As I look back at them now, those energetic years seem all compacted to
a year or so; from the days of our first hazardous beginning in
Farringdon Street with barely a thousand pounds’ worth of stuff or
credit all told—and that got by something perilously like snatching—to
the days when my uncle went to the public on behalf of himself and me
(one-tenth share) and our silent partners, the drug wholesalers and the
printing people and the owner of that group of magazines and
newspapers, to ask with honest confidence for £150,000. Those silent
partners were remarkably sorry, I know, that they had not taken larger
shares and given us longer credit when the subscriptions came pouring
in. My uncle had a clear half to play with (including the one-tenth
understood to be mine).
£150,000—think of it!—for the goodwill in a string of lies and a trade
in bottles of mitigated water! Do you realise the madness of the world
that sanctions such a thing? Perhaps you don’t. At times use and wont
certainly blinded me. If it had not been for Ewart, I don’t think I
should have had an inkling of the wonderfulness of this development of
my fortunes; I should have grown accustomed to it, fallen in with all
its delusions as completely as my uncle presently did. He was immensely
proud of the flotation. “They’ve never been given such value,” he said,
“for a dozen years.” But Ewart, with his gesticulating hairy hands and
bony wrists, his single-handed chorus to all this as it played itself
over again in my memory, and he kept my fundamental absurdity
illuminated for me during all this astonishing time.
“It’s just on all fours with the rest of things,” he remarked; “only
more so. You needn’t think you’re anything out of the way.”
I remember one disquisition very distinctly. It was just after Ewart
had been to Paris on a mysterious expedition to “rough in” some work
for a rising American sculptor. This young man had a commission for an
allegorical figure of Truth (draped, of course) for his State Capitol,
and he needed help. Ewart had returned with his hair cut _en brosse_
and with his costume completely translated into French. He wore, I
remember, a bicycling suit of purplish-brown, baggy beyond ageing—the
only creditable thing about it was that it had evidently not been made
for him—a voluminous black tie, a decadent soft felt hat and several
French expletives of a sinister description. “Silly clothes, aren’t
they?” he said at the sight of my startled eye. “I don’t know why I
got’m. They seemed all right over there.”
He had come down to our Raggett Street place to discuss a benevolent
project of mine for a poster by him, and he scattered remarkable
discourse over the heads (I hope it was over the heads) of our
bottlers.
“What I like about it all, Ponderevo, is its poetry.... That’s where we
get the pull of the animals. No animal would ever run a factory like
this. Think!... One remembers the Beaver, of course. He might very
possibly bottle things, but would he stick a label round ’em and sell
’em? The Beaver is a dreamy fool, I’ll admit, him and his dams, but
after all there’s a sort of protection about ’em, a kind of muddy
practicality! They prevent things getting at him. And it’s not your
poetry only. It’s the poetry of the customer too. Poet answering to
poet—soul to soul. Health, Strength and Beauty—in a bottle—the magic
philtre! Like a fairy tale....
“Think of the people to whom your bottles of footle go! (I’m calling it
footle, Ponderevo, out of praise,” he said in parenthesis.)
“Think of the little clerks and jaded women and overworked people.
People overstrained with wanting to do, people overstrained with
wanting to be.... People, in fact, overstrained.... The real trouble of
life, Ponderevo, isn’t that we exist—that’s a vulgar error; the real
trouble is that we _don’t_ really exist and we want to. That’s what
this—in the highest sense—just stands for! The hunger to be—for
once—really alive—to the finger tips!...
“Nobody wants to do and be the things people are—nobody. YOU don’t want
to preside over this—this bottling; I don’t want to wear these beastly
clothes and be led about by you; nobody wants to keep on sticking
labels on silly bottles at so many farthings a gross. That isn’t
existing! That’s—sus—_substratum_. None of us want to be what we are,
or to do what we do. Except as a sort of basis. What do we want? _You_
know. _I_ know. Nobody confesses. What we all want to be is something
perpetually young and beautiful—young Joves—young Joves, Ponderevo”—his
voice became loud, harsh and declamatory—“pursuing coy half-willing
nymphs through everlasting forests.”...
There was a just-perceptible listening hang in the work about us.
“Come downstairs,” I interrupted, “we can talk better there.”
“I can talk better here,” he answered.
He was just going on, but fortunately the implacable face of Mrs.
Hampton Diggs appeared down the aisle of bottling machines.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll come.”
In the little sanctum below, my uncle was taking a digestive pause
after his lunch and by no means alert. His presence sent Ewart back to
the theme of modern commerce, over the excellent cigar my uncle gave
him. He behaved with the elaborate deference due to a business magnate
from an unknown man.
“What I was pointing out to your nephew, sir,” said Ewart, putting both
elbows on the table, “was the poetry of commerce. He doesn’t, you know,
seem to see it at all.”
My uncle nodded brightly. “Whad I tell ’im,” he said round his cigar.
“We are artists. You and I, sir, can talk, if you will permit me, as
one artist to another. It’s advertisement has—done it. Advertisement
has revolutionised trade and industry; it is going to revolutionise the
world. The old merchant used to tote about commodities; the new one
creates values. Doesn’t need to tote. He takes something that isn’t
worth anything—or something that isn’t particularly worth anything—and
he makes it worth something. He takes mustard that is just like anybody
else’s mustard, and he goes about saying, shouting, singing, chalking
on walls, writing inside people’s books, putting it everywhere,
‘Smith’s Mustard is the Best.’ And behold it is the best!”
“True,” said my uncle, chubbily and with a dreamy sense of mysticism;
“true!”
“It’s just like an artist; he takes a lump of white marble on the verge
of a lime-kiln, he chips it about, he makes—he makes a monument to
himself—and others—a monument the world will not willingly let die.
