The H.G. Wells Reader (69 page)

“This is our home” he said smiling, and with thoughtful eyes on me
.

As David Lodge argues
, Tono-Bungay
belongs in the tradition of the “State of England” novel, in which character is less important than a rendering of the institutions and procedures that bear responsibility for the way things are. It is a long, sprawling novel that traces George Ponderevo's growth (with many parallels to Wells's own) through different stages and arenas of British life. Few other novels catch the energy of commerce and its fraud so well as
Tono-Bungay.
The title is the name of a quack medicine that George's uncle Teddy Ponderevo concocts and makes a very great fortune selling. George himself, in the following selections, has some qualms about the business. As he overcomes them, we enter an ambiguous world of compromise and excitement. Uncle Teddy is a magnificent comic figure, completely taken by the goal of commercial capitalism, a man who is not a villain but who knows at his heart that he is acting like a scoundrel, full of the “air” of the magnate entrepreneur, able to play the role with bravado and with an eye to the details. Aunt Susan, Teddy's spouse, is one of Wells's most sympathetic women. She manages to nurture Teddy and George in their social adventure without any illusions about the legitimacy of the thing
. Tono-Bungay
ends with economic disaster. After helping his uncle escape his creditors to die with some trace of dignity on the continent, George moves on and becomes a shipbuilder. The final scene, selected here, renders the double quality of dangerous excitement and moral ambiguity that has recurred throughout the novel
.

Throughout my student days I had not seen my uncle. I refrained from going to him in spite of an occasional regret that in this way I estranged myself from my aunt Susan, and I maintained a sulky attitude of mind towards him. And I don't think that once in all that time I gave a thought to that mystic word of his that was to alter all the world for us. Yet I had not altogether forgotten it. It was with a touch of memory, dim transient perplexity if no more—why did this thing seem in some way personal?—that I read a new inscription upon the hoarding:

The Secret of Vigour, Tono-Bungay.

That was all. It was simple and yet in some way arresting. I found myself repeating the word after I had passed, it roused one's attention like the sound of distant guns. “Tono”—what's that? And deep, rich, unhurrying;—“
Bun
-gay!”

Then came my uncle's amazing telegram, his answer to my hostile note, which must have followed him on from place to place; “
Come to me at once you are wanted three hundred a year certain tono-bungay
.”

“By Jove!” I cried, “of course!

“It's something—. A patent-medicine! I wonder what he wants with me?”

In his Napoleonic way my uncle had omitted to give an address. His telegram had been handed in at Farringdon Road, and after complex meditations I replied to Ponderevo, Farringdon Road, trusting to the rarity of our surname to reach him.

“Where are you?” I asked.

His reply came promptly:

“192A, Raggett Street, E.C.”

The next day I took an unsanctioned holiday after the morning's lecture. I discovered my uncle in a wonderfully new silk hat—oh, a splendid hat! With a rolling brim that went beyond the common fashion. It was decidedly too big for him—that was its only fault. It was stuck on the back of his head, and he was in a white waistcoat and shirt-sleeves. He welcomed me with a forgetfulness of my bitter satire and my hostile abstinence that was almost divine. His glasses fell off at the sight of me. His round inexpressive eyes shone brightly. He held out his plump short hand.

“Here we are, George! What did I tell you? Needn't whisper it now, my boy. Shout it—
loud
! Spread it about! Tell every one! Tono—TONO—TONO-BUYNGAY!”

