Tono-Bungay, H. G. Wells [reading like a writer .TXT] 📗

a moment mutely with our eyes. My aunt slapped the pile of books from Mudie’s.

“I’ve been having such a Go of reading, George. You never did!”

“What do you think of the business?” I asked.

“Well, they’ve let him have money,” she said, and thought and raised her eyebrows. “It’s been a time,” she went on. “The flapping about! Me sitting doing nothing and him on the go like a rocket. He’s done wonders. But he wants you, George⁠—he wants you. Sometimes he’s full of hope⁠—talks of when we’re going to have a carriage and be in society⁠—makes it seem so natural and topsy-turvy, I hardly know whether my old heels aren’t up here listening to him, and my old head on the floor.⁠ ⁠… Then he gets depressed. Says he wants restraint. Says he can make a splash but can’t keep on. Says if you don’t come in everything will smash⁠—But you are coming in?”

She paused and looked at me.

“Well⁠—”

“You don’t say you won’t come in!”

“But look here, aunt,” I said, “do you understand quite?⁠ ⁠… It’s a quack medicine. It’s trash.”

“There’s no law against selling quack medicine that I know of,” said my aunt. She thought for a minute and became unusually grave. “It’s our only chance, George,” she said. “If it doesn’t go.⁠ ⁠…”

There came the slamming of a door, and a loud bellowing from the next apartment through the folding doors. “Here-er Shee Rulk lies Poo Tom Bo⁠—oling.”

“Silly old Concertina! Hark at him, George!” She raised her voice. “Don’t sing that, you old Walrus, you! Sing ‘I’m afloat!’ ”

One leaf of the folding doors opened and my uncle appeared.

“Hullo, George! Come along at last? Gossome teacake, Susan?”

“Thought it over George?” he said abruptly.

“Yes,” said I.

“Coming in?”

I paused for a last moment and nodded yes.

“Ah!” he cried. “Why couldn’t you say that a week ago?”

“I’ve had false ideas about the world,” I said. “Oh! they don’t matter now! Yes, I’ll come, I’ll take my chance with you, I won’t hesitate again.”

And I didn’t. I stuck to that resolution for seven long years.

III How We Made Tono-Bungay Hum I

So I made my peace with my uncle, and we set out upon this bright enterprise of selling slightly injurious rubbish at one-and-three-halfpence and two-and-nine a bottle, including the Government stamp. We made Tono-Bungay hum! It brought us wealth, influence, respect, the confidence of endless people. All that my uncle promised me proved truth and understatement; Tono-Bungay carried me to freedoms and powers that no life of scientific research, no passionate service of humanity could ever have given me.⁠ ⁠…

It was my uncle’s genius that did it. No doubt he needed me⁠—I was, I will admit, his indispensable right hand; but his was the brain to conceive. He wrote every advertisement; some of them even he sketched. You must remember that his were the days before the Times took to enterprise and the vociferous hawking of that antiquated Encyclopedia. That alluring, buttonholing, let-me-just-tell-you-quite-soberly-something-you-ought-to-know style of newspaper advertisement, with every now and then a convulsive jump of some attractive phrase into capitals, was then almost a novelty. “Many people who are moderately well think they are quite well,” was one of his early efforts. The jerks in capitals were, “Do Not Need Drugs or Medicine,” and “Simply a Proper Regimen to Get You in Tone.” One was warned against the chemist or druggist who pushed “much-advertised nostrums” on one’s attention. That trash did more harm than good. The thing needed was regimen⁠—and Tono-Bungay!

Very early, too, was that bright little quarter column, at least it was usually a quarter column in the evening papers: “Hilarity⁠—Tono-Bungay. Like Mountain Air in the Veins.” The penetrating trio of questions: “Are you bored with your Business? Are you bored with your Dinner? Are you bored with your Wife?”⁠—that, too, was in our Gower Street days. Both these we had in our first campaign when we worked London south central, and west; and then, too, we had our first poster⁠—the Health, Beauty, and Strength one. That was his design; I happen still to have got by me the first sketch he made for it. I have reproduced it here with one or two others to enable the reader to understand the mental quality that initiated these familiar ornaments of London.

(The second one is about eighteen months later, the germ of the well-known “Fog” poster; the third was designed for an influenza epidemic, but never issued.)

These things were only incidental in my department.

I had to polish them up for the artist and arrange the business of printing and distribution, and after my uncle had had a violent and needless quarrel with the advertising manager of the Daily Regulator about the amount of display given to one of his happy thoughts, I also took up the negotiations of advertisements for the press.

We discussed and worked out distribution together first in the drawing-room floor in Gower Street with my aunt sometimes helping very shrewdly, and then, with a steadily improving type of cigar and older and older whisky, in his smuggery at their first house, the one in Beckenham. Often we worked far into the night, sometimes until dawn.

We really worked infernally hard, and, I recall, we worked with a very decided enthusiasm, not simply on my uncle’s part but mine, It was a game, an absurd but absurdly interesting game, and the points were scored in cases of bottles. People think a happy notion is enough to make a man rich, that fortunes can be made without toil. It’s a dream, as every millionaire (except one or two lucky gamblers) can testify; I doubt if J. D. Rockefeller in the early days of Standard Oil, worked harder than we did. We worked far into