“You know how they look at you. His stuff was soap, I’m pretty nearly
certain. And he had a name—And the thing was the straightest
Bit-of-All-right you ever. I was clear enough to spot that...”
We went out at last with knitted brows, and wandered up into Finsbury
seeking a good, well-stocked looking grocer. We called first on a
chemist for a pick-me-up for my uncle, and then we found the shop we
needed.
“I want,” said my uncle, “half a pound of every sort of soap you got.
Yes, I want to take them now. Wait a moment, George.... Now what sort
of soap d’you call _that?_”
At the third repetition of that question the young man said, “Moggs’
Domestic.”
“Right,” said my uncle. “You needn’t guess again. Come along, George,
let’s go to a telephone and get on to Moggs. Oh—the order? Certainly. I
confirm it. Send it all—send it all to the Bishop of London; he’ll have
some good use for it—(First-rate man, George, he is—charities and all
that)—and put it down to me, here’s a card—Ponderevo—Tono-Bungay.”
Then we went on to Moggs and found him in a camel-hair dressing-jacket
in a luxurious bed, drinking China tea, and got the shape of everything
but the figures fixed by lunch time.
Young Moggs enlarged my mind considerably; he was a sort of thing I
hadn’t met before; he seemed quite clean and well-informed and he
assured me to never read newspapers nor used soap in any form at all,
“Delicate skin,” he said.
“No objection to our advertising you wide and free?” said my uncle.
“I draw the line at railway stations,” said Moggs, “south-coast cliffs,
theatre programmes, books by me and poetry generally—scenery—oh!—and
the _Mercure de France_.”
“We’ll get along,” said my uncle.
“So long as you don’t annoy me,” said Moggs, lighting a cigarette, “you
can make me as rich as you like.”
We certainly made him no poorer. His was the first firm that was
advertised by a circumstantial history; we even got to illustrated
magazine articles telling of the quaint past of Moggs. We concocted
Moggsiana. Trusting to our partner’s preoccupation with the
uncommercial aspects of life, we gave graceful history—of Moggs the
First, Moggs the Second, Moggs the Third, and Moggs the Fourth. You
must, unless you are very young, remember some of them and our
admirable block of a Georgian shop window. My uncle brought early
nineteenth-century memoirs, soaked himself in the style, and devised
stories about old Moggs the First and the Duke of Wellington, George
the Third and the soap dealer (“almost certainly old Moggs”). Very soon
we had added to the original Moggs’ Primrose several varieties of
scented and superfatted, a “special nurseries used in the household of
the Duke of Kent and for the old Queen in Infancy,” a plate powder,
“the Paragon,” and a knife powder. We roped in a good little
second-rate black-lead firm, and carried their origins back into the
mists of antiquity. It was my uncle’s own unaided idea that we should
associate that commodity with the Black Prince. He became industriously
curious about the past of black-lead. I remember his button-holing the
president of the Pepys Society.
“I say, is there any black-lead in Pepys? You know—black-lead—for
grates! _Or does he pass it over as a matter of course?_”
He became in those days the terror of eminent historians. “Don’t want
your drum and trumpet history—no fear,” he used to say. “Don’t want to
know who was who’s mistress, and why so-and-so devastated such a
province; that’s bound to be all lies and upsy-down anyhow. Not my
affair. Nobody’s affair now. Chaps who did it didn’t clearly know....
What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for
Housemaid’s Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting,
and was the Black Prince—you know the Black Prince—was he enameled or
painted, or what? I think myself, black-leaded—very likely—like
pipe-clay—but _did_ they use blacking so early?”
So it came about that in designing and writing those Moggs’ Soap
Advertisements, that wrought a revolution in that department of
literature, my uncle was brought to realise not only the lost history,
but also the enormous field for invention and enterprise that lurked
among the little articles, the dustpans and mincers, the mousetraps and
carpet-sweepers that fringe the shops of the oilman and domestic
ironmonger. He was recalled to one of the dreams of his youth, to his
conception of the Ponderevo Patent Flat that had been in his mind so
early as the days before I went to serve him at Wimblehurst. “The Home,
George,” he said, “wants straightening up. Silly muddle! Things that
get in the way. Got to organise it.”
For a time he displayed something like the zeal of a genuine social
reformer in relation to these matters.
“We’ve got to bring the Home Up to Date? That’s my idee, George. We got
to make a civilised domestic machine out of these relics of barbarism.
I’m going to hunt up inventors, make a corner in d’mestic ideas.
Everything. Balls of string that won’t dissolve into a tangle, and gum
that won’t dry into horn. See? Then after conveniences—beauty. Beauty,
George! All these few things ought to be made fit to look at; it’s your
aunt’s idea, that. Beautiful jam-pots! Get one of those new art chaps
to design all the things they make ugly now. Patent carpet-sweepers by
these greenwood chaps, housemaid’s boxes it’ll be a pleasure to fall
over—rich coloured house-flannels. Zzzz. Pails, f’rinstance. Hang ’em
up on the walls like warming-pans. All the polishes and things in such
tins—you’ll want to cuddle ’em, George! See the notion? ‘Sted of all
the silly ugly things we got.”...