Raggett Street, you must understand, was a thoroughfare over which some one had distributed large quantities of cabbage stumps and leaves. It opened out of the upper end of Farringdon Street, and 192A was a shop with the plate-glass front coloured chocolate, on which several of the same bills I had read upon the hoardings had been struck. The floor was covered by street mud that had been brought in on dirty boots, and three energetic young men of the hooligan type, in neck-wraps and caps, were packing wooden cases with papered-up bottles, amidst much straw and confusion. The counter was littered with these same swathed bottles, of a pattern then novel but now amazingly familiar in the world, the blue paper with the coruscating figure of a genial nude giant, and the printed directions of how under practically all circumstances to take Tono-Bungay. Beyond the counter on one side opened a staircase down which I seem to remember a girl descending with a further consignment of bottles, and the rest of the background was a high partition, also chocolate, with “Temporary Laboratory” inscribed upon it in white letters, and over a door that pierced it, “Office.” Here I rapped, inaudible amid much hammering, and then entered unanswered to find my uncle, dressed as I have described, one hand gripping a sheaf of letters, and the other scratching his head as he dictated to one of three toiling typewriter girls. Behind him was a further partition and a door inscribed “ABSOLUTELY PRIVATE—NO ADMISSION,” thereon. This partition was of wood painted the universal chocolate up to about eight feet from the ground and then of glass. Through the glass I saw dimly a crowded suggestion of crucibles and glass retorts,
and—by Jove!—yes!—the dear old Wimblehurst air-pump still! It gave me quite a little thrill—that air-pump! And beside it was the electrical machine—but something—some serious trouble—had happened to that. All these were evidently placed on a shelf just at the level to show.

“Come right into the sanctum,” said my uncle, after he had finished something about “esteemed consideration,” and whisked me through the door into a room that quite amazingly failed to verify the promise of that apparatus. It was papered with dingy wallpaper that had peeled in places; it contained a fireplace, an easy-chair with a cushion, a table on which stood two or three big bottles, a number of cigar-boxes on the mantel, a whisky Tantalus and a row of soda syphons. He shut the door after me carefully.

“Well, here we are!” he said. “Going strong! Have a whiskey, George? No!—Wise man! Neither will I! You see me at it! At it—hard!”

“Hard at what?”

“Read it,” and he thrust into my hand a label—that label that has now become one of the most familiar objects of the chemist's shop, the greenish-blue rather old-fashioned bordering, the legend, the name in good black type, very clear, and the strong man all set about with lightning flashes above the double column of skillful lies in red—the label of Tono-Bungay. “It's afloat,” he said, as I stood puzzling at this, “It's afloat. I'm afloat!” And suddenly he burst out singing in that throaty tenor of his—

“I'm afloat, I'm afloat on the fierce flowing tide
,

The ocean's my home and my bark is my bride!”

“Ripping song that is, George. Not so much a bark as a solution, but still—it does! Here we are at it! By-the-bye! Half a mo'! I've thought of a thing.” He whisked out, leaving me to examine this nuclear spot at leisure, while his voice became dictatorial without. The den struck me as in its large grey dirty way quite unprecedented and extraordinary. The bottles were all labelled simply A, B, C, and so forth, and that dear old apparatus above, seen from this side, was even more patently “On the shelf” than when it had been used to impress Wimblehurst. I saw nothing for it but to sit down in the chair and await my uncle's explanations. I remarked, a frock-coat with satin lapels behind the door; there was a dignified umbrella in the corner and a clothes-brush and a hat-brush stood on a side-table. My uncle returned in five minutes looking at his watch—a gold watch—“Gettin' lunch-time, George,” he said. “You'd better come and have lunch with me!”

“How's Aunt Susan?” I asked.

“Exuberant. Never saw her so larky. This has bucked her up something wonderful—all this.”

“All what?”

“Tono-Bungay.”

“What is Tono-Bungay?” I asked.

My uncle hesitated. “Tell you after lunch, George,” he said. “Come along!” and having locked up the sanctum after himself, led the way along a narrow dirty pavement, lined with barrows and swept at times by avalanche-like porters bearing burthens to vans, to Farringdon Street. He hailed a passing cab superbly, and the cabman was infinitely respectful. “Schäfers',” he said, and off we went side by side—and with me more and more amazed at all these things—to Schäfers' Hotel, the second of the two big places with huge lace-curtain-covered windows near the corner of Blackfriars Bridge.

I will confess I felt a magic change in our relative proportions as the two colossal, pale-blue-and-red-liveried porters of Schäfers' held open the inner doors for us with a salutation that in some manner they seemed to confine wholly to my uncle. Instead of being about four inches taller, I felt at least the same size as he, and very much slenderer. Still more obsequious waiters relieved him of the new hat and the dignified umbrella, and took his orders for our lunch. He gave them with a fine assurance.

He nodded to several of the waiters.

“They know me, George, already,” he said. “Point me out. Lively place! Eye for coming men!”

The detailed business of the lunch engaged our attention for a while, and then I leaned across my plate. “And
now
?” said I.

