£150,000 – think of it! – for the goodwill in a string of lies and a trade in bottles of mitigated water! Do you realize the madness of the world that sanctions such a thing? Perhaps you don’t. At times use and wont certainly blinded me. If it had not been for Ewart, I don’t think I should have had an inkling of the wonderfulness of this development of my fortunes; I should have grown accustomed to it, fallen in with all its delusions as completely as my uncle presently did. He was immensely proud of the flotation. ‘They’ve never been given such value,’ he said, ‘for a dozen years.’ But Ewart, with his gesticulating hairy hands and bony wrists, is single-handed chorus to all this as it plays itself over again in my memory, and he kept my fundamental absurdity illuminated for me during all this astonishing time.

  ‘It’s just on all fours with the rest of things,’ he remarked; ‘only more so. You needn’t think you’re anything out of the way.’

  I remember one disquisition very distinctly. It was just after Ewart had been to Paris on a mysterious expedition to ‘rough in’ some work for a rising American sculptor. This young man had a commission for an allegorical figure of Truth (draped, of course) for his State Capitol, and he needed help. Ewart had returned with his hair cut en brosse5 and with his costume completely translated into French. He wore, I remember, a bicycling suit of purplish-brown, baggy beyond imagining – the only creditable thing about it was that it had evidently not been made for him – a voluminous black tie, a decadent soft felt hat and several French expletives of a sinister description. ‘Silly clothes, aren’t they?’ he said at the sight of my startled eye. ‘I don’t know why I got ’m. They seemed all right over there.’ He had come down to our Raggett Street place to discuss a benevolent project of mine for a poster by him, and he scattered remarkable discourse over the heads (I hope it was over the heads) of our bottlers.

  ‘What I like about it all, Ponderevo, is its poetry…. That’s where we get the pull of the animals. No animal would ever run a factory like this. Think!… One remembers the Beaver, of course. He might very possibly bottle things, but would he stick a label round ‘em and sell ‘em? The Beaver is a dreamy fool I’ll admit, him and his dams, but after all, there’s a sort of protection about ‘em, a kind of muddy practicality! They prevent things getting at him. And it’s not your poetry only. It’s the poetry of the customer too. Poet answering to poet – soul to soul. Health, Strength and Beauty – in a bottle – the magic philtre! Like a fairy-tale….

  ‘Think of the people to whom your bottles of footle go! (I’m calling it footle, Ponderevo, out of praise,’ he said in parenthesis.)

  ‘Think of the little clerks and jaded women and overworked people. People overstrained with wanting to do, people overstrained with wanting to be…. People, in fact, overstrained… The real trouble of life, Ponderevo, isn’t that we exist – that’s a vulgar error; the real trouble is that we don’t really exist and we want to. That’s what this – in the highest sense – muck stands for! The hunger to be – for once – really alive – to the fingertips!…

  ‘Nobody wants to do and be the things people are – nobody. You don’t want to preside over this – this bottling, I don’t want to wear these beastly clothes and be led about by you, nobody wants to keep on sticking labels on silly bottles at so many farthings a gross. That isn’t existing! That’s – sus – substratum.6 None of us want to be what we are, or to do what we do. Except as a sort of basis. What do we want? You know. I know. Nobody confesses. What we all want to be is something perpetually young and beautiful – young Joves, young Joves, Ponderevo’ – his voice became loud, harsh and declamatory – ‘pursuing coy half-willing nymphs through everlasting forests…’

  There was a just-perceptible listening hang in the work about us.

  ‘Come downstairs,’ I interrupted, ‘we can talk better there.’

  ‘I can talk better here,’ he answered.

  He was just going on, but fortunately the implacable face of Mrs Hampton Diggs appeared down the aisle of bottling machines.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll come.’…

  In the little sanctum below, my uncle was taking a digestive pause after his lunch and by no means alert. His presence sent Ewart back to the theme of modern commerce, over the excellent cigar my uncle gave him. He behaved with the elaborate deference due to a business magnate from an unknown man.

  ‘What I was pointing out to your nephew, sir,’ said Ewart, putting both elbows on the table, ‘was the poetry of commerce. He doesn’t, you know, seem to see it at all.’

