When I think of my uncle near the days of his Great Boom and in
connection with the actualities of his enterprises, I think of him as I
used to see him in the suite of rooms he occupied in the Hardingham
Hotel, seated at a great old oak writing-table, smoking, drinking, and
incoherently busy; that was his typical financial aspect—our evenings,
our mornings, our holidays, our motor-car expeditions, Lady Grove and
Crest Hill belong to an altogether different set of memories.
These rooms in the Hardingham were a string of apartments along one
handsome thick-carpeted corridor. All the doors upon the corridor were
locked except the first; and my uncle’s bedroom, breakfast-room and
private sanctum were the least accessible and served by an entrance
from the adjacent passage, which he also used at times as a means of
escape from importunate callers. The most eternal room was a general
waiting-room and very business-like in quality; it had one or two
uneasy sofas, a number of chairs, a green baize table, and a collection
of the very best Moggs and Tone posters: and the plush carpets normal
to the Hardingham had been replaced by a grey-green cork linoleum; Here
I would always find a remarkable miscellany of people presided over by
a peculiarly faithful and ferocious looking commissioner, Ropper, who
guarded the door that led a step nearer my uncle. Usually there would
be a parson or so, and one or two widows; hairy, eyeglassy, middle-aged
gentlemen, some of them looking singularly like Edward Ponderevos who
hadn’t come off, a variety of young and youngish men more or less
attractively dressed, some with papers protruding from their pockets,
others with their papers decently concealed. And wonderful, incidental,
frowsy people.
All these persons maintained a practically hopeless siege—sometimes for
weeks together; they had better have stayed at home. Next came a room
full of people who had some sort of appointment, and here one would
find smart-looking people, brilliantly dressed, nervous women hiding
behind magazines, nonconformist divines, clergy in gaiters, real
business men, these latter for the most part gentlemen in admirable
morning dress who stood up and scrutinised my uncle’s taste in water
colours manfully and sometimes by the hour together. Young men again
were here of various social origins, young Americans, treasonable
clerks from other concerns, university young men, keen-looking, most of
them, resolute, reserved, but on a sort of hair trigger, ready at any
moment to be most voluble, most persuasive.
This room had a window, too, looking out into the hotel courtyard with
its fern-set fountains and mosaic pavement, and the young men would
stand against this and sometimes even mutter. One day I heard one
repeating in all urgent whisper as I passed “But you don’t quite see,
Mr. Ponderevo, the full advantages, the _full_ advantages—” I met his
eye and he was embarrassed.
Then came a room with a couple of secretaries—no typewriters, because
my uncle hated the clatter—and a casual person or two sitting about,
projectors whose projects were being entertained. Here and in a further
room nearer the private apartments, my uncle’s correspondence underwent
an exhaustive process of pruning and digestion before it reached him.
Then the two little rooms in which my uncle talked; my magic uncle who
had got the investing public—to whom all things were possible. As one
came in we would find him squatting with his cigar up and an expression
of dubious beatitude upon his face, while some one urged him to grow
still richer by this or that.
“That’ju, George?” he used to say. “Come in. Here’s a thing. Tell
him—Mister—over again. Have a drink, George? No! Wise man! Liss’n.”
I was always ready to listen. All sorts of financial marvels came out
of the Hardingham, more particularly during my uncle’s last great
flurry, but they were nothing to the projects that passed in. It was
the little brown and gold room he sat in usually. He had had it
redecorated by Bordingly and half a dozen Sussex pictures by Webster
hung about it. Latterly he wore a velveteen jacket of a golden-brown
colour in this apartment that I think over-emphasised its esthetic
intention, and he also added some gross Chinese bronzes.
He was, on the whole, a very happy man throughout all that wildly
enterprising time. He made and, as I shall tell in its place, spent
great sums of money. He was constantly in violent motion, constantly
stimulated mentally and physically and rarely tired. About him was an
atmosphere of immense deference much of his waking life was triumphal
and all his dreams. I doubt if he had any dissatisfaction with himself
at all until the crash bore him down. Things must have gone very
rapidly with him.... I think he must have been very happy.
As I sit here writing about all these things, jerking down notes and
throwing them aside in my attempt to give some literary form to the
tale of our promotions, the marvel of it all comes to me as if it came
for the first time the supreme unreason of it. At the climax of his
Boom, my uncle at the most sparing estimate must have possessed in
substance and credit about two million pounds’-worth of property to set
off against his vague colossal liabilities, and from first to last he
must have had a controlling influence in the direction of nearly thirty
millions.
