H G Wells Omnibus, page 340
‘Shall I serve the tea now, Mem?’ said the real housemaid, surveying our greetings coldly.
‘Not till Mr Ponderevo comes, Meggie,’ said my aunt, and grimaced with extraordinary swiftness and virulence as the housemaid turned her back.
‘Meggie, she calls herself,’ said my aunt as the door closed, and left me to infer a certain want of sympathy.
‘You’re looking very jolly, aunt,’ said I.
‘What do you think of all this old Business he’s got?’ asked my aunt.
‘Seems a promising thing,’ I said.
‘I suppose there is a business somewhere?’
‘Haven’t you seen it?’
‘’fraid I’d say something at it, George, if I did. So he won’t let me. It came on quite suddenly. Brooding he was and writing letters and sizzling something awful – like a chestnut going to pop. Then he come home one day saying Tono-Bungay till I thought he was clean off his onion, and singing – what was it?’
‘“I’m afloat, I’m afloat,”’ I guessed.
‘The very thing. You’ve heard him. And saying our fortunes were made. Took me out to the Ho’born Restaurant, 18 George, – dinner, and we had champagne, stuff that blows up the back of your nose and makes you go So, and he said at last he’d got things worthy of me – and we moved here next day. It’s a swell house, George. Three pounds a week for the rooms. And he says the Business’ll stand it.’
She looked at me doubtfully.
‘Either do that or smash,’ I said profoundly.
We discussed the question for a moment mutely with our eyes. My aunt slapped the pile of books from Mudie’s.19
‘I’ve been having such a Go of reading, George. You never did!’
‘What do you think of the business?’ 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 sidding 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.’20
‘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 tea-cake, 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.
CHAPTER 3
How We Made Tono-Bungay Hum
§1
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 those were the days before the Times took to enterprise and the vociferous hawking of that antiquated Encyclopaedia.1 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 incidentally 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 advertisement manager of the Daily Regulator about the amount of display given to one of his happy thoughts, I also took up the negotiation 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 snuggery 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 the night – and we also worked all day. We made a rule to be always dropping in at the factory unannounced to keep things right – for at first we could afford no properly responsible underlings – and we travelled London, pretending to be our own representatives and making all sorts of special arrangements.
But none of this was my proper work, and as soon as we could get other men in, I dropped the travelling, though my uncle found it particularly interesting and kept it up for years. ‘Does me good, George, to see the chaps behind their counters like I was once,’ he explained. My special and distinctive duty was to give Tono-Bungay substance and an outward and visible bottle, to translate my uncle’s great imaginings into the creation of case after case of labelled bottles of nonsense, and the punctual discharge of them by railway, road and steamer towards their ultimate goal in the Great Stomach of the People. By all modern standards the business was, as my uncle would say, ‘absolutely bona fide’. We sold our stuff and got the money, and spent the money honestly in lies and clamour to sell more stuff. Section by section we spread it over the whole of the British Isles; first working the middle-class London suburbs, then the outer suburbs, then the home counties, then going (with new bills and a more pious style of ‘ad’) into Wales, a great field always for a new patent medicine, and then into Lancashire. My uncle had in his inner office a big map of England, and as we took up fresh sections of the local press and our consignments invaded new areas, flags for advertisements and pink underlines for orders showed our progress.
‘The romance of modern commerce, George!’ my uncle would say, rubbing his hands together and drawing in air through his teeth. ‘The romance of modern commerce, eh? Conquest. Province by province. Like sogers.’
We subjugated England and Wales; we rolled over the Cheviots with a special adaptation containing eleven per cent of absolute alcohol; ‘Tono-Bungay. Thistle Brand.’ We also had the Fog poster adapted to a kilted Briton in a misty Highland scene.