  My uncle nodded brightly. ‘Whad I tell ‘im,’ he said round his cigar.

  ‘You are artists. You and I, sir, can talk, if you will permit me, as one artist to another. It’s advertisement has – done it. Advertisement has revolutionized trade and industry; it is going to revolutionize the world. The old merchant used to tote about commodities; the new one creates values. Doesn’t need to tote. He takes something that isn’t worth anything – or something that isn’t particularly worth anything, and he makes it worth something. He takes mustard that is just like anybody else’s mustard, and he goes about saying, shouting, singing, chalking on walls, writing inside people’s books, putting it everywhere, “Smith’s Mustard is the Best.” And behold it is the Best!’

  ‘True,’ said my uncle, chubbily and with a dreamy sense of mysticism; ‘true!’

  It’s just like an artist; he takes a lump of white marble on the verge of a lime-kiln, he chips it about, he makes – he makes a monument to himself – and others – a monument the world will not willingly let die. Talking of mustard, sir, I was at Clapham Junction the other day, and all the banks are overgrown with horseradish that’s got loose from a garden somewhere. You know what horseradish is – grows like wildfire – spreads – spreads. I stood at the end of the platform looking at the stuff and thinking about it. “Like fame,” I thought, “Rank and wild where it isn’t wanted. Why don’t the really good things in life grow like horseradish?” I thought. My mind went off in a peculiar way it does from that to the idea that mustard costs a penny a tin – I bought some the other day for a ham I had. It came into my head that it would be ripping good business to use horseradish to adulterate mustard. I had a sort of idea that I could plunge into business on that, get rich and come back to my own proper monumental art again. And then I said, “But why adulterate? I don’t like the idea of adulteration.”’

  ‘Shabby,’ said my uncle, nodding his head. ‘Bound to get found out!’

  ‘And totally unnecessary too! Why not do up a mixture – three-quarters pounded horseradish and a quarter mustard – give it a fancy name – and sell it at twice the mustard price. See? I very nearly started the business straight away, only something happened. My train came along.’

  ‘Jolly good ideer,’ said my uncle. He looked at me. ‘That really is an ideer, George,’ he said.

  ‘Take shavin’s, again! You know that poem of Longfellow’s, 7 sir, that sounds exactly like the first declension. What is it? – “man’s a maker men say!” ’

  My uncle nodded and gurgled some quotation that died away.

  ‘Jolly good poem, George,’ he said in an aside to me.

  ‘Well, it’s about a carpenter and a poetic Victorian child, you know, and some shavin’s. The child made no end out of the shavin’s. So might you. Powder ‘em. They might be anything. Soak ‘em in jipper, – Xylo-tobacco!8 Powder ‘em and get a little tar and turpentinous smell in, – wood-packing for hot baths – a Certain Cure for the scourge of Influenza! There’s all these patent grain foods, – what Americans call cereals. I believe I’m right, sir, in saying they’re sawdust.’

  ‘No!’ said my uncle, removing his cigar; ‘as far as I can find out it’s really grain, – spoilt grain…. I’ve been going into that.’

  ‘Well, there you are!’ said Ewart. ‘Say it’s spoilt grain. It carries out my case just as well. Your modern commerce is no more buying and selling than sculpture. It’s mercy – it’s salvation. It’s rescue work! It takes all sorts of fallen commodities by the hand and raises them. Cana9 isn’t in it. You turn water into Tono-Bungay.’

  ‘Tono-Bungay’s all right,’ said my uncle, suddenly grave. ‘We aren’t talking of Tono-Bungay.’

  ‘Your nephew, sir, is hard; he wants everything to go to a sort of predestinated end; he’s a Calvinist of Commerce. Offer him a dustbin full of stuff; he calls it refuse – passes by on the other side. Now you, sir – you’d make cinders respect themselves.’

  My uncle regarded him dubiously for a moment. But there was a touch of appreciation in his eye.

  ‘Might make ‘em into a sort of sanitary brick,’ he reflected over his cigar end.

