Tono Bungay

I didn’t succumb without a struggle to my uncle’s allurements.  Indeed, I held out for a week while I contemplated life and my prospects.  It was a crowded and muddled contemplation.  It invaded even my sleep.

My interview with the Registrar, my talk with my uncle, my abrupt discovery of the hopeless futility of my passion for Marion, had combined to bring me to sense of crisis.  What was I going to do with life?

I remember certain phases of my indecisions very well.

I remember going home from our talk.  I went down Farringdon Street to the Embankment because I thought to go home by Holborn and Oxford Street would be too crowded for thinking….  That piece of Embankment from Blackfriars to Westminster still reminds me of that momentous hesitation.

You know, from first to last, I saw the business with my eyes open, I saw its ethical and moral values quite clearly.  Never for a moment do I remember myself faltering from my persuasion that the sale of Tono-Bungay was a thoroughly dishonest proceeding.  The stuff was, I perceived, a mischievous trash, slightly stimulating, aromatic and attractive, likely to become a bad habit and train people in the habitual use of stronger tonics and insidiously dangerous to people with defective kidneys.  It would cost about sevenpence the large bottle to make, including bottling, and we were to sell it at half a crown plus the cost of the patent medicine stamp.  A thing that I will confess deterred me from the outset far more than the sense of dishonesty in this affair, was the supreme silliness of the whole concern.  I still clung to the idea that the world of men was or should be a sane and just organisation, and the idea that I should set myself gravely, just at the fine springtime of my life, to developing a monstrous bottling and packing warehouse, bottling rubbish for the consumption of foolish, credulous and depressed people, had in it a touch of insanity.  My early beliefs still clung to me.  I felt assured that somewhere there must be a hitch in the fine prospect of ease and wealth under such conditions; that somewhere, a little overgrown, perhaps, but still traceable, lay a neglected, wasted path of use and honour for me.

My inclination to refuse the whole thing increased rather than diminished at first as I went along the Embankment.  In my uncle’s presence there had been a sort of glamour that had prevented an outright refusal.  It was a revival of affection for him I felt in his presence, I think, in part, and in part an instinctive feeling that I must consider him as my host.  But much more was it a curious persuasion he had the knack of inspiring—­a persuasion not so much of his integrity and capacity as of the reciprocal and yielding foolishness of the world.  One felt that he was silly and wild, but in some way silly and wild after the fashion of the universe.  After all, one must live somehow.  I astonished him and myself by temporising.

“No,” said I, “I’ll think it over!”

And as I went along the embankment the first effect was all against my uncle.  He shrank—­for a little while he continued to shrink—­in perspective until he was only a very small shabby little man in a dirty back street, sending off a few hundred bottles of rubbish to foolish buyers.  The great buildings on the right of us, the Inns and the School Board place—­as it was then—­Somerset House, the big hotels, the great bridges, Westminster’s outlines ahead, had an effect of grey largeness that reduced him to the proportions of a busy black beetle in a crack in the floor.

And then my eye caught the advertisements on the south side of “Sorber’s Food,” of “Cracknell’s Ferric Wine,” very bright and prosperous signs, illuminated at night, and I realised how astonishingly they looked at home there, how evidently part they were in the whole thing.

I saw a man come charging out of Palace Yard—­the policeman touched his helmet to him—­with a hat and a bearing astonishingly like my uncle’s.  After all,—­didn’t Cracknell himself sit in the House?

Tono-Bungay shouted at me from a hoarding near Adelphi Terrace; I saw it afar off near Carfax Street; it cried out again upon me in Kensington High Street, and burst into a perfect clamour; six or seven times I saw it as I drew near my diggings.  It certainly had an air of being something more than a dream.

Yes, I thought it over—­thoroughly enough….  Trade rules the world.  Wealth rather than trade!  The thing was true, and true too was my uncle’s proposition that the quickest way to get wealth is to sell the cheapest thing possible in the dearest bottle.  He was frightfully right after all.  Pecunnia non olet,—­a Roman emperor said that.  Perhaps my great heroes in Plutarch were no more than such men, fine now only because they are distant; perhaps after all this Socialism to which I had been drawn was only a foolish dream, only the more foolish because all its promises were conditionally true.  Morris and these others played with it wittingly; it gave a zest, a touch of substance, to their aesthetic pleasures.  Never would there be good faith enough to bring such things about.  They knew it; every one, except a few young fools, knew it.  As I crossed the corner of St. James’s Park wrapped in thought, I dodged back just in time to escape a prancing pair of greys.  A stout, common-looking woman, very magnificently dressed, regarded me from the carriage with a scornful eye.  “No doubt,” thought I, “a pill-vendor’s wife….”

Running through all my thoughts, surging out like a refrain, was my uncle’s master-stroke, his admirable touch of praise:  “Make it all slick—­and then make it go Woosh.  I know you can!  Oh!  I know you can!”