I remember going home from our talk. I went down Farringdon Street to
the Embankment because I thought to go home by Holborn and Oxford
Street would be too crowded for thinking.... That piece of Embankment
from Blackfriars to Westminster still reminds me of that momentous
hesitation.
You know, from first to last, I saw the business with my eyes open, I
saw its ethical and moral values quite clearly. Never for a moment do I
remember myself faltering from my persuasion that the sale of
Tono-Bungay was a thoroughly dishonest proceeding. The stuff was, I
perceived, a mischievous trash, slightly stimulating, aromatic and
attractive, likely to become a bad habit and train people in the
habitual use of stronger tonics and insidiously dangerous to people
with defective kidneys. It would cost about sevenpence the large bottle
to make, including bottling, and we were to sell it at half a crown
plus the cost of the patent medicine stamp. A thing that I will confess
deterred me from the outset far more than the sense of dishonesty in
this affair, was the supreme silliness of the whole concern. I still
clung to the idea that the world of men was or should be a sane and
just organisation, and the idea that I should set myself gravely, just
at the fine springtime of my life, to developing a monstrous bottling
and packing warehouse, bottling rubbish for the consumption of foolish,
credulous and depressed people, had in it a touch of insanity. My early
beliefs still clung to me. I felt assured that somewhere there must be
a hitch in the fine prospect of ease and wealth under such conditions;
that somewhere, a little overgrown, perhaps, but still traceable, lay a
neglected, wasted path of use and honour for me.
My inclination to refuse the whole thing increased rather than
diminished at first as I went along the Embankment. In my uncle’s
presence there had been a sort of glamour that had prevented an
outright refusal. It was a revival of affection for him I felt in his
presence, I think, in part, and in part an instinctive feeling that I
must consider him as my host. But much more was it a curious persuasion
he had the knack of inspiring—a persuasion not so much of his integrity
and capacity as of the reciprocal and yielding foolishness of the
world. One felt that he was silly and wild, but in some way silly and
wild after the fashion of the universe. After all, one must live
somehow. I astonished him and myself by temporising.
“No,” said I, “I’ll think it over!”
And as I went along the embankment the first effect was all against my
uncle. He shrank—for a little while he continued to shrink—in
perspective until he was only a very small shabby little man in a dirty
back street, sending off a few hundred bottles of rubbish to foolish
buyers. The great buildings on the right of us, the Inns and the School
Board place—as it was then—Somerset House, the big hotels, the great
bridges, Westminster’s outlines ahead, had an effect of grey largeness
that reduced him to the proportions of a busy black beetle in a crack
in the floor.
And then my eye caught the advertisements on the south side of
“Sorber’s Food,” of “Cracknell’s Ferric Wine,” very bright and
prosperous signs, illuminated at night, and I realised how
astonishingly they looked at home there, how evidently part they were
in the whole thing.
I saw a man come charging out of Palace Yard—the policeman touched his
helmet to him—with a hat and a bearing astonishingly like my uncle’s.
After all,—didn’t Cracknell himself sit in the House?
Tono-Bungay shouted at me from a hoarding near Adelphi Terrace; I saw
it afar off near Carfax Street; it cried out again upon me in
Kensington High Street, and burst into a perfect clamour; six or seven
times I saw it as I drew near my diggings. It certainly had an air of
being something more than a dream.
Yes, I thought it over—thoroughly enough.... Trade rules the world.
Wealth rather than trade! The thing was true, and true too was my
uncle’s proposition that the quickest way to get wealth is to sell the
cheapest thing possible in the dearest bottle. He was frightfully right
after all. _Pecunia non olet_,—a Roman emperor said that. Perhaps my
great heroes in Plutarch were no more than such men, fine now only
because they are distant; perhaps after all this Socialism to which I
had been drawn was only a foolish dream, only the more foolish because
all its promises were conditionally true. Morris and these others
played with it wittingly; it gave a zest, a touch of substance, to
their aesthetic pleasures. Never would there be good faith enough to
bring such things about. They knew it; every one, except a few young
fools, knew it. As I crossed the corner of St. James’s Park wrapped in
thought, I dodged back just in time to escape a prancing pair of greys.
A stout, common-looking woman, very magnificently dressed, regarded me
from the carriage with a scornful eye. “No doubt,” thought I, “a
pill-vendor’s wife....”
Running through all my thoughts, surging out like a refrain, was my
uncle’s master-stroke, his admirable touch of praise: “Make it all
slick—and then make it go Woosh. I know you can! Oh! I _know_ you can!”