter column in the evening papers: “HILARITY—Tono-Bungay. Like Mountain Air in the Veins.” The penetrating trio of questions: “Are you bored with your Business? Are you bored with your Dinner. Are you bored with your Wife?”—that, too, was in our Gower Street days. Both these we had in our first campaign when we worked London south central, and west; and then, too, we had our first poster—the HEALTH, BEAUTY, AND STRENGTH one. That was his design; I happen still to have got by me the first sketch he made for it. I have reproduced it here with one or two others to enable the reader to understand the mental quality that initiated these familiar ornaments of London.

(The second one is about eighteen months later, the germ of the well-known “Fog” poster; the third was designed for an influenza epidemic, but never issued.)

These things were only incidental in my department. I had to polish them up for the artist and arrange the business of printing and distribution, and after my uncle had had a violent and needless quarrel with the advertising manager of the _Daily Regulator_ about the amount of display given to one of his happy thoughts, I also took up the negotiations of advertisements for the press.

We discussed and worked out distribution together first in the drawing-room floor in Gower Street with my aunt sometimes helping very shrewdly, and then, with a steadily improving type of cigar and older and older whisky, in his smuggery at their first house, the one in Beckenham. Often we worked far into the night sometimes until dawn.

We really worked infernally hard, and, I recall, we worked with a very decided enthusiasm, not simply on my uncle’s part but mine, It was a game, an absurd but absurdly interesting game, and the points were scored in cases of bottles. People think a happy notion is enough to make a man rich, that fortunes can be made without toil. It’s a dream, as every millionaire (except one or two lucky gamblers) can testify; I doubt if J.D. Rockefeller in the early days of Standard Oil, worked harder than we did. We worked far into the night—and we also worked all day. We made a rule to be always dropping in at the factory unannounced to keep things right—for at first we could afford no properly responsible underlings—and we traveled London, pretending to be our own representatives and making all sorts of special arrangements.

But none of this was my special work, and as soon as we could get other men in, I dropped the traveling, though my uncle found it particularly interesting and kept it up for years. “Does me good, George, to see the chaps behind their counters like I was once,” he explained. My special and distinctive duty was to give Tono-Bungay substance and an outward and visible bottle, to translate my uncle’s great imaginings into the creation of case after case of labelled bottles of nonsense, and the punctual discharge of them by railway, road and steamer towards their ultimate goal in the Great Stomach of the People. By all modern standards the business was, as my uncle would say, “absolutely _bonâ fide_.” We sold our stuff and got the money, and spent the money honestly in lies and clamour to sell more stuff. Section by section we spread it over the whole of the British Isles; first working the middle-class London suburbs, then the outer suburbs, then the home counties, then going (with new bills and a more pious style of “ad”) into Wales, a great field always for a new patent-medicine, and then into Lancashire.

My uncle had in his inner office a big map of England, and as we took up fresh sections of the local press and our consignments invaded new areas, flags for advertisements and pink underlines for orders showed our progress.

“The romance of modern commerce, George!” my uncle would say, rubbing his hands together and drawing in air through his teeth. “The romance of modern commerce, eh? Conquest. Province by province. Like sogers.”

We subjugated England and Wales; we rolled over the Cheviots with a special adaptation containing eleven per cent. of absolute alcohol; “Tono-Bungay: Thistle Brand.” We also had the Fog poster adapted to a kilted Briton in a misty Highland scene.

Under the shadow of our great leading line we were presently taking subsidiary specialties into action; “Tono-Bungay Hair Stimulant” was our first supplement. Then came “Concentrated Tono-Bungay” for the eyes. That didn’t go, but we had a considerable success with the Hair Stimulant. We broached the subject, I remember, in a little catechism beginning: “Why does the hair fall out? Because the follicles are fagged. What are the follicles?...” So it went on to the climax that the Hair Stimulant contained all “The essential principles of that most reviving tonic, Tono-Bungay, together with an emollient and nutritious oil derived from crude Neat’s Foot Oil by a process of refinement, separation and deodorization.... It will be manifest to any one of scientific attainments that in Neat’s Foot Oil derived from the hoofs and horns of beasts, we must necessarily have a natural skin and hair lubricant.”