"Just as though an old Porpoise like him would ever make money," she said, turning her eyes upon his profile with a sudden lapse to affection. "He'll just porpoise about."
"I'll do something," said my uncle, "you bet! Zzzz!" and rapped with a shilling on the marble table.
"When you do you'll have to buy me a new pair of gloves," she said, "anyhow. That finger's past mending. Look! you Cabbage--you." And she held the split under his nose, and pulled a face of comical fierceness.
My uncle smiled at these sallies at the time, but afterwards, when I went back with him to the Pharmacy--the low-class business grew brisker in the evening and they kept open late--he reverted to it in a low expository tone. "Your aunt's a bit impatient, George. She gets at me. It's only natural.... A woman doesn't understand how long it takes to build up a position. No.... In certain directions now--I am--quietly--building up a position.
Now here.... I get this room. I have my three assistants. Zzzz.
It's a position that, judged by the criterion of imeedjit income, isn't perhaps so good as I deserve, but strategically--yes. It's what I want. I make my plans. I rally my attack."
"What plans," I said, "are you making?"
"Well, George, there's one thing you can rely upon, I'm doing nothing in a hurry. I turn over this one and that, and I don't talk--indiscreetly. There's-- No! I don't think I can tell you that. And yet, why NOT?"
He got up and closed the door into the shop. "I've told no one," he remarked, as he sat down again. "I owe you something."
His face flushed slightly, he leant forward over the little table towards me.
"Listen!" he said.
I listened.
"Tono-Bungay," said my uncle very slowly and distinctly.
I thought he was asking me to hear some remote, strange noise.
"I don't hear anything," I said reluctantly to his expectant face. He smiled undefeated. "Try again," he said, and repeated, "Tono-Bungay."
"Oh, THAT!" I said.
"Eh?" said he.
"But what is it?"
"Ah!" said my uncle, rejoicing and expanding. "What IS it?
That's what you got to ask? What won't it be?" He dug me violently in what he supposed to be my ribs. "George," he cried--"George, watch this place! There's more to follow."
And that was all I could get from him.
That, I believe, was the very first time that the words Tono-Bungay ever heard on earth--unless my uncle indulged in monologues in his chamber--a highly probable thing. Its utterance certainly did not seem to me at the time to mark any sort of epoch, and had I been told this word was the Open Sesame to whatever pride and pleasure the grimy front of London hid from us that evening, I should have laughed aloud.
"Coming now to business," I said after a pause, and with a chill sense of effort; and I opened the question of his trust.
My uncle sighed, and leant back in his chair. "I wish I could make all this business as clear to you as it is to me," he said.
"However--Go on! Say what you have to say."
VII
After I left my uncle that evening I gave way to a feeling of profound depression. My uncle and aunt seemed to me to be leading--I have already used the word too often, but I must use it again--DINGY lives. They seemed to be adrift in a limitless crowd of dingy people, wearing shabby clothes, living uncomfortably in shabby second-hand houses, going to and fro on pavements that had always a thin veneer of greasy, slippery mud, under grey skies that showed no gleam of hope of anything for them but dinginess until they died. It seemed absolutely clear to me that my mother's little savings had been swallowed up and that my own prospect was all too certainly to drop into and be swallowed up myself sooner or later by this dingy London ocean.
The London that was to be an adventurous escape from the slumber of Wimblehurst, had vanished from my dreams. I saw my uncle pointing to the houses in Park Lane and showing a frayed shirt-cuff as he did so. I heard my aunt: "I'm to ride in my carriage then. So he old says."
My feelings towards my uncle were extraordinarily mixed. I was intensely sorry not only for my aunt Susan but for him--for it seemed indisputable that as they were living then so they must go on--and at the same time I was angry with the garrulous vanity and illness that had elipped all my chance of independent study, and imprisoned her in those grey apartments. When I got back to Wimblehurst I allowed myself to write him a boyishly sarcastic and sincerely bitter letter. He never replied. Then, believing it to be the only way of escape for me, I set myself far more grimly and resolutely to my studies than I had ever done before.
After a time I wrote to him in more moderate terms, and he answered me evasively. And then I tried to dismiss him from my mind and went on working.
Yes, that first raid upon London under the moist and chilly depression of January had an immense effect upon me. It was for me an epoch-making disappointment. I had thought of London as a large, free, welcoming, adventurous place, and I saw it slovenly and harsh and irresponsive.
I did not realise at all what human things might be found behind those grey frontages, what weakness that whole forbidding facade might presently confess. It is the constant error of youth to over-estimate the Will in things. I did not see that the dirt, the discouragement, the discomfort of London could be due simply to the fact that London was a witless old giantess of a town, too slack and stupid to keep herself clean and maintain a brave face to the word. No! I suffered from the sort of illusion that burnt witches in the seventeenth century. I endued her grubby disorder with a sinister and magnificent quality of intention.
And my uncle's gestures and promises filled me with doubt and a sort of fear for him. He seemed to me a lost little creature, too silly to be silent, in a vast implacable condemnation. I was full of pity and a sort of tenderness for my aunt Susan, who was doomed to follow his erratic fortunes mocked by his grandiloquent promises.
I was to learn better. But I worked with the terror of the grim underside of London in my soul during all my last year at Wimblehurst.
