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

isn’t wanted. Why don’t the really good things in life grow like horseradish?’ I thought. My mind went off in a peculiar way it does from that to the idea that mustard costs a penny a tin⁠—I bought some the other day for a ham I had. It came into my head that it would be ripping good business to use horseradish to adulterate mustard. I had a sort of idea that I could plunge into business on that, get rich and come back to my own proper monumental art again. And then I said, ‘But why adulterate? I don’t like the idea of adulteration.’ ”

“Shabby,” said my uncle, nodding his head. “Bound to get found out!”

“And totally unnecessary, too! Why not do up a mixture⁠—three-quarters pounded horseradish and a quarter mustard⁠—give it a fancy name⁠—and sell it at twice the mustard price. See? I very nearly started the business straight away, only something happened. My train came along.”

“Jolly good ideer,” said my uncle. He looked at me. “That really is an ideer, George,” he said.

“Take shavin’s, again! You know that poem of Longfellow’s, sir, that sounds exactly like the first declension. What is it?⁠—‘Man’s a maker, men say!’ ”

My uncle nodded and gurgled some quotation that died away.

“Jolly good poem, George,” he said in an aside to me.

“Well, it’s about a carpenter and a poetic Victorian child, you know, and some shavin’s. The child made no end out of the shavin’s. So might you. Powder ’em. They might be anything. Soak ’em in jipper⁠—Xylo-tobacco! Powder’em and get a little tar and turpentinous smell in⁠—wood-packing for hot baths⁠—a Certain Cure for the scourge of Influenza! There’s all these patent grain foods⁠—what Americans call cereals. I believe I’m right, sir, in saying they’re sawdust.”

“No!” said my uncle, removing his cigar; “as far as I can find out it’s really grain⁠—spoilt grain.⁠ ⁠… I’ve been going into that.”

“Well, there you are!” said Ewart. “Say it’s spoilt grain. It carried out my case just as well. Your modern commerce is no more buying and selling than sculpture. It’s mercy⁠—it’s salvation. It’s rescue work! It takes all sorts of fallen commodities by the hand and raises them. Cana isn’t in it. You turn water⁠—into Tono-Bungay.”

“Tono-Bungay’s all right,” said my uncle, suddenly grave. “We aren’t talking of Tono-Bungay.”

“Your nephew, sir, is hard; he wants everything to go to a sort of predestinated end; he’s a Calvinist of Commerce. Offer him a dustbin full of stuff; he calls it refuse⁠—passes by on the other side. Now you, sir you’d make cinders respect themselves.”

My uncle regarded him dubiously for a moment. But there was a touch of appreciation in his eye.

“Might make ’em into a sort of sanitary brick,” he reflected over his cigar end.

“Or a friable biscuit. Why not? You might advertise: ‘Why are Birds so Bright? Because they digest their food perfectly! Why do they digest their food so perfectly? Because they have a gizzard! Why hasn’t man a gizzard? Because he can buy Ponderevo’s Asphalt Triturating, Friable Biscuit⁠—Which is Better.’ ”

He delivered the last words in a shout, with his hairy hand flourished in the air.⁠ ⁠…

“Damn clever fellow,” said my uncle, after he had one. “I know a man when I see one. He’d do. But drunk, I should say. But that only makes some chap brighter. If he wants to do that poster, he can. Zzzz. That ideer of his about the horseradish. There’s something in that, George. I’m going to think over that.⁠ ⁠…”

I may say at once that my poster project came to nothing in the end, though Ewart devoted an interesting week to the matter. He let his unfortunate disposition to irony run away with him. He produced a picture of two beavers with a subtle likeness, he said, to myself and my uncle⁠—the likeness to my uncle certainly wasn’t half bad⁠—and they were bottling rows and rows of Tono-Bungay, with the legend “Modern commerce.” It certainly wouldn’t have sold a case, though he urged it on me one cheerful evening on the ground that it would “arouse curiosity.” In addition he produced a quite shocking study of my uncle, excessively and needlessly nude, but, so far as I was able to judge, an admirable likeness, engaged in feats of strength of a Gargantuan type before an audience of deboshed and shattered ladies. The legend, “Health, Beauty, Strength,” below, gave a needed point to his parody. This he hung up in the studio over the oil shop, with a flap of brown paper; by way of a curtain over it to accentuate its libellous offence.

IV Marion I

As I look back on those days in which we built up the great Tono-Bungay property out of human hope and credit for bottles and rent and printing, I see my life as it were arranged in two parallel columns of unequal width, a wider, more diffused, eventful and various one which continually broadens out, the business side of my life, and a narrow, darker and darkling one shot ever and again with a gleam of happiness, my home-life with Marion. For, of course, I married Marion.

I didn’t, as a matter of fact, marry her until a year after Tono-Bungay was thoroughly afloat, and then only after conflicts and discussions of a quite strenuous sort. By that time I was twenty-four. It seems the next thing to childhood now. We were both in certain directions unusually ignorant and simple; we were temperamentally antagonistic, and we hadn’t⁠—I don’t think we were capable of⁠—an idea in common. She was young and extraordinarily conventional⁠—she seemed never to have an idea of her own but always the idea of her class⁠—and I was young and sceptical, enterprising and passionate; the two links that held us together were the intense appeal her physical beauty had for me, and her appreciation of her importance in my thoughts. There can be no doubt of my passion for her. In her I had discovered woman desired. The nights I have