Tono-Bungay

OTEL, AND HOW WE

increasing excitements that followed that first flotation came dyspepsia and a certain flabbiness and falling away. His abdomen-if the reader will pardon my taking his features in the order of their value-had at first a nice full roundness, but afterwards it lost tone without, however, losing size. He always went

that is sometimes cocked jauntily up from the higher corner, that sometimes droops from the lower;-it was as eloquent as a dog's tail, and he removed it only for the more emphatic modes of speech. He assumed a broad black ribbon for his glasses, and wore them more and

ough that seemed to shorten him. He displayed a number of valuable rings, and I remember one upon his left little finger with a large red stone bearing Gnostic symbols. "Clever chaps, those Gnostics, George," he told me. "Means a lot. Lucky!" He never had any but a black mohair watch-chair. In the country he affected grey and a large grey cloth top-hat, except when

world, for at the crest of the boom he allowed quite a number of photogra

en at Wimblehurst. He would never avail himself of the services of a valet; at the very climax of his greatness his trousers were folded by a housemaid and his shoulders brushed as he left his house or hotel. He became wary about breakfast as life advanced, and at one time talked much of Dr. Haig and uric acid. But for other meals he remained reasonably omnivorous. He was something of

it is, has been preceded and will be followed by a rush. If I were painting him, I should certainly give him for a background that distressed, uneasy sky that was popu

ole world of investors marveled. I have already I think, mentioned how, long before we offered Tono Bungay to the public, we took over the English agency of certain American specialties. To this was presently added our

e initial sobriety of the occasion. This was the grandson of the original Moggs, and a very typical instance of an educated, cultivated, degenerate plutocrat. His people had taken him ab

te himself to the History of the Thebaid, when this cousin died suddenly and precipitated responsibilities upon him. In the frankness of conviviality, Moggs bewailed the uncongenia

carelessness, and next morning neither seems to have thought to rescue his shirt from the wash until it was

ond sort of chap, George, with glas

led. "Aqua

early certain. And he had a name-And the thing was the straighte

seeking a good, well-stocked looking grocer. We called first on a chem

soap you got. Yes, I want to take them now. Wait a mom

that question the young m

h-the order? Certainly. I confirm it. Send it all-send it all to the Bishop of London; he'll have some good use for

sing-jacket in a luxurious bed, drinking China tea, and got

et before; he seemed quite clean and well-informed and he assured me to neve

dvertising you wide an

uth-coast cliffs, theatre programmes, books by me and

along," sai

id Moggs, lighting a cigarette, "yo

some of them and our admirable block of a Georgian shop window. My uncle brought early nineteenth-century memoirs, soaked himself in the style, and devised stories about old Moggs the First and the Duke of Wellington, George the Third and the soap dealer ("almost certainly old Moggs"). Very soon we had added to the original Moggs' Primrose several varieties of scented and superfatted, a "special nurseries used in the household of the

? You know-black-lead-for grates! OR DOE

s bound to be all lies and upsy-down anyhow. Not my affair. Nobody's affair now. Chaps who did it didn't clearly know.... What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for Housemaid's Knee? What did the

n and enterprise that lurked among the little articles, the dustpans and mincers, the mousetraps and carpet-sweepers that fringe the shops of the oilman and domestic ironmonger. He was recalled to one of the dreams of his youth, to his conc

ike the zeal of a genuine social re

ry into horn. See? Then after conveniences-beauty. Beauty, George! All these few things ought to be made fit to look at; it's your aunt's idea, that. Beautiful jam-pots! Get one of those new art chaps to design all the things they make ugly now. Patent carpet-sweepers by these greenwood cha

as trees in late winter, flushed with the effort to burst into leaf and flower.... And really we did do much towards that very bright

er conception throughout the chandlery and minor ironmongery, how we became agents for this little commodity, partners in that, got a tentacle round the neck of a specialised manufacturer or so, secured a pull upon this or tha

y figures so much wrong as STRAINED. In the matter of Moggs and Do Ut, as in the first Tono-Bungay promotion and in its reconstruction, we left the court by city standards without a stain on our characters. The great amalgamation of Household Services was my uncle's first really big-scale enterprise and his first display of bolder methods: for this we bought back Do Ut, Moggs (going strong with a seven per cent. dividend) and acquired Skinnerton's polishes, the Riffleshaw properties and the Runcorn's mincer and coffee-mill business. To that Amalgamation I was really not a party; I left it to my uncle because I was then beginning to

ter the crash how recklessly my uncle had kept his promise of paying a dividend of over eight p

