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

in Infancy,” a plate powder, “the Paragon,” and a knife powder. We roped in a good little second-rate black-lead firm, and carried their origins back into the mists of antiquity. It was my uncle’s own unaided idea that we should associate that commodity with the Black Prince. He became industriously curious about the past of black-lead. I remember his buttonholing the president of the Pepys Society.

“I say, is there any black-lead in Pepys? You know⁠—black-lead⁠—for grates! Or does he pass it over as a matter of course?”

He became in those days the terror of eminent historians. “Don’t want your drum and trumpet history⁠—no fear,” he used to say. “Don’t want to know who was who’s mistress, and why so-and-so devastated such a province; that’s bound to be all lies and upsy-down anyhow. Not my affair. Nobody’s affair now. Chaps who did it didn’t clearly know.⁠ ⁠… What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for Housemaid’s Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting, and was the Black Prince⁠—you know the Black Prince⁠—was he enameled or painted, or what? I think myself, black-leaded⁠—very likely⁠—like pipe-clay⁠—but did they use blacking so early?”

So it came about that in designing and writing those Moggs’ Soap Advertisements, that wrought a revolution in that department of literature, my uncle was brought to realise not only the lost history, but also the enormous field for invention and enterprise that lurked among the little articles, the dustpans and mincers, the mousetraps and carpet-sweepers that fringe the shops of the oilman and domestic ironmonger. He was recalled to one of the dreams of his youth, to his conception of the Ponderevo Patent Flat that had been in his mind so early as the days before I went to serve him at Wimblehurst. “The Home, George,” he said, “wants straightening up. Silly muddle! Things that get in the way. Got to organise it.”

For a time he displayed something like the zeal of a genuine social reformer in relation to these matters.

“We’ve got to bring the Home Up to Date? That’s my idee, George. We got to make a civilised domestic machine out of these relics of barbarism. I’m going to hunt up inventors, make a corner in d’mestic idees. Everything. Balls of string that won’t dissolve into a tangle, and gum that won’t dry into horn. See? Then after conveniences⁠—beauty. Beauty, George! All these few things ought to be made fit to look at; it’s your aunt’s idea, that. Beautiful jam-pots! Get one of those new art chaps to design all the things they make ugly now. Patent carpet-sweepers by these greenwood chaps, housemaid’s boxes it’ll be a pleasure to fall over⁠—rich coloured house-flannels. Zzzz. Pails, f’rinstance. Hang ’em up on the walls like warming-pans. All the polishes and things in such tins⁠—you’ll want to cuddle ’em, George! See the notion? ’Sted of all the silly ugly things we got.”⁠ ⁠…

We had some magnificent visions; they so affected me that when I passed ironmongers and oil-shops they seemed to me as full of promise as trees in late winter, flushed with the effort to burst into leaf and flower.⁠ ⁠… And really we did do much towards that very brightness these shops display. They were dingy things in the eighties compared to what our efforts have made them now, grey quiet displays.

Well, I don’t intend to write down here the tortuous financial history of Moggs’ Limited, which was our first development of Moggs and Sons; nor will I tell very much of how from that we spread ourselves with a larger and larger conception throughout the chandlery and minor ironmongery, how we became agents for this little commodity, partners in that, got a tentacle round the neck of a specialised manufacturer or so, secured a pull upon this or that supply of raw material, and so prepared the way for our second flotation, Domestic Utilities; “Do it,” they reordered it in the city. And then came the reconstruction of Tono-Bungay, and then “Household services” and the Boom!

That sort of development is not to be told in detail in a novel. I have, indeed, told much of it elsewhere. It is to be found set out at length, painfully at length, in my uncle’s examination and mine in the bankruptcy proceedings, and in my own various statements after his death. Some people know everything in that story, some know it all too well, most do not want the details, it is the story of a man of imagination among figures, and unless you are prepared to collate columns of pounds, shillings and pence, compare dates and check additions, you will find it very unmeaning and perplexing. And after all, you wouldn’t find the early figures so much wrong as strained. In the matter of Moggs and Do Ut, as in the first Tono-Bungay promotion and in its reconstruction, we left the court by city standards without a stain on our characters. The great amalgamation of Household Services was my uncle’s first really big-scale enterprise and his first display of bolder methods: for this we bought back Do Ut, Moggs (going strong with a seven percent dividend) and acquired Skinnerton’s polishes, the Riffleshaw properties and the Runcorn’s mincer and coffee-mill business. To that amalgamation I was really not a party; I left it to my uncle because I was then beginning to get keen upon the soaring experiments I had taken on from the results then to hand of Lilienthal, Pilcher and the Wright brothers. I was developing a glider into a flyer. I meant to apply power to this glider as soon as I could work out one or two residual problems affecting the longitudinal stability. I knew that I had a sufficiently light motor in my own modification of Bridger’s light turbine, but I knew too that until I had cured my aeroplane of a tendency demanding constant alertness from me, a tendency to jerk up its nose at unexpected moments and slide