Under the shadow of our great leading line we were presently taking subsidiary specialities into action; ‘Tono-Bungay Hair Stimulant’ was our first supplement. Then came ‘Concentrated Tono-Bungay’ for the eyes. That didn’t go, but we had a
considerable success with the Hair Stimulant. We broached the subject, I remember, in a little catechism beginning: ‘Why does the hair fall out? Because the follicles are fagged. What are the follicles?…’ So it went on to the climax that the Hair Stimulant contained all ‘The essential principles of that most reviving tonic, Tono-Bungay, together with an emollient and nutritious oil derived from crude Neat’s Foot Oil by a process of refinement, separation and deodorization… It will be manifest to anyone of scientific attainments that in Neat’s Foot Oil derived from the hoofs and horns of beasts, we must necessarily have a natural skin and hair lubricant.’
And we also did admirable things with our next subsidiaries, ‘Tono-Bungay Lozenges’, and ‘Tono-Bungay Chocolate’. These we urged upon the public for their extraordinary nutritive and recuperative value in cases of fatigue and strain. We gave them posters and illustrated advertisements showing climbers hanging from marvellously vertical cliffs, cyclist champions upon the track, mounted messengers engaged in Aix-to-Ghent rides, 2 soldiers lying out in action under a hot sun. ‘You can GO for twenty-four hours,’ we declared, ‘on Tono-Bungay Chocolate.’ We didn’t say whether you could return on the same commodity. We also showed a dreadfully barristerish barrister, wig, side-whiskers, teeth, a horribly lifelike portrait of all existing barristers, talking at a table, and beneath, this legend: ‘A Four Hours’ Speech on Tono-Bungay Lozenges, and as fresh as when he began.’ That brought in regiments of schoolteachers, revivalist ministers, politicians and the like. I really do believe there was an element of ‘kick’ in the strychnine in these lozenges, especially in those made according to our earlier formula. For we altered all our formulae – invariably weakening them enormously as sales got ahead.
In a little while – so it seems to me now – we were employing travellers3 and opening up Great Britain at the rate of a hundred square miles a day. All the organization throughout was sketched in a crude, entangled, half-inspired fashion by my uncle, and all of it had to be worked out into a practicable scheme of quantities and expenditure by me. We had a lot of trouble finding our travellers; in the end at least half of them were Irish-Americans, a wonderful breed for selling medicine. We had still more trouble over our factory manager, because of the secrets of the inner room, and in the end we got a very capable woman, Mrs Hampton Diggs, who had formerly managed a large millinery workroom, whom we could trust to keep everything in good working order without finding out anything that wasn’t put exactly under her loyal and energetic nose. She conceived a high opinion of Tono-Bungay and took it in all forms and large quantities so long as I knew her. It didn’t seem to do her any harm. And she kept the girls going quite wonderfully.
My uncle’s last addition to the Tono-Bungay group was the Tono-Bungay Mouthwash. The reader has probably read a hundred times that inspiring inquiry of his, ‘You are Young Yet, but are you Sure Nothing has Aged your Gums?’
And after that we took over the agency for three or four good American lines that worked in with our own, and could be handled with it; Texan Embrocation, and ‘23 – to clear the system’ were the chief…
I set down these bare facts. To me they are all linked with the figure of my uncle. In some of the old seventeenth and early eighteenth century prayer-books at Bladesover there used to be illustrations with long scrolls coming out of the mouths of the wood-cut figures. I wish I could write all this last chapter on a scroll coming out of the head of my uncle, show it all the time as unfolding and pouring out from a short, fattening, small-legged man with stiff cropped hair, disobedient glasses on a perky little nose and a round stare behind them. I wish I could show you him breathing hard and a little through his nose as his pen scrabbled out some absurd inspiration for a poster or a picture page, and make you hear his voice, charged with solemn import like the voice of a squeaky prophet, saying, ‘George! list’n! I got an ideer. I got a notion, George!’
