“Ah!” he cried. “Why couldn’t you say that a week ago?”
“I’ve had false ideas about the world,” I said. “Oh! they don’t matter
now! Yes, I’ll come, I’ll take my chance with you, I won’t hesitate
again.”
And I didn’t. I stuck to that resolution for seven long years.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
HOW WE MADE TONO-BUNGAY HUM
I
So I made my peace with my uncle, and we set out upon this bright
enterprise of selling slightly injurious rubbish at
one-and-three-halfpence and two-and-nine a bottle, including the
Government stamp. We made Tono-Bungay hum! It brought us wealth,
influence, respect, the confidence of endless people. All that my uncle
promised me proved truth and understatement; Tono-Bungay carried me to
freedoms and powers that no life of scientific research, no passionate
service of humanity could ever have given me....
It was my uncle’s genius that did it. No doubt he needed me,—I was, I
will admit, his indispensable right hand; but his was the brain to
conceive. He wrote every advertisement; some of them even he sketched.
You must remember that his were the days before the Time took to
enterprise and the vociferous hawking of that antiquated
_Encyclopædia_. That alluring, button-holing,
let-me-just-tell-you-quite-soberly-something-you-ought-to-know style of
newspaper advertisement, with every now and then a convulsive jump of
some attractive phrase into capitals, was then almost a novelty. “Many
people who are MODERATELY well think they are QUITE well,” was one of
his early efforts. The jerks in capitals were, “DO NOT NEED DRUGS OR
MEDICINE,” and “SIMPLY A PROPER REGIMEN TO GET YOU IN TONE.” One was
warned against the chemist or druggist who pushed “much-advertised
nostrums” on one’s attention. That trash did more harm than good. The
thing needed was regimen—and Tono-Bungay!
Very early, too, was that bright little quarter column, at least it was
usually a quarter column in the evening papers: “HILARITY—Tono-Bungay.
Like Mountain Air in the Veins.” The penetrating trio of questions:
“Are you bored with your Business? Are you bored with your Dinner. Are
you bored with your Wife?”—that, too, was in our Gower Street days.
Both these we had in our first campaign when we worked London south
central, and west; and then, too, we had our first poster—the HEALTH,
BEAUTY, AND STRENGTH one. That was his design; I happen still to have
got by me the first sketch he made for it. I have reproduced it here
with one or two others to enable the reader to understand the mental
quality that initiated these familiar ornaments of London.
(The second one is about eighteen months later, the germ of the
well-known “Fog” poster; the third was designed for an influenza
epidemic, but never issued.)
These things were only incidental in my department. I had to polish
them up for the artist and arrange the business of printing and
distribution, and after my uncle had had a violent and needless quarrel
with the advertising manager of the _Daily Regulator_ about the amount
of display given to one of his happy thoughts, I also took up the
negotiations of advertisements for the press.
We discussed and worked out distribution together first in the
drawing-room floor in Gower Street with my aunt sometimes helping very
shrewdly, and then, with a steadily improving type of cigar and older
and older whisky, in his smuggery at their first house, the one in
Beckenham. Often we worked far into the night sometimes until dawn.
We really worked infernally hard, and, I recall, we worked with a very
decided enthusiasm, not simply on my uncle’s part but mine, It was a
game, an absurd but absurdly interesting game, and the points were
scored in cases of bottles. People think a happy notion is enough to
make a man rich, that fortunes can be made without toil. It’s a dream,
as every millionaire (except one or two lucky gamblers) can testify; I
doubt if J.D. Rockefeller in the early days of Standard Oil, worked
harder than we did. We worked far into the night—and we also worked all
day. We made a rule to be always dropping in at the factory unannounced
to keep things right—for at first we could afford no properly
responsible underlings—and we traveled London, pretending to be our own
representatives and making all sorts of special arrangements.
But none of this was my special work, and as soon as we could get other
men in, I dropped the traveling, though my uncle found it particularly
interesting and kept it up for years. “Does me good, George, to see the
chaps behind their counters like I was once,” he explained. My special
and distinctive duty was to give Tono-Bungay substance and an outward
and visible bottle, to translate my uncle’s great imaginings into the
creation of case after case of labelled bottles of nonsense, and the
punctual discharge of them by railway, road and steamer towards their
ultimate goal in the Great Stomach of the People. By all modern
standards the business was, as my uncle would say, “absolutely _bonâ
fide_.” We sold our stuff and got the money, and spent the money
honestly in lies and clamour to sell more stuff. Section by section we
spread it over the whole of the British Isles; first working the
middle-class London suburbs, then the outer suburbs, then the home
counties, then going (with new bills and a more pious style of “ad”)
into Wales, a great field always for a new patent-medicine, and then
into Lancashire.