teful things to the scientific type of mind. It wasn't fear I felt so much as an uneasy inaccuracy. I didn't realise dangers, I simply disliked the sloppy, relaxing quality of this new sort of work. I was at last constantly making excuses not to come up to him in London. The latter part of his business career recedes therefore beyo

flannel and shaving-strop-and its allegiance was secured by the Egyptian solidity of his apparent results. Tono-Bungay, after its reconstruction, paid thirteen, Moggs seven, Domestic Utilities had been a safe

remained little more for my uncle to do therefore, in his climb to the high unstable crest of Financial Greatness but, as he said, to "grasp the cosmic oyster, George, while it gaped," which, being translated, meant for him to buy respectable businesses confidently and courageously at the vendor's estimate, add thirty or

I

suite of rooms he occupied in the Hardingham Hotel, seated at a great old oak writing-table, smoking, drinking, and incoherently busy; that was his typical fin

oom and very business-like in quality; it had one or two uneasy sofas, a number of chairs, a green baize table, and a collection of the very best Moggs and Tone posters: and the plush carpets normal to the Hardingham had been replaced by a grey-green cork linoleum; Here I would always find a remarkable miscellany of people presided over by a peculiarly faithful and ferocious looking commissioner, Ropper, who guarded th

omen hiding behind magazines, nonconformist divines, clergy in gaiters, real business men, these latter for the most part gentlemen in admirable morning dress who stood up and scrutinised my uncle's taste in water colours manfully and sometimes by the hour together.

young men would stand against this and sometimes even mutter. One day I heard one repeating in all urgent whisper as I pass

r the private apartments, my uncle's correspondence underwent an exhaustive process of pruning and digestion before it reached him. Then the two little rooms in which my uncle talked; my magic uncle who had got the invest

Here's a thing. Tell him-Mister-over again.

jects that passed in. It was the little brown and gold room he sat in usually. He had had it redecorated by Bordingly and half a dozen Sussex pictures by Webster hung about it.

lent motion, constantly stimulated mentally and physically and rarely tired. About him was an atmosphere of immense deference much of his waking life was triumphal and all his dre

to me as if it came for the first time the supreme unreason of it. At the climax of his Boom, my uncle at the most sparing estimate must have possessed in substance and credit about two mi

out, I repeat, were nothing to the things that came in. I think of the long procession of people who sat down before us and propounded this and that. Now it was a device for selling bread under a fancy name and so escaping the laws as to weight-this was afterwards floated as the Decorticated Health-Bread Company and bumped against the law-now it was a new scheme for still more strident advertisement, now it was a story of unsuspected deposits of minerals, now a cheap and nasty substitute

st, some flustered beyond measure at their opportunity. Some of them begged and prayed to be taken

t of existence.... He had become a sort of vortex to which wealth flowed of its own accord.

d. This was in the culminating time when I had least to do with affairs. I don't say that with any desire to exculpate myself; I admit I was a director of all three, and I will confess I was willfully incurious in that capacity. Each of these companie

us fiction, a gratuity in return for the one reality of human life-illusion. We gave them a feeling of hope and profit; we sent a tidal wave of water and confidence into their stranded affa

modern mercantile investing civilisation is indeed such stuff as dreams are made of. A mass of people swelters and toils, great railway systems grow, cities arise to the skies and spread wide and far, mines are opened, factories hum, foundries roar, ships plough the seas, countries are settled; about this busy striving world the rich owners go, controlling all, enjoying all, confident and creating the confidence that draws us all together into a reluctant, nearly unconscio

ream of notes and money trickling into our pockets; hundreds of thousands of men and women respected us, saluted us and gave us toil and honour; I asked, and my worksheets rose, my aeroplanes swooped out of nothingness to scare the downland pe-wits; my uncle waved his hand and Lady Grove and all its associations of chivalry and

of our eddy of greed and enterprise. I see again my uncle's face, white and intent, and hear him discourse, hear him make consciously Napoleonic decisions, "grip" his nettl

r; and leave me, as they say, with blood upon my hands. It is remarkable how little it troubles my conscience and how much it stirs my imagination, that particular memory of the life I took. The story of Mord

e and one faded blue eye-the other was a closed and sunken lid-and how he told us with a stiff affectation of ease his incredible story of this great

uncle on the fourth r

d Gordon-Nasmyth; "but our relations weren'

Nobody knows about it. I got down to the damned place in a canoe

on-Nasmyth was incl

behind him as he spoke, "do you two men-yes or no-want to put up six thousand

e, cocking his cigar offensively, wiping his glasses a

mper showed in a slight s

re different, and I know your books. We're very glad you've come to us.

