Tono Bungay

So far as I can remember now, except for that one emotional phase by the graveside, I passed through all these experiences rather callously.  I had already, with the facility of youth, changed my world, ceased to think at all of the old school routine and put Bladesover aside for digestion at a latter stage.  I took up my new world in Wimblehurst with the chemist’s shop as its hub, set to work at Latin and materia medica, and concentrated upon the present with all my heart.  Wimblehurst is an exceptionally quiet and grey Sussex town rare among south of England towns in being largely built of stone.  I found something very agreeable and picturesque in its clean cobbled streets, its odd turnings and abrupt corners; and in the pleasant park that crowds up one side of the town.  The whole place is under the Eastry dominion and it was the Eastry influence and dignity that kept its railway station a mile and three-quarters away.  Eastry House is so close that it dominates the whole; one goes across the marketplace (with its old lock-up and stocks), past the great pre-reformation church, a fine grey shell, like some empty skull from which the life has fled, and there at once are the huge wrought-iron gates, and one peeps through them to see the facade of this place, very white and large and fine, down a long avenue of yews.  Eastry was far greater than Bladesover and an altogether completer example of the eighteenth century system.  It ruled not two villages, but a borough, that had sent its sons and cousins to parliament almost as a matter of right so long as its franchise endured.  Every one was in the system, every one—­except my uncle.  He stood out and complained.

My uncle was the first real breach I found in the great front of Bladesover the world had presented me, for Chatham was not so much a breach as a confirmation.  But my uncle had no respect for Bladesover and Eastry—­none whatever.  He did not believe in them.  He was blind even to what they were.  He propounded strange phrases about them, he exfoliated and wagged about novel and incredible ideas.

“This place,” said my uncle, surveying it from his open doorway in the dignified stillness of a summer afternoon, “wants Waking Up!”

I was sorting up patent medicines in the corner.

“I’d like to let a dozen young Americans loose into it,” said my uncle.  “Then we’d see.”

I made a tick against Mother Shipton’s Sleeping Syrup.  We had cleared our forward stock.

“Things must be happening somewhere, George,” he broke out in a querulously rising note as he came back into the little shop.  He fiddled with the piled dummy boxes of fancy soap and scent and so forth that adorned the end of the counter, then turned about petulantly, stuck his hands deeply into his pockets and withdrew one to scratch his head.  “I must do something,” he said.  “I can’t stand it.

“I must invent something.  And shove it….  I could.

“Or a play.  There’s a deal of money in a play, George.  What would you think of me writing a play eh?...  There’s all sorts of things to be done.

“Or the stog-igschange.”

He fell into that meditative whistling of his.

“Sac-ramental wine!” he swore, “this isn’t the world—­it’s Cold Mutton Fat!  That’s what Wimblehurst is!  Cold Mutton Fat!—­dead and stiff!  And I’m buried in it up to the arm pits.  Nothing ever happens, nobody wants things to happen ’scept me!  Up in London, George, things happen.  America!  I wish to Heaven, George, I’d been born American—­where things hum.

“What can one do here?  How can one grow?  While we’re sleepin’ here with our Capital oozing away into Lord Eastry’s pockets for rent-men are up there….”  He indicated London as remotely over the top of the dispensing counter, and then as a scene of great activity by a whirl of the hand and a wink and a meaning smile at me.

“What sort of things do they do?” I asked.

“Rush about,” he said.  “Do things!  Somethin’ glorious.  There’s cover gambling.  Ever heard of that, George?” He drew the air in through his teeth.  “You put down a hundred say, and buy ten thousand pounds worth.  See?  That’s a cover of one per cent.  Things go up one, you sell, realise cent per cent; down, whiff, it’s gone!  Try again!  Cent per cent, George, every day.  Men are made or done for in an hour.  And the shoutin’!  Zzzz….  Well, that’s one way, George.  Then another way—­there’s Corners!”

“They’re rather big things, aren’t they?” I ventured.