“It's the secret of vigour. Didn't you read that label?”

“Yes, but—”

“It's selling like hot cakes.”

“And what is it?” I pressed.

“Well,” said my uncle, and then leaned forward and spoke softly under cover of his hand, “It's nothing more or less than . . .”

(But here an unfortunate scruple intervenes. After all, Tono-bungay is still a marketable commodity and in the hands of purchasers, who bought it from—among other venders—me. No! I am afraid I cannot give it away.)

“You see,” said my uncle in a slow confidential whisper, with eyes very wide and a creased forehead, “it's nice because of the” (here he mentioned a flavouring matter and an aromatic spirit), “it's stimulating because of” (here he mentioned two very vivid tonics, one with a marked action on the kidneys). “And the” (here he mentioned two other ingredients) “makes it pretty intoxicating. Cocks their tails. Then there's” (but I touch on the essential secret). “And there you are. I got it out of an old book of recipes—all except the” (here he mentioned the more virulent substance, the one that assails the kidneys), “which is my idea. Modern touch! There you are!”

He reverted to the direction of our lunch.

Presently he was leading the way to the lounge—a sumptuous place in red morocco and yellow glazed crockery, with incredible vistas of settees and sofas and things, and there I found myself grouped with him in two excessively upholstered chairs with an earthenware Moorish table between us bearing coffee and Benedictine, and I was tasting the delights of a tenpenny cigar. My uncle smoked a similar cigar in an habituated manner, and he looked energetic and knowing and luxurious and
most unexpectedly a little bounder, round the end of it. It was just a trivial flaw upon our swagger, perhaps, that we both were clear our cigars had to be “mild.” He got obliquely across the spaces of his great arm-chair so as to incline confidentially to my ear, he curled up his little legs, and I, in my longer way, adopted a corresponding receptive obliquity. I felt that we should strike an unbiased observer as a couple of very deep and wily and developing and repulsive persons.

“I want to let you into this”—puff—“George,” said my uncle round the end of his cigar. “For many reasons.”

His voice grew lower and more cunning. He made explanations that to my inexperience did not completely explain. I retain an impression of a long credit and a share with a firm of wholesale chemists, of a credit and a prospective share with some pirate printers, of a third share for a leading magazine and newspaper proprietor.

“I played 'em off one against the other,” said my uncle. I took his point in an instant. He had gone to each of them in turn and said the others had come in.

“I put up four hundred pounds,” said my uncle, “myself and my all. And you know—”

He assumed a brisk confidence. “I hadn't five hundred pence. At least—”

For a moment he really was just a little embarrassed. “I
did
,” he said, “produce capital. You see, there was that trust affair of yours—I ought I suppose—in strict legality—to have put that straight first. Zzzz. . . .

“It was a bold thing to do,” said my uncle, shifting the venue from the region of honour to the region of courage. And then with a characteristic outburst of piety, “Thank God it's all come right!

“And now, I suppose, you ask where do
you
come in! Well, fact is I've always believed in you, George. You've got—it's a sort of dismal grit. Bark your shins, rouse you, and you'll go! You'd rush any position you had a mind to rush. I know a bit about character, George—trust me. You've got—” He clenched his hands and thrust them out suddenly, and at the same time said, with explosive violence, “Wooosh! Yes. You have! The way you put away that Latin at Wimblehurst; I've never forgotten it. Wo-oo-oo-osh! Your science and all that! Wo-oo-oo-osh! I know my limitations. There's things I can do, and” (he spoke in a whisper, as though this was the first hint of his life's secret) “there's things I can't. Well, I can create this business, but I can't make it go. I'm too voluminous—I'm a boiler-over, not a simmering stick-at-it. You keep on
hotting up and hotting up
. Papins' digester. That's you, steady and long and piling up,—then, wo-oo-oo-oo-osh. Come in and stiffen these niggers. Teach them that wo-oo-oo-osh. There you are! That's what I'm after. You! Nobody else believes you're more than a body. Come right in with me and be a man. Eh, George? Think of the fun of it—a thing on the go—a Real Live Thing! Wooshing it up! Making it buzz and spin! Whoo-oo-oo.”—He made alluring expanding circles in the air with his hand. “Eh?”