Nasmyth, fixing his

ncle softly, with his

's quap! It's a festering mass of earths and heavy metals, polonium, radium, ythorium, thorium, carium, and new things, too. There's a stuff called Xk-provisionally. There they are, mucked up together in a sort of rotting sand. What it is, how it got made, I

right," said I. "

u can have anythin

e is

elt of Atlantic surf, of the dense tangled vegetation that creeps into the shimmering water with root and sucker. He gave a sense of heat and a perpetual reek of vegetable decay, and told how at last comes a break among these things, an arena fringed with bone-white dead trees, a sight of the hard-blue sea line beyond the dazzling surf and a wide desolatio

backs of hogs, one small, one great, sticking out u

, if it's worth a penny; two great heaps of it, rotten stuff and

d it ge

't trade. In a country where the company waits for good kind men to find

do any so

pid. You've got to go a

ight ca

rse. But they're no

ey wouldn't catch me, because I'd sink first. Give m

et caught," s

ousand pounds on the strength of his talk. It was very good talk, but we didn't do t

ion pocketwards, that gave us an invincible persuasion that he had a sample up

o presently, to gain time for these hesitations of his, he began to talk of other things. He talked very well. He talked of the Dutch East Indies and of the Congo, of Portuguese East Africa and Paraguay, of Malays and rich Chinese merchants, Dyaks and negroes and the spread of the Mahometan world in Africa to-day. And all this time he was tr

e raw material of the goods we sold had seemed to us as remote as fairyland or the forest of Arden. But Gordon-Nasmyth made it so r

rains, in a glass bottle wrapped about with lead and flannel-red flannel it was, I remember

n you," said Gordon-Nas

, but at the time Gordon-Nasmyth wouldn't hear for a moment of our publication of any facts at all; indeed, he flew into a violent passion and abused me mercilessly even for showing

xtracted for the gas-mantles then in vogue. There were, however, doubts. Indeed, there were numerous doubts. What were the limits of the gas-mantle trade? How much thorium, not to speak of cerium, could they take at a maximum. Suppose that quantity was high enough to justify our shipload, came dou

t, though I think we tried his patience. Then suddenly he vanis

ate (and we guessed passionate) affairs, the business of the "quap" expedition had to be begun again at the beginning. My uncle was disposed to be altogether s

pt it going during Gordon-Nasmyth's intermittent appearances in England. Every now and then he and I would meet and reinforce its effect. We would

erious sample brought to him by me, and to me it was known as one of the elements in quap. I told my uncle, and we jumped on to the process at once. We found that Gordon-Nasmyth, still unaware of the altered value of the stuff, and still thinking of the experimental prices of radium and the rarity value of cerium, had got hold of a cousin named Pollack, made some extraordinary transaction about his life insurance policy, and was buying a brig. We put in, put do

rprises before our great crisis,

t was real, until at last I saw with my eyes the heaps my imagination had seen for so long, and felt between my fingers a

eel it to

in the crisis of our fortunes. So much came to us that it seemed to me at times as though the whole world of human affairs was ready to prostit

nd the Lancet, and run them on what he called modern lines, and when they resisted him he talked very vigorously for a time of organising a rival enterprise. That was a very magnificent idea indeed in its way; it would have given a tremendous advantage in the handling of innumerable specialties and indeed I scarcely know how far it would not have put the medical profession

el"-under one or other of which three aspects the editor was included. Even at that price it didn't pay. If you are a literary person you will remember the bright new cover he gave that repr

ACRED

of Art, Philos

s Let

-------

ASTY TASTE I

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NE TWENTY-

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UT A LIVE AM

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TEN

lished Letter fr

nte's Materna

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us of Sh

endelian Hypothesis;

gin;" Claverhouse;

The Dignit

lore

the Paradox

aphy, Verse,

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THE WORLD FOR A

arch and my ineradicable boyish imagination that at bottom our State should be wise, sane and dignified, that makes me think a country which leaves its medical and literary criticism, or inde

mic situation in the world at the present time than this cover of the Sacred Grove-the quiet conservatism of the one element embed

impression of a drizzling November day, and how we looked o

ineffectual men had been raked together to trail their spiritless misery through the West Eire with a

place, the men who had "snapped" too eagerly, the men who had never said "snap," the men who had never had a chance of saying "snap." A shambling, shameful stream they made, oozing along the street, the gutter w

or the grace of God, go Ge

el, and he made that vision the test of a spirit