The complete works, p.167
The Complete Works, page 167
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. Pecunnia 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.
"Hello!" 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 Encyclopedia. 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.
