Tono-Bungay - H. G. Wells (my reading book txt) 📗

am I just grown a man at the sight of you. I have wanted something to fight for. Let me fight for you!⁠ ⁠…

“I’m rich without intending it. Let me mean it, give me an honourable excuse for it, and I’ll put all this rotten old Warren of England at your feet!”

I said such things as that. I write them down here in all their resounding base pride. I said these empty and foolish things, and they are part of me. Why should I still cling to pride and be ashamed? I shouted her down.

I passed from such megalomania to petty accusations.

“You think Carnaby is a better man than I?” I said.

“No!” she cried, stung to speech. “No!”

“You think we’re unsubstantial. You’ve listened to all these rumours Boom has started because we talked of a newspaper of our own. When you are with me you know I’m a man; when you get away from me you think I’m a cheat and a cad.⁠ ⁠… There’s not a word of truth in the things they say about us. I’ve been slack. I’ve left things. But we have only to exert ourselves. You do not know how wide and far we have spread our nets. Even now we have a coup⁠—an expedition⁠—in hand. It will put us on a footing.”⁠ ⁠…

Her eyes asked mutely and asked in vain that I would cease to boast of the very qualities she admired in me.

In the night I could not sleep for thinking of that talk and the vulgar things I had said in it. I could not understand the drift my mind had taken. I was acutely disgusted. And my unwonted doubts about myself spread from a merely personal discontent to our financial position. It was all very well to talk as I had done of wealth and power and peerages, but what did I know nowadays of my uncle’s position? Suppose in the midst of such boasting and confidence there came some turn I did not suspect, some rottenness he had concealed from me? I resolved I had been playing with aeronautics long enough; that next morning I would go to him and have things clear between us.

I caught an early train and went up to the Hardingham.

I went up to the Hardingham through a dense London fog to see how things really stood. Before I had talked to my uncle for ten minutes I felt like a man who has just awakened in a bleak, inhospitable room out of a grandiose dream.

IV How I Stole the Heaps of Quap from Mordet Island I

“We got to make a fight for it,” said my uncle. “We got to face the music!”

I remember that even at the sight of him I had a sense of impending calamity. He sat under the electric light with the shadow of his hair making bars down his face. He looked shrunken, and as though his skin had suddenly got loose and yellow. The decorations of the room seemed to have lost freshness, and outside the blinds were up⁠—there was not so much fog as a dun darkness. One saw the dingy outlines of the chimneys opposite quite distinctly, and then a sky of such brown as only London can display.

“I saw a placard,” I said: “ ‘More Ponderevity.’ ”

“That’s Boom,” he said. “Boom and his damned newspapers. He’s trying to fight me down. Ever since I offered to buy the Daily Decorator he’s been at me. And he thinks consolidating Do Ut cut down the ads. He wants everything, damn him! He’s got no sense of dealing. I’d like to bash his face!”

“Well,” I said, “what’s to be done?”

“Keep going,” said my uncle.

“I’ll smash Boom yet,” he said, with sudden savagery.

“Nothing else?” I asked.

“We got to keep going. There’s a scare on. Did you notice the rooms? Half the people out there this morning are reporters. And if I talk they touch it up!⁠ ⁠… They didn’t used to touch things up! Now they put in character touches⁠—insulting you. Don’t know what journalism’s coming to. It’s all Boom’s doing.”

He cursed Lord Boom with considerable imaginative vigour.

“Well,” said I, “what can he do?”

“Shove us up against time, George; make money tight for us. We been handling a lot of money⁠—and he tightens us up.”

“We’re sound?”

“Oh, we’re sound, George. Trust me for that! But all the same⁠—There’s such a lot of imagination in these things.⁠ ⁠… We’re sound enough. That’s not it.”

He blew. “Damn Boom!” he said, and his eyes over his glasses met mine defiantly.

“We can’t, I suppose, run close hauled for a bit⁠—stop expenditure?”

“Where?”

“Well⁠—Crest Hill.”

“What!” he shouted. “Me stop Crest Hill for Boom!” He waved a fist as if to hit his inkpot, and controlled himself with difficulty. He spoke at last in a reasonable voice. “If I did,” he said, “he’d kick up a fuss. It’s no good, even if I wanted to. Everybody’s watching the place. If I was to stop building we’d be down in a week.”

He had an idea. “I wish I could do something to start a strike or something. No such luck. Treat those workmen a sight too well. No, sink or swim, Crest Hill goes on until we’re under water.”

I began to ask questions and irritated him instantly.

“Oh, dash these explanations, George!” he cried; “You only make things look rottener than they are. It’s your way. It isn’t a case of figures. We’re all right⁠—there’s only one thing we got to do.”

“Yes?”

“Show value, George. That’s where this quap comes in; that’s why I fell in so readily with what you brought to me week before last. Here we are, we got our option on the perfect filament, and all we want’s canadium. Nobody knows there’s more canadium in the world than will go on the edge of a sixpence except me and you. Nobody has an idee the perfect filament’s more than just a bit of theorising. Fifty tons of quap and we’d turn that bit of theorising into something. We’d