  ‘Or a friable10 biscuit. Why not? You might advertise: “Why are Birds so Bright? Because they digest their food perfectly! Why do they digest their food so perfectly? Because they have a gizzard! Why hasn’t man a gizzard? Because he can buy Ponderevo’s Ashpit Triturating11 Friable Biscuit – Which is Better.” ’

  He delivered the last words in a shout with his hairy hand flourished in the air….

  ‘Damn clever fellow,’ said my uncle, after he had gone. ‘I know a man when I see one. He’ll do. Bit drunk, I should say. But that only makes some chaps brighter. If he wants to do that poster, he can. Zzzz. That ideer of his about the horseradish. There’s something in that, George. I’m going to think over that…’

  I may say at once that my poster project came to nothing in the end, though Ewart devoted an interesting week to the matter. He let his unfortunate disposition to irony run away with him. He produced a picture of two Beavers with a subtle likeness, he said, to myself and my uncle – the likeness to my uncle certainly wasn’t half bad – and they were bottling rows and rows of Tono-Bungay, with the legend ‘Modern Commerce’. It certainly wouldn’t have sold a case, though he urged it on me one cheerful evening on the ground that it would ‘arouse curiosity’. In addition he produced a quite shocking study of my uncle, excessively and needlessly nude but, so far as I was able to judge, an admirable likeness, engaged in feats of strength of a Gargantuan type before an audience of deboshed and shattered ladies. The legend, ‘Health, Beauty, Strength’ below, gave a needed point to his parody. This he hung up in the studio over the oil-shop, with a flap of brown paper by way of a curtain over it to accentuate its libellous offence.

  CHAPTER 4

  Marion

  §1

  As I look back on those days in which we built up the great Tono-Bungay property out of human hope and a credit for bottles and rent and printing, I see my life as it were arranged in two parallel columns of unequal width, a wider, more diffused, eventful and various one which continually broadens out, the business side of my life, and a narrow, darker and darkling one shot ever and again with a gleam of happiness, my home life with Marion. For of course I married Marion.

  I didn’t, as a matter of fact, marry her until a year after Tono-Bungay was thoroughly afloat, and then only after conflicts and discussions of a quite strenuous sort. By that time I was twenty-four. It seems the next thing to childhood now. We were both in certain directions unusually ignorant and simple; we were temperamentally antagonistic, and we hadn’t – I don’t think we were capable of – an idea in common. She was young and extraordinarily conventional – she seemed never to have an idea of her own but always the idea of her class – and I was young and sceptical, enterprising and passionate; the two links that held us together were the intense appeal her physical beauty had for me, and her appreciation of her importance in my thoughts. There can be no doubt of my passion for her. In her I had discovered woman desired. The nights I have lain awake on account of her, writhing, biting my wrists in a fever of longing!…

  I have told how I got myself a silk hat and black coat to please her on Sunday – to the derision of some of my fellow students who chanced to meet me – and how we became engaged. But that was only the beginning of our differences. To her that meant the beginning of a not unpleasant little secrecy, an occasional use of verbal endearments, perhaps even kisses. It was something to go on indefinitely, interfering in no way with her gossiping spells of work at Smithie’s. To me it was a pledge to come together into the utmost intimacy of soul and body so soon as we could contrive it….

  I don’t know if it will strike the reader that I am setting out to discuss the queer unwise love relationship and my bungle of a marriage with excessive solemnity. But to me it seems to reach out to vastly wider issues than our own personal affair. I’ve thought over my life. In these last few years I’ve tried to get at least a little wisdom out of it. And in particular I’ve thought over this part of my life. I’m enormously impressed by the ignorant, unguided way in which we two entangled ourselves with each other. It seems to me the queerest thing in all this network of misunderstandings and misstatements and faulty and ramshackle conventions which makes up our social order as the individual meets it, that we should have come together so accidentally and so blindly. Because we were no more than samples of the common fate. Love is not only the cardinal fact in the individual life, but the most important concern of the community; after all, the way in which the young people of this generation pair off determines the fate of the nation; all the other affairs of the state are subsidiary to that. And we leave it to flushed and blundering youth to stumble on its own significance, with nothing to guide it but shocked looks and sentimental twaddle and base whisperings and cant-smeared examples.