My uncle had in his inner office a big map of England, and as we took
up fresh sections of the local press and our consignments invaded new
areas, flags for advertisements and pink underlines for orders showed
our progress.
“The romance of modern commerce, George!” my uncle would say, rubbing
his hands together and drawing in air through his teeth. “The romance
of modern commerce, eh? Conquest. Province by province. Like sogers.”
We subjugated England and Wales; we rolled over the Cheviots with a
special adaptation containing eleven per cent. of absolute alcohol;
“Tono-Bungay: Thistle Brand.” We also had the Fog poster adapted to a
kilted Briton in a misty Highland scene.
Under the shadow of our great leading line we were presently taking
subsidiary specialties into action; “Tono-Bungay Hair Stimulant” was
our first supplement. Then came “Concentrated Tono-Bungay” for the
eyes. That didn’t go, but we had a considerable success with the Hair
Stimulant. We broached the subject, I remember, in a little catechism
beginning: “Why does the hair fall out? Because the follicles are
fagged. What are the follicles?...” So it went on to the climax that
the Hair Stimulant contained all “The essential principles of that most
reviving tonic, Tono-Bungay, together with an emollient and nutritious
oil derived from crude Neat’s Foot Oil by a process of refinement,
separation and deodorization.... It will be manifest to any one of
scientific attainments that in Neat’s Foot Oil derived from the hoofs
and horns of beasts, we must necessarily have a natural skin and hair
lubricant.”
And we also did admirable things with our next subsidiaries,
“Tono-Bungay Lozenges,” and “Tono-Bungay Chocolate.” These we urged
upon the public for their extraordinary nutritive and recuperative
value in cases of fatigue and strain. We gave them posters and
illustrated advertisements showing climbers hanging from marvelously
vertical cliffs, cyclist champions upon the track, mounted messengers
engaged in Aix-to-Ghent rides, soldiers lying out in action under a hot
sun. “You can GO for twenty-four hours,” we declared, “on Tono-Bungay
Chocolate.” We didn’t say whether you could return on the same
commodity. We also showed a dreadfully barristerish barrister, wig,
side-whiskers, teeth, a horribly life-like portrait of all existing
barristers, talking at a table, and beneath, this legend: “A Four
Hours’ Speech on Tono-Bungay Lozenges, and as fresh as when he began.”
Then brought in regiments of school-teachers, revivalist ministers,
politicians and the like. I really do believe there was an element of
“kick” in the strychnine in these lozenges, especially in those made
according to our earlier formula. For we altered all our
formulae—invariably weakening them enormously as sales got ahead.
In a little while—so it seems to me now—we were employing travelers and
opening up Great Britain at the rate of a hundred square miles a day.
All the organisation throughout was sketched in a crude, entangled,
half-inspired fashion by my uncle, and all of it had to be worked out
into a practicable scheme of quantities and expenditure by me. We had a
lot of trouble finding our travelers; in the end at least half of them
were Irish-Americans, a wonderful breed for selling medicine. We had
still more trouble over our factory manager, because of the secrets of
the inner room, and in the end we got a very capable woman, Mrs.
Hampton Diggs, who had formerly managed a large millinery workroom,
whom we could trust to keep everything in good working order without
finding out anything that wasn’t put exactly under her loyal and
energetic nose. She conceived a high opinion of Tono-Bungay and took it
in all forms and large quantities so long as I knew her. It didn’t seem
to do her any harm. And she kept the girls going quite wonderfully.
My uncle’s last addition to the Tono-Bungay group was the Tono-Bungay
Mouthwash. The reader has probably read a hundred times that inspiring
inquiry of his, “You are Young Yet, but are you Sure Nothing has Aged
your Gums?”
And after that we took over the agency for three or four good American
lines that worked in with our own, and could be handled with it; Texan
Embrocation, and “23—to clear the system” were the chief....