This irrational muddle of a community in which we live gave him that,
paid him at that rate for sitting in a room and scheming and telling it
lies. For he created nothing, he invented nothing, he economised
nothing. I cannot claim that a single one of the great businesses we
organised added any real value to human life at all. Several like
Tono-Bungay were unmitigated frauds by any honest standard, the giving
of nothing coated in advertisements for money. And the things the
Hardingham gave out, I repeat, were nothing to the things that came in.
I think of the long procession of people who sat down before us and
propounded this and that. Now it was a device for selling bread under a
fancy name and so escaping the laws as to weight—this was afterwards
floated as the Decorticated Health-Bread Company and bumped against the
law—now it was a new scheme for still more strident advertisement, now
it was a story of unsuspected deposits of minerals, now a cheap and
nasty substitute for this or that common necessity, now the treachery
of a too well-informed employee, anxious to become our partner. It was
all put to us tentatively, persuasively. Sometimes one had a large pink
blusterous person trying to carry us off our feet by his pseudo-boyish
frankness, now some dyspeptically yellow whisperer, now some earnest,
specially dressed youth with an eye-glass and a buttonhole, now some
homely-speaking, shrewd Manchester man or some Scotchman eager to be
very clear and full.
Many came in couples or trios, often in tow of an explanatory
solicitor. Some were white and earnest, some flustered beyond measure
at their opportunity. Some of them begged and prayed to be taken up. My
uncle chose what he wanted and left the rest. He became very autocratic
to these applicants.
He felt he could make them, and they felt so too. He had but to say
“No!” and they faded out of existence.... He had become a sort of
vortex to which wealth flowed of its own accord. His possessions
increased by heaps; his shares, his leaseholds and mortgages and
debentures.
Behind his first-line things he found it necessary at last, and
sanctioned by all the precincts, to set up three general trading
companies, the London and African Investment Company, the British
Traders’ Loan Company, and Business Organisations Limited. This was in
the culminating time when I had least to do with affairs. I don’t say
that with any desire to exculpate myself; I admit I was a director of
all three, and I will confess I was willfully incurious in that
capacity. Each of these companies ended its financial year solvent by
selling great holdings of shares to one or other of its sisters, and
paying a dividend out of the proceeds. I sat at the table and agreed.
That was our method of equilibrium at the iridescent climax of the
bubble.
You perceive now, however, the nature of the services for which this
fantastic community have him unmanageable wealth and power and real
respect. It was all a monstrous payment for courageous fiction, a
gratuity in return for the one reality of human life—illusion. We gave
them a feeling of hope and profit; we sent a tidal wave of water and
confidence into their stranded affairs. “We mint Faith, George,” said
my uncle one day. “That’s what we do. And by Jove we got to keep
minting! We been making human confidence ever since I drove the first
cork of Tono-Bungay.”
“Coining” would have been a better word than minting! And yet, you
know, in a sense he was right. Civilisation is possible only through
confidence, so that we can bank our money and go unarmed about the
streets. The bank reserve or a policeman keeping order in a jostling
multitude of people, are only slightly less impudent bluffs than my
uncle’s prospectuses. They couldn’t for a moment “make good” if the
quarter of what they guarantee was demanded of them. The whole of this
modern mercantile investing civilisation is indeed such stuff as dreams
are made of. A mass of people swelters and toils, great railway systems
grow, cities arise to the skies and spread wide and far, mines are
opened, factories hum, foundries roar, ships plough the seas, countries
are settled; about this busy striving world the rich owners go,
controlling all, enjoying all, confident and creating the confidence
that draws us all together into a reluctant, nearly unconscious
brotherhood. I wonder and plan my engines. The flags flutter, the
crowds cheer, the legislatures meet. Yet it seems to me indeed at times
that all this present commercial civilisation is no more than my poor
uncle’s career writ large, a swelling, thinning bubble of assurances;
that its arithmetic is just as unsound, its dividends as ill-advised,
its ultimate aim as vague and forgotten; that it all drifts on perhaps
to some tremendous parallel to his individual disaster...
Well, so it was we Boomed, and for four years and a half we lived a
life of mingled substance and moonshine. Until our particular
unsoundness overtook us we went about in the most magnificent of
motor-cars upon tangible high roads, made ourselves conspicuous and
stately in splendid houses, ate sumptuously and had a perpetual stream
of notes and money trickling into our pockets; hundreds of thousands of
men and women respected us, saluted us and gave us toil and honour; I
asked, and my worksheets rose, my aeroplanes swooped out of nothingness
to scare the downland pe-wits; my uncle waved his hand and Lady Grove
and all its associations of chivalry and ancient peace were his; waved
again, and architects were busy planning the great palace he never
finished at Crest Hill and an army of folkmen gathered to do his
bidding, blue marble came from Canada, and timber from New Zealand; and
beneath it all, you know, there was nothing but fictitious values as
evanescent as rainbow gold.