play, George. What would you think of me writing a play eh?.. There’s all sorts of things to be done.
“Or the stog-igschange.”
He fell into that meditative whistling of his.
“Sac-ramental wine!” he swore, “this isn’t the world – it’s Cold Mutton Fat! That’s what Wimblehurst is! Cold Mutton Fat! – dead and stiff! And I’m buried in it up to the arm pits. Nothing ever happens, nobody wants things to happen ‘scept me! Up in London, George, things happen. America! I wish to Heaven, George, I’d been born American – where things hum.
“What can one do here? How can one grow? While we’re sleepin’ here with our Capital oozing away into Lord Eastry’s pockets for rent-men are up there…” He indicated London as remotely over the top of the dispensing counter, and then as a scene of great activity by a whirl of the hand and a wink and a meaning smile at me.
“What sort of things do they do?” I asked.
“Rush about,” he said. “Do things! Somethin’ glorious. There’s cover gambling. Ever heard of that, George?” He drew the air in through his teeth. “You put down a hundred say, and buy ten thousand pounds worth. See? That’s a cover of one per cent. Things go up one, you sell, realise cent per cent; down, whiff, it’s gone! Try again! Cent per cent, George, every day. Men are made or done for in an hour. And the shoutin’! Zzzz… Well, that’s one way, George. Then another way – there’s Corners!”
“They’re rather big things, aren’t they?” I ventured.
“Oh, if you go in for wheat or steel – yes. But suppose you tackled a little thing, George. Just some little thing that only needed a few thousands. Drugs for example. Shoved all you had into it – staked your liver on it, so to speak. Take a drug – take ipecac, for example. Take a lot of ipecac. Take all there is! See? There you are! There aren’t unlimited supplies of ipecacuanha – can’t be! – and it’s a thing people must have. Then quinine again! You watch your chance, wait for a tropical war breaking out, let’s say, and collar all the quinine. Where ARE they? Must have quinine, you know. Eh? Zzzz.
“Lord! there’s no end of things – no end of little things. Dill-water – all the suffering babes yowling for it. Eucalyptus again – cascara – witch hazel – menthol – all the toothache things. Then there’s antiseptics, and curare, cocaine…”
“Rather a nuisance to the doctors,” I reflected.
“They got to look out for themselves. By Jove, yes. They’ll do you if they can, and you do them. Like brigands. That makes it romantic. That’s the Romance of Commerce, George. You’re in the mountains there! Think of having all the quinine in the world, and some millionaire’s pampered wife gone ill with malaria, eh? That’s a squeeze, George, eh? Eh? Millionaire on his motor car outside, offering you any price you liked. That ‘ud wake up Wimblehurst… Lord! You haven’t an Idea down here. Not an idea. Zzzz.”
He passed into a rapt dream, from which escaped such fragments as: “Fifty per cent. advance sir; security – to-morrow. Zzzz.”
The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a sort of irresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever be permitted to do in reality. It was the sort of nonsense one would talk to make Ewart laugh and set him going on to still odder possibilities. I thought it was part of my uncle’s way of talking. But I’ve learnt differently since. The whole trend of modern money-making is to foresee something that will presently be needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself wealthy. You buy up land upon which people will presently want to build houses, you secure rights that will bar vitally important developments, and so on, and so on. Of course the naive intelligence of a boy does not grasp the subtler developments of human inadequacy. He begins life with a disposition to believe in the wisdom of grown-up people, he does not realise how casual and disingenuous has been the development of law and custom, and he thinks that somewhere in the state there is a power as irresistible as a head master’s to check mischievous and foolish enterprises of every sort. I will confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I had a clear impression that any one who contrived to do that would pretty certainly go to jail. Now I know that any one who could really bring it off would be much more likely to go to the House of Lords!
My uncle ranged over the gilt labels of his bottles and drawers for a while, dreaming of corners in this and that. But at last he reverted to Wimblehurst again.
“You got to be in London when these things are in hand. Down here – !
“Jee-rusalem!” he cried. “Why did I plant myself here? Everything’s done. The game’s over. Here’s Lord Eastry, and he’s got everything, except what his lawyers get, and before you get any more change this way you’ll have to dynamite him – and them. HE doesn’t want anything more to happen. Why should he? Any chance ‘ud be a loss to him. He wants everything to burble along and burble along and go on as it’s going for the next ten thousand years, Eastry after Eastry, one parson down another come, one grocer dead, get another! Any one with any ideas better go away. They HAVE gone away! Look at all these blessed people in this place! Look at ‘em! All fast asleep, doing their business out of habit – in a sort of dream, Stuffed men would do just as well – just. They’ve all shook down into their places. THEY don’t want anything to happen either. They’re all broken in. There you are! Only what are they all alive for?..
“Why can’t they get a clockwork chemist?”
He concluded as he often concluded these talks. “I must invent something, – that’s about what I must do. Zzzz. Some convenience. Something people want… Strike out… You can’t think, George, of anything everybody wants and hasn’t got? I mean something you could turn out retail under a shilling, say? Well, YOU think, whenever you haven’t got anything better to do. See?”
So I remember my uncle in that first phase, young, but already a little fat, restless, fretful, garrulous, putting in my fermenting head all sorts of discrepant ideas. Certainly he was educational…
For me the years at Wimblehurst were years of pretty active growth. Most of my leisure and much of my time in the shop I spent in study. I speedily mastered the modicum of Latin necessary for my qualifying examinations, and – a little assisted by the Government Science and Art Department classes that were held in the Grammar School – went on with my mathematics. There were classes in physics, in chemistry, in mathematics and machine drawing, and I took up these subjects with considerable avidity. Exercise I got chiefly in the form of walks. There was some cricket in the summer and football in the winter sustained by young men’s clubs that levied a parasitic blackmail of the big people and the sitting member, but I was never very keen at these games. I didn’t find any very close companions among the youths of Wimblehurst. They struck me, after my cockney schoolmates, as loutish and slow, servile and furtive, spiteful and mean. WE used to swagger, but these countrymen dragged their feet and hated an equal who didn’t; we talked loud, but you only got the real thoughts of Wimblehurst in a knowing undertone behind its hand. And even then they weren’t much in the way of thoughts.
No, I didn’t like those young countrymen, and I’m no believer in the English countryside under the Bladesover system as a breeding ground for honourable men. One hears a frightful lot of nonsense about the Rural Exodus and the degeneration wrought by town life upon our population. To my mind, the English townsman, even in the slums, is infinitely better spiritually, more courageous, more imaginative and cleaner, than his agricultural cousin. I’ve seen them both when they didn’t think they were being observed, and I know. There was something about my Wimblehurst companions that disgusted me. It’s hard to define. Heaven knows that at that cockney boarding-school at Goudhurst we were coarse enough; the Wimblehurst youngsters had neither words nor courage for the sort of thing we used to do – for our bad language, for example; but, on the other hand, they displayed a sort of sluggish, real lewdness, lewdness is the word – a baseness of attitude. Whatever we exiled urbans did at Goudhurst was touched with something, however coarse, of romantic imagination. We had read the Boys of England, and told each other stories. In the English countryside there are no books at all, no songs, no drama, no valiant sin even; all these things have never