“I’d like to let a dozen young Americans loose into it,” said my uncle.
“Then we’d see.”
I made a tick against Mother Shipton’s Sleeping Syrup. We had cleared
our forward stock.
“Things must be happening _somewhere_, George,” he broke out in a
querulously rising note as he came back into the little shop. He
fiddled with the piled dummy boxes of fancy soap and scent and so forth
that adorned the end of the counter, then turned about petulantly,
stuck his hands deeply into his pockets and withdrew one to scratch his
head. “I must do _something_,” he said. “I can’t stand it.
“I must invent something. And shove it.... I could.
“Or a play. There’s a deal of money in a play, George. What would you
think of me writing a play eh?... There’s all sorts of things to be
done.
“Or the stog-igschange.”
He fell into that meditative whistling of his.
“Sac-ramental wine!” he swore, “this isn’t the world—it’s Cold Mutton
Fat! That’s what Wimblehurst is! Cold Mutton Fat!—dead and stiff! And
I’m buried in it up to the arm pits. Nothing ever happens, nobody wants
things to happen ‘scept me! Up in London, George, things happen.
America! I wish to Heaven, George, I’d been born American—where things
hum.
“What can one do here? How can one grow? While we’re sleepin’ here with
our Capital oozing away into Lord Eastry’s pockets for rent-men are up
there....” He indicated London as remotely over the top of the
dispensing counter, and then as a scene of great activity by a whirl of
the hand and a wink and a meaning smile at me.
“What sort of things do they do?” I asked.
“Rush about,” he said. “Do things! Somethin’ glorious. There’s cover
gambling. Ever heard of that, George?” He drew the air in through his
teeth. “You put down a hundred say, and buy ten thousand pounds worth.
See? That’s a cover of one per cent. Things go up one, you sell,
realise cent per cent; down, whiff, it’s gone! Try again! Cent per
cent, George, every day. Men are made or done for in an hour. And the
shoutin’! Zzzz.... Well, that’s one way, George. Then another
way—there’s Corners!”
“They’re rather big things, aren’t they?” I ventured.
“Oh, if you go in for wheat or steel—yes. But suppose you tackled a
little thing, George. Just some little thing that only needed a few
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 per cent. advance sir; security—to-morrow. 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 money-making 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 naïve 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 any one who contrived to do that would pretty certainly go to
jail. Now I know that any one 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 chance ’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! Any one 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?”