We had some magnificent visions; they so affected me that when I passed
ironmongers and oil-shops they seemed to me as full of promise as trees
in late winter, flushed with the effort to burst into leaf and
flower.... And really we did do much towards that very brightness these
shops display. They were dingy things in the eighties compared to what
our efforts have made them now, grey quiet displays.
Well, I don’t intend to write down here the tortuous financial history
of Moggs’ Limited, which was our first development of Moggs and Sons;
nor will I tell very much of how from that we spread ourselves with a
larger and larger conception throughout the chandlery and minor
ironmongery, how we became agents for this little commodity, partners
in that, got a tentacle round the neck of a specialised manufacturer or
so, secured a pull upon this or that supply of raw material, and so
prepared the way for our second flotation, Domestic Utilities; “Do it,”
they reordered it in the city. And then came the reconstruction of
Tono-Bungay, and then “Household services” and the Boom!
That sort of development is not to be told in detail in a novel. I
have, indeed, told much of it elsewhere. It is to be found set out at
length, painfully at length, in my uncle’s examination and mine in the
bankruptcy proceedings, and in my own various statements after his
death. Some people know everything in that story, some know it all too
well, most do not want the details, it is the story of a man of
imagination among figures, and unless you are prepared to collate
columns of pounds, shillings and pence, compare dates and check
additions, you will find it very unmeaning and perplexing. And after
all, you wouldn’t find the early figures so much wrong as _strained_.
In the matter of Moggs and Do Ut, as in the first Tono-Bungay promotion
and in its reconstruction, we left the court by city standards without
a stain on our characters. The great amalgamation of Household Services
was my uncle’s first really big-scale enterprise and his first display
of bolder methods: for this we bought back Do Ut, Moggs (going strong
with a seven per cent. dividend) and acquired Skinnerton’s polishes,
the Riffleshaw properties and the Runcorn’s mincer and coffee-mill
business. To that Amalgamation I was really not a party; I left it to
my uncle because I was then beginning to get keen upon the soaring
experiments I had taken on from the results then to hand of Lilienthal,
Pilcher and the Wright brothers. I was developing a glider into a
flyer. I meant to apply power to this glider as soon as I could work
out one or two residual problems affecting the longitudinal stability.
I knew that I had a sufficiently light motor in my own modification of
Bridger’s light turbine, but I knew too that until I had cured my
aeroplane of a tendency demanding constant alertness from me, a
tendency to jerk up its nose at unexpected moments and slide back upon
me, the application of an engine would be little short of suicide.
But that I will tell about later. The point I was coming to was that I
did not realise until after the crash how recklessly my uncle had kept
his promise of paying a dividend of over eight per cent. on the
ordinary shares of that hugely over-capitalised enterprise, Household
Services.
I drifted out of business affairs into my research much more than
either I or my uncle had contemplated. Finance was much less to my
taste than the organisation of the Tono-Bungay factory. In the new
field of enterprise there was a great deal of bluffing and gambling, of
taking chances and concealing material facts—and these are hateful
things to the scientific type of mind. It wasn’t fear I felt so much as
an uneasy inaccuracy. I didn’t realise dangers, I simply disliked the
sloppy, relaxing quality of this new sort of work. I was at last
constantly making excuses not to come up to him in London. The latter
part of his business career recedes therefore beyond the circle of any
particular life. I lived more or less with him; I talked, I advised, I
helped him at times to fight his Sunday crowd at Crest Hill, but I did
not follow nor guide him. From the Do Ut time onward he rushed up the
financial world like a bubble in water and left me like some busy
water-thing down below in the deeps.
Anyhow, he was an immense success. The public was, I think,
particularly attracted by the homely familiarity of his field of
work—you never lost sight of your investment they felt, with the name
on the house-flannel and shaving-strop—and its allegiance was secured
by the Egyptian solidity of his apparent results. Tono-Bungay, after
its reconstruction, paid thirteen, Moggs seven, Domestic Utilities had
been a safe-looking nine; here was Household Services with eight; on
such a showing he had merely to buy and sell Roeburn’s Antiseptic
fluid, Razor soaks and Bath crystals in three weeks to clear twenty
thousand pounds.
I do think that as a matter of fact Roeburn’s was good value at the
price at which he gave it to the public, at least until it was strained
by ill-conserved advertisement. It was a period of expansion and
confidence; much money was seeking investment and “Industrials” were
the fashion. Prices were rising all round. There remained little more
for my uncle to do therefore, in his climb to the high unstable crest
of Financial Greatness but, as he said, to “grasp the cosmic oyster,
George, while it gaped,” which, being translated, meant for him to buy
respectable businesses confidently and courageously at the vendor’s
estimate, add thirty or forty thousand to the price and sell them
again. His sole difficulty indeed was the tactful management of the
load of shares that each of these transactions left upon his hands. But
I thought so little of these later things that I never fully
appreciated the peculiar inconveniences of that until it was too late
to help him.