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

thousands. Drugs for example. Shoved all you had into it⁠—staked your liver on it, so to speak. Take a drug⁠—take ipecac, for example. Take a lot of ipecac. Take all there is! See? There you are! There aren’t unlimited supplies of ipecacuanha⁠—can’t be!⁠—and it’s a thing people must have. Then quinine again! You watch your chance, wait for a tropical war breaking out, let’s say, and collar all the quinine. Where are they? Must have quinine, you know. Eh? Zzzz.

“Lord! there’s no end of things⁠—no end of little things. Dill-water⁠—all the suffering babes yowling for it. Eucalyptus again⁠—cascara⁠—witch hazel⁠—menthol⁠—all the toothache things. Then there’s antiseptics, and curare, cocaine.⁠ ⁠…”

“Rather a nuisance to the doctors,” I reflected.

“They got to look out for themselves. By Jove, yes. They’ll do you if they can, and you do them. Like brigands. That makes it romantic. That’s the Romance of Commerce, George. You’re in the mountains there! Think of having all the quinine in the world, and some millionaire’s pampered wife gone ill with malaria, eh? That’s a squeeze, George, eh? Eh? Millionaire on his motor car outside, offering you any price you liked. That ’ud wake up Wimblehurst.⁠ ⁠… Lord! You haven’t an idea down here. Not an idea. Zzzz.”

He passed into a rapt dream, from which escaped such fragments as: “Fifty percent advance sir; security⁠—tomorrow. Zzzz.”

The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a sort of irresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever be permitted to do in reality. It was the sort of nonsense one would talk to make Ewart laugh and set him going on to still odder possibilities. I thought it was part of my uncle’s way of talking. But I’ve learnt differently since. The whole trend of modern moneymaking is to foresee something that will presently be needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself wealthy. You buy up land upon which people will presently want to build houses, you secure rights that will bar vitally important developments, and so on, and so on. Of course the naive intelligence of a boy does not grasp the subtler developments of human inadequacy. He begins life with a disposition to believe in the wisdom of grown-up people, he does not realise how casual and disingenuous has been the development of law and custom, and he thinks that somewhere in the state there is a power as irresistible as a head master’s to check mischievous and foolish enterprises of every sort. I will confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I had a clear impression that anyone who contrived to do that would pretty certainly go to jail. Now I know that anyone who could really bring it off would be much more likely to go to the House of Lords!

My uncle ranged over the gilt labels of his bottles and drawers for a while, dreaming of corners in this and that. But at last he reverted to Wimblehurst again.

“You got to be in London when these things are in hand. Down here⁠—!

“Jee-rusalem!” he cried. “Why did I plant myself here? Everything’s done. The game’s over. Here’s Lord Eastry, and he’s got everything, except what his lawyers get, and before you get any more change this way you’ll have to dynamite him⁠—and them. He doesn’t want anything more to happen. Why should he? Any change ’ud be a loss to him. He wants everything to burble along and burble along and go on as it’s going for the next ten thousand years, Eastry after Eastry, one parson down another come, one grocer dead, get another! Anyone with any ideas better go away. They have gone away! Look at all these blessed people in this place! Look at ’em! All fast asleep, doing their business out of habit⁠—in a sort of dream, Stuffed men would do just as well⁠—just. They’ve all shook down into their places. They don’t want anything to happen either. They’re all broken in. There you are! Only what are they all alive for?⁠ ⁠…

“Why can’t they get a clockwork chemist?”

He concluded as he often concluded these talks. “I must invent something⁠—that’s about what I must do. Zzzz. Some convenience. Something people want.⁠ ⁠… Strike out.⁠ ⁠… You can’t think, George, of anything everybody wants and hasn’t got? I mean something you could turn out retail under a shilling, say? Well, you think, whenever you haven’t got anything better to do. See?”

II

So I remember my uncle in that first phase, young, but already a little fat, restless, fretful, garrulous, putting in my fermenting head all sorts of discrepant ideas. Certainly he was educational.⁠ ⁠…

For me the years at Wimblehurst were years of pretty active growth. Most of my leisure and much of my time in the shop I spent in study. I speedily mastered the modicum of Latin necessary for my qualifying examinations, and⁠—a little assisted by the Government Science and Art Department classes that were held in the Grammar School⁠—went on with my mathematics. There were classes in physics, in chemistry, in mathematics and machine drawing, and I took up these subjects with considerable avidity. Exercise I got chiefly in the form of walks. There was some cricket in the summer and football in the winter sustained by young men’s clubs that levied a parasitic blackmail of the big people and the sitting member, but I was never very keen at these games. I didn’t find any very close companions among the youths of Wimblehurst. They struck me, after my cockney schoolmates, as loutish and slow, servile and furtive, spiteful and mean. We used to swagger, but these countrymen dragged their feet and hated an equal who didn’t; we talked loud, but you only got the real thoughts of Wimblehurst in a knowing undertone behind its hand. And even then they weren’t much in the way of thoughts.

No, I didn’t like those young countrymen, and I’m no believer in the English countryside under the Bladesover system as a breeding ground