“Oh, if you go in for wheat or steel—­yes.  But suppose you tackled a little thing, George.  Just some little thing that only needed a few thousands.  Drugs for example.  Shoved all you had into it—­staked your liver on it, so to speak.  Take a drug—­take ipecac, for example.  Take a lot of ipecac.  Take all there is!  See?  There you are!  There aren’t unlimited supplies of ipecacuanha—­can’t be!—­and it’s a thing people must have.  Then quinine again!  You watch your chance, wait for a tropical war breaking out, let’s say, and collar all the quinine.  Where are they?  Must have quinine, you know.  Eh?  Zzzz.

“Lord! there’s no end of things—­no end of little things.  Dill-water—­all the suffering babes yowling for it.  Eucalyptus again—­cascara—­witch hazel—­menthol—­all the toothache things.  Then there’s antiseptics, and curare, cocaine….”

“Rather a nuisance to the doctors,” I reflected.

“They got to look out for themselves.  By Jove, yes.  They’ll do you if they can, and you do them.  Like brigands.  That makes it romantic.  That’s the Romance of Commerce, George.  You’re in the mountains there!  Think of having all the quinine in the world, and some millionaire’s pampered wife gone ill with malaria, eh?  That’s a squeeze, George, eh?  Eh?  Millionaire on his motor car outside, offering you any price you liked.  That ’ud wake up Wimblehurst….  Lord!  You haven’t an Idea down here.  Not an idea.  Zzzz.”

He passed into a rapt dream, from which escaped such fragments as:  “Fifty per cent. advance sir; security—­to-morrow.  Zzzz.”

The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a sort of irresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever be permitted to do in reality.  It was the sort of nonsense one would talk to make Ewart laugh and set him going on to still odder possibilities.  I thought it was part of my uncle’s way of talking.  But I’ve learnt differently since.  The whole trend of modern money-making is to foresee something that will presently be needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself wealthy.  You buy up land upon which people will presently want to build houses, you secure rights that will bar vitally important developments, and so on, and so on.  Of course the naive intelligence of a boy does not grasp the subtler developments of human inadequacy.  He begins life with a disposition to believe in the wisdom of grown-up people, he does not realise how casual and disingenuous has been the development of law and custom, and he thinks that somewhere in the state there is a power as irresistible as a head master’s to check mischievous and foolish enterprises of every sort.  I will confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I had a clear impression that any one who contrived to do that would pretty certainly go to jail.  Now I know that any one who could really bring it off would be much more likely to go to the House of Lords!

My uncle ranged over the gilt labels of his bottles and drawers for a while, dreaming of corners in this and that.  But at last he reverted to Wimblehurst again.

“You got to be in London when these things are in hand.  Down here—!

“Jee-rusalem!” he cried.  “Why did I plant myself here?  Everything’s done.  The game’s over.  Here’s Lord Eastry, and he’s got everything, except what his lawyers get, and before you get any more change this way you’ll have to dynamite him—­and them.  He doesn’t want anything more to happen.  Why should he?  Any chance ’ud be a loss to him.  He wants everything to burble along and burble along and go on as it’s going for the next ten thousand years, Eastry after Eastry, one parson down another come, one grocer dead, get another!  Any one with any ideas better go away.  They have gone away!  Look at all these blessed people in this place!  Look at ’em!  All fast asleep, doing their business out of habit—­in a sort of dream, Stuffed men would do just as well—­just.  They’ve all shook down into their places.  They don’t want anything to happen either.  They’re all broken in.  There you are!  Only what are they all alive for?...

“Why can’t they get a clockwork chemist?”

He concluded as he often concluded these talks.  “I must invent something,—­that’s about what I must do.  Zzzz.  Some convenience.

Something people want….  Strike out….  You can’t think, George, of anything everybody wants and hasn’t got?  I mean something you could turn out retail under a shilling, say?  Well, you think, whenever you haven’t got anything better to do.  See?”