  I have tried to indicate something of my own sexual development in the preceding chapter. Nobody was ever frank and decent with me in this relation, nobody, no book, ever came and said to me thus and thus is the world made and so and so is necessary. Everything came obscurely, indefinitely, perplexingly; and all I knew of law or convention in the matter had the form of threatenings and prohibitions. Except through the furtive, shameful talk of my coevals at Goudhurst and Wimblehurst, I was not even warned against quite horrible dangers. My ideas were made partly of instinct, partly of a romantic imagination, partly woven out of a medley of scraps of suggestion that came to me haphazard. I had read widely and confusedly: Vathek, Shelley, Tom Paine, Plutarch, Carlyle, Haeckel, William Morris, the Bible, the Freethinker, the Clarion, The Woman Who Did, 1 – I mention the ingredients that come first to mind. All sorts of ideas were jumbled up in me and never a lucid explanation. But it was evident to me that the world regarded Shelley, for example, as a very heroic as well as beautiful person; and that to defy convention and succumb magnificently to passion was the proper thing to do to gain the respect and affection of all decent people.

  And the make-up of Marion’s mind in the matter was an equally irrational affair. Her training had been one not simply of silences, but suppressions. An enormous force of suggestion had so shaped her that the intense natural fastidiousness of girlhood had developed into an absolute perversion of instinct. For all that is cardinal in this essential business of life she had one inseparable epithet – ‘horrid’. Without any such training she would have been a shy lover, but now she was an impossible one. For the rest she had derived, I suppose, partly from the sort of fiction she got from the Public Library, and partly from the workroom talk at Smithie’s. So far as the former origin went, she had an idea of love as a state of worship and service on the part of the man and of condescension on the part of the woman. There was nothing ‘horrid’ about it in any fiction she had read. The man gave presents, did services, sought to be in every way delightful. The woman ‘went out’ with him, smiled at him, was kissed by him in decorous secrecy, and if he chanced to offend, denied her countenance and presence. Usually she did something ‘for his good’ to him, made him go to church, made him give up smoking or gambling, smartened him up. Quite at the end of the story came a marriage, and after that the interest ceased.

  That was the tenor of Marion’s fiction; but I think the worktable conversation at Smithie’s did something to modify that. At Smithie’ s it was recognized, I think, that a ‘fellow’ was a possession to be desired; that it was better to be engaged to a fellow than not; that fellows had to be kept – they might be mislaid, they might even be stolen. There was a case of stealing at Smithie’s, and many tears.

  Smithie I met before we were married, and afterwards she became a frequent visitor to our house at Ealing. She was a thin, bright-eyed, hawk-nosed girl of thirty-odd, with prominent teeth, a high-pitched, eager voice, and a disposition to be urgently smart in her dress. Her hats were startling and various but invariably disconcerting, and she talked in a rapid, nervous flow that was hilarious rather than witty, and broken by little screams of ‘Oh my dear!’ and ‘You never did!’ She was the first woman I ever met who used scent. Poor old Smithie! What a harmless, kindly soul she really was, and how heartily I detested her! Out of the profits on the Persian robes she supported a sister’s family of three children, she ‘helped’ a worthless brother and overflowed in help even to her workgirls, but that didn’t weigh with me in those youthfully narrow times. It was one of the intense minor irritations of my married life that Smithie’s whirlwind chatter seemed to me to have far more influence with Marion than anything I had to say. Before all things I coveted her grip upon Marion’s inaccessible mind.

  In the workroom at Smithie’s, I gathered, they always spoke of me demurely as ‘A Certain Person‘. I was rumoured to be dreadfully ‘clever‘, and there were doubts – not altogether without justification – of the sweetness of my temper.

  §2

  Well, these general explanations will enable the reader to understand the distressful times we two had together when presently I began to feel on a footing with Marion and to fumble conversationally for the mind and the wonderful passion I felt, obstinately and stupidly, must be in her. I think she thought me the maddest of sane men; ‘clever’, in fact, which at Smithie’s was, I suppose, the next thing to insanity, a word intimating incomprehensible and incalculable motives….