I should put myself into the same picture. Best setting for us, I think, would be the Beckenham snuggery, because there we worked hardest. It would be the lamplit room of the early nineties, and the clock upon the mantel would indicate midnight or later. We would be sitting on either side of the fire, I with a pipe, my uncle with cigar or cigarette. There would be glasses standing inside the brass fender. Our expressions would be very grave. My uncle used to sit right back in his armchair; his toes always turned in when he was sitting down and his legs had a way of looking curved, as though they hadn’t bones or joints but were stuffed with sawdust.
‘George; whad’yer think of T.-B. for sea-sickness?’ he would say.
‘No good that I can imagine.’
‘Oom! No harm trying, George. We can but try.’
I would suck my pipe. ‘Hard to get at. Unless we sold our stuff specially at the docks. Might do a special at Cook’s office, or in the Continental Bradshaw.’4
‘It ‘ud give ‘em confidence, George.’
He would Zzzz, with his glasses reflecting the red of the glowing coals.
‘No good hiding our light under a Bushel,’ he would remark…
I never really determined whether my uncle regarded Tono-Bungay as a fraud, or whether he didn’t come to believe in it in a kind of way by the mere reiteration of his own assertions. I think that his average attitude was one of kindly, almost parental, toleration. I remember saying on one occasion, ‘But you don’t suppose this stuff ever did a human being the slightest good at all?’ and how his face assumed a look of protest, as of one reproving harshness and dogmatism.
‘You’ve a hard nature, George,’ he said. ‘You’re too ready to run things down. How can one tell? How can one venture to tell?….
I suppose any creative and developing game would have interested me in those years. At any rate, I know I put as much zeal into this Tono-Bungay as any young lieutenant could have done who suddenly found himself in command of a ship. It was extraordinarily interesting to me to figure out the advantage accruing from this shortening of the process or that, and to weigh it against the capital cost of the alteration. I made a sort of machine for sticking on the labels, that I patented; to this day there is a little trickle of royalties to me from that. I also contrived to have our mixture made concentrated, got the bottles, which all came sliding down a guarded slant-way, nearly filled with distilled water at one tap, and dripped our magic ingredients in at the next. This was an immense economy of space for the inner sanctum. For the bottling we needed special taps, and these, too, I invented and patented.
We had a sort of endless band of bottles sliding along an inclined glass trough made slippery with running water. At one end a girl held them up to the light, put aside any that were imperfect and placed the others in the trough – the filling was automatic; at the other end a girl slipped in the cork and drove it home with a little mallet. Each tank, the little one for the vivifying ingredients and the big one for distilled water, had a level indicator, and inside I had a float arrangement that stopped the slide whenever either had sunk too low. Another girl stood ready with my machine to label the corked bottles and hand them to the three packers, who slipped them into their outer papers and put them, with a pad of corrugated paper between each pair, into a little groove from which they could be made to slide neatly into position in our standard packing-case. It sounds wild, I know, but I believe I was the first man in the city of London to pack patent medicines through the side of the packing-case, to discover there was a better way in than by the lid. Our cases packed themselves, practically; had only to be put into position on a little wheeled tray and when full pulled to the lift that dropped them to the men downstairs, who padded up the free space and nailed on top and side. Our girls, moreover, packed with corrugated paper and matchbox-wood box partitions when everybody else was using expensive young men to pack through the top of the box with straw, many breakages and much waste and confusion.
§2
As I look back at them now, those energetic years seem all compacted to a year or so; from the days of our first hazardous beginning in Farringdon Street with barely a thousand pounds’ worth of stuff or credit all told – and that got by something perilously like snatching – to the days when my uncle went to the public on behalf of himself and me (one-tenth share) and our silent partners, the drug wholesalers and the printing people and the owner of that group of magazines and newspapers, to ask with honest confidence for £150,000. Those silent partners were remarkably sorry, I know, that they had not taken larger shares and given us longer credit when the subscriptions came pouring in. My uncle had a clear half to play with (including the one-tenth understood to be mine).