I set down these bare facts. To me they are all linked with the figure
of my uncle. In some of the old seventeenth and early eighteenth
century prayerbooks at Bladesover there used to be illustrations with
long scrolls coming out of the mouths of the wood-cut figures. I wish I
could write all this last chapter on a scroll coming out of the head of
my uncle, show it all the time as unfolding and pouring out from a
short, fattening, small-legged man with stiff cropped hair, disobedient
glasses on a perky little nose, and a round stare behind them. I wish I
could show you him breathing hard and a little through his nose as his
pen scrabbled out some absurd inspiration for a poster or a picture
page, and make you hear his voice, charged with solemn import like the
voice of a squeaky prophet, saying, “George! list’n! I got an ideer. I
got a notion! George!”
I should put myself into the same picture. Best setting for us, I
think, would be the Beckenham snuggery, because there we worked
hardest. It would be the lamplit room of the early nineties, and the
clock upon the mantel would indicate midnight or later. We would be
sitting on either side of the fire, I with a pipe, my uncle with a
cigar or cigarette. There would be glasses standing inside the brass
fender. Our expressions would be very grave. My uncle used to sit right
back in his armchair; his toes always turned in when he was sitting
down and his legs had a way of looking curved, as though they hadn’t
bones or joints but were stuffed with sawdust.
“George, whad’yer think of T.B. for sea-sickness?” he would say.
“No good that I can imagine.”
“Oom! No harm _trying_, George. We can but try.”
I would suck my pipe. “Hard to get at. Unless we sold our stuff
specially at the docks. Might do a special at Cook’s office, or in the
Continental Bradshaw.”
“It ’ud give ’em confidence, George.”
He would Zzzz, with his glasses reflecting the red of the glowing
coals.
“No good hiding our light under a Bushel,” he would remark.
I never really determined whether my uncle regarded Tono-Bungay as a
fraud, or whether he didn’t come to believe in it in a kind of way by
the mere reiteration of his own assertions. I think that his average
attitude was one of kindly, almost parental, toleration. I remember
saying on one occasion, “But you don’t suppose this stuff ever did a
human being the slightest good all?” and how his face assumed a look of
protest, as of one reproving harshness and dogmatism.
“You’ve a hard nature, George,” he said. “You’re too ready to run
things down. How can one _tell?_ How can one venture to _tell?_...”
I suppose any creative and developing game would have interested me in
those years. At any rate, I know I put as much zeal into this
Tono-Bungay as any young lieutenant could have done who suddenly found
himself in command of a ship. It was extraordinarily interesting to me
to figure out the advantage accruing from this shortening of the
process or that, and to weigh it against the capital cost of the
alteration. I made a sort of machine for sticking on the labels, that I
patented; to this day there is a little trickle of royalties to me from
that. I also contrived to have our mixture made concentrated, got the
bottles, which all came sliding down a guarded slant-way, nearly filled
with distilled water at one tap, and dripped our magic ingredients in
at the next. This was an immense economy of space for the inner
sanctum. For the bottling we needed special taps, and these, too, I
invented and patented.
We had a sort of endless band of bottles sliding along an inclined
glass trough made slippery with running water. At one end a girl held
them up to the light, put aside any that were imperfect and placed the
others in the trough; the filling was automatic; at the other end a
girl slipped in the cork and drove it home with a little mallet. Each
tank, the little one for the vivifying ingredients and the big one for
distilled water, had a level indicator, and inside I had a float
arrangement that stopped the slide whenever either had sunk too low.
Another girl stood ready with my machine to label the corked bottles
and hand them to the three packers, who slipped them into their outer
papers and put them, with a pad of corrugated paper between each pair,
into a little groove from which they could be made to slide neatly into
position in our standard packing-case. It sounds wild, I know, but I
believe I was the first man in the city of London to pack patent
medicines through the side of the packing-case, to discover there was a
better way in than by the lid. Our cases packed themselves,
practically; had only to be put into position on a little wheeled tray
and when full pulled to the lift that dropped them to the men
downstairs, who padded up the free space and nailed on top and side.
Our girls, moreover, packed with corrugated paper and matchbook-wood
box partitions when everybody else was using expensive young men to
pack through the top of the box with straw, many breakages and much
waste and confusion.