Talking of mustard, sir, I was at Clapham Junction the other day, and
all the banks are overgrown with horse radish that’s got loose from a
garden somewhere. You know what horseradish is—grows like
wildfire—spreads—spreads. I stood at the end of the platform looking at
the stuff and thinking about it. ‘Like fame,’ I thought, ‘rank and wild
where it 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?—‘Marr’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.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
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 lain awake on account of her, writhing, biting my wrists
in a fever of longing! ...
I have told how I got myself a silk hat and black coat to please her on
Sunday—to the derision of some of my fellow-students who charged to
meet me, and how we became engaged. But that was only the beginning of
our difference. To her that meant the beginning of a not unpleasant
little secrecy, an occasional use of verbal endearments, perhaps even
kisses. It was something to go on indefinitely, interfering in no way
with her gossiping spells of work at Smithie’s. To me it was a pledge
to come together into the utmost intimacy of soul and body so soon as
we could contrive it....
I don’t know if it will strike the reader that I am setting out to
discuss the queer, unwise love relationship and my bungle of a marriage
with excessive solemnity. But to me it seems to reach out to vastly
wider issues than our little personal affair. I’ve thought over my
life. In these last few years I’ve tried to get at least a little
wisdom out of it. And in particular I’ve thought over this part of my
life. I’m enormously impressed by the ignorant, unguided way in which
we two entangled ourselves with each other. It seems to me the queerest
thing in all this network of misunderstandings and misstatements and
faulty and ramshackle conventions which makes up our social order as
the individual meets it, that we should have come together so
accidentally and so blindly. Because we were no more than samples of
the common fate. Love is not only the cardinal fact in the individual
life, but the most important concern of the community; after all, the
way in which the young people of this generation pair off determines
the fate of the nation; all the other affairs of the State are
subsidiary to that. And we leave it to flushed and blundering youth to
stumble on its own significance, with nothing to guide in but shocked
looks and sentimental twaddle and base whisperings and cant-smeared
examples.
I have tried to indicate something of my own sexual development in the
preceding chapter. Nobody was ever frank and decent with me in this
relation; nobody, no book, ever came and said to me thus and thus is
the world made, and so and so is necessary. Everything came obscurely,
indefinitely, perplexingly; and all I knew of law or convention in the
matter had the form of threatenings and prohibitions. Except through
the furtive, shameful talk of my coevals at Goudhurst and Wimblehurst,
I was not even warned against quite horrible dangers. My ideas were
made partly of instinct, partly of a romantic imagination, partly woven
out of a medley of scraps of suggestion that came to me haphazard. I
had read widely and confusedly “Vathek,” Shelley, Tom Paine, Plutarch,
Carlyle, Haeckel, William Morris, the Bible, the _Freethinker_, the
_Clarion_, “The Woman Who Did,”—I mention the ingredients that come
first to mind. All sorts of ideas were jumbled up in me and never a
lucid explanation. But it was evident to me that the world regarded
Shelley, for example, as a very heroic as well as beautiful person; and
that to defy convention and succumb magnificently to passion was the
proper thing to do to gain the respect and affection of all decent
people.
And the make-up of Marion’s mind in the matter was an equally
irrational affair. Her training had been one, not simply of silences,
but suppressions. An enormous force of suggestion had so shaped her
that the intense natural fastidiousness of girlhood had developed into
an absolute perversion of instinct. For all that is cardinal in this
essential business of life she had one inseparable epithet—“horrid.”
Without any such training she would have been a shy lover, but now she
was an impossible one. For the rest she had derived, I suppose, partly
from the sort of fiction she got from the Public Library, and partly
from the workroom talk at Smithie’s. So far as the former origin went,
she had an idea of love as a state of worship and service on the part
of the man and of condescension on the part of the woman. There was
nothing “horrid” about it in any fiction she had read. The man gave
presents, did services, sought to be in every way delightful. The woman
“went out” with him, smiled at him, was kissed by him in decorous
secrecy, and if he chanced to offend, denied her countenance and
presence. Usually she did something “for his good” to him, made him go
to church, made him give up smoking or gambling, smartened him up.
Quite at the end of the story came a marriage, and after that the
interest ceased.
That was the tenor of Marion’s fiction; but I think the work-table
conversation at Smithie’s did something to modify that. At Smithie’s it
was recognised, I think, that a “fellow” was a possession to be
desired; that it was better to be engaged to a fellow than not; that
fellows had to be kept—they might be mislaid, they might even be
stolen. There was a case of stealing at Smithie’s, and many tears.
Smithie I met before we were married, and afterwards she became a
frequent visitor to our house at Ealing. She was a thin, bright-eyed,
hawk-nosed girl of thirtyodd, with prominent teeth, a high-pitched,
eager voice and a disposition to be urgently smart in her dress. Her
hats were startling and various, but invariably disconcerting, and she
talked in a rapid, nervous flow that was hilarious rather than witty,
and broken by little screams of “Oh, my _dear!_” and “you never did!”
She was the first woman I ever met who used scent. Poor old Smithie!
What a harmless, kindly soul she really was, and how heartily I
detested her! Out of the profits on the Persian robes she supported a
sister’s family of three children, she “helped” a worthless brother,
and overflowed in help even to her workgirls, but that didn’t weigh
with me in those youthfully-narrow times. It was one of the intense
minor irritations of my married life that Smithie’s whirlwind chatter
seemed to me to have far more influence with Marion than anything I had
to say. Before all things I coveted her grip upon Marion’s inaccessible
mind.
In the workroom at Smithie’s, I gathered, they always spoke of me
demurely as “A Certain Person.” I was rumoured to be dreadfully
“clever,” and there were doubts—not altogether without justification—of
the sweetness of my temper.