He paused. "It's wonderful, George," he said.
"Anglo-Saxon energy," I said softly to the night.
"That's it, George—energy. It's put things in our grip—threads, wires, stretching out and out, George, from that little office of ours, out to West Africa, out to Egypt, out to Inja, out east, west, north and south. Running the world practically. Running it faster and faster. Creative. There's that Palestine canal affair. Marvellous idee! Suppose we take that up, suppose we let ourselves in for it, us and the others, and run that water sluice from the Mediterranean into the Dead Sea Valley—think of the difference it will make! All the desert blooming like a rose, Jericho lost for ever, all the Holy Places under water.... Very likely destroy Christianity."...
He mused for a space. "Cuttin' canals," murmured my uncle. "Making tunnels.... New countries.... New centres.... Zzzz.... Finance.... Not only Palestine.
"I wonder where we shall get before we done, George? We got a lot of big things going. We got the investing public sound and sure. I don't see why in the end we shouldn't be very big. There's difficulties but I'm equal to them. We're still a bit soft in our bones, but they'll harden all right.... I suppose, after all, I'm worth something like a million, George, cleared up and settled. If I got out of things now. It's a great time, George, a wonderful time!"...
I glanced through the twilight at his convexity and I must confess it struck me that on the whole he wasn't particularly good value.
"We got our hands on things, George, us big people. We got to hang together, George run the show. Join up with the old order like that mill-wheel of Kipling's. (Finest thing he ever wrote, George; I jes' been reading it again. Made me buy Lady Grove.) Well, we got to run the country, George. It's ours. Make it a Scientific Organised Business Enterprise. Put idees into it. 'Lectrify it. Run the Press. Run all sorts of developments. All sorts of developments. I been talking to Lord Boom. I been talking to all sorts of people. Great things. Progress. The world on business lines. Only jes' beginning."...
He fell into a deep meditation.
He Zzzzed for a time and ceased.
"YES," he said at last in the tone of a man who has at last emerged with ultimate solutions to the profoundest problems.
"What?" I said after a seemly pause.
My uncle hung fire for a moment and it seemed to me the fate of nations trembled in the balance. Then he spoke as one who speaks from the very bottom of his heart—and I think it was the very bottom of his heart.
"I'd jes' like to drop into the Eastry Arms, jes' when all those beggars in the parlour are sittin' down to whist, Ruck and Marbel and all, and give 'em ten minutes of my mind, George. Straight from the shoulder. Jes' exactly what I think of them. It's a little thing, but I'd like to do it jes' once before I die."...
He rested on that for some time Zzzz-ing.
Then he broke out at a new place in a tone of detached criticism.
"There's Boom," he reflected.
"It's a wonderful system this old British system, George. It's staid and stable and yet it has a place for new men. We come up and take our places. It's almost expected. We take a hand. That's where our Democracy differs from America. Over there a man succeeds; all he gets is money. Here there's a system open to every one—practically.... Chaps like Boom—come from nowhere."
His voice ceased. I reflected upon the spirit of his words. Suddenly I kicked my feet in the air, rolled on my side and sat up suddenly on my deck chair with my legs down.
"You don't mean it!" I said.
"Mean what, George?"
"Subscription to the party funds. Reciprocal advantage. Have we got to that?"
"Whad you driving at, George?"
"You know. They'd never do it, man!"
"Do what?" he said feebly; and, "Why shouldn't they?"
"They'd not even go to a baronetcy. NO!.... And yet, of course, there's Boom! And Collingshead and Gorver. They've done beer, they've done snippets! After all Tono-Bungay—it's not like a turf commission agent or anything like that!... There have of course been some very gentlemanly commission agents. It isn't like a fool of a scientific man who can't make money!"
My uncle grunted; we'd differed on that issue before.
A malignant humour took possession of me. "What would they call you?" I speculated. "The vicar would like Duffield. Too much like Duffer! Difficult thing, a title." I ran my mind over various possibilities. "Why not take a leaf from a socialist tract I came upon yesterday. Chap says we're all getting delocalised. Beautiful word—delocalised! Why not be the first delocalised peer? That gives you—Tono-Bungay! There is a Bungay, you know. Lord Tono of Bungay—in bottles everywhere. Eh?"
My uncle astonished me by losing his temper.
"Damn it. George, you don't seem to see I'm serious! You're always sneering at Tono-Bungay! As though it was some sort of swindle. It was perfec'ly legitimate trade, perfec'ly legitimate. Good value and a good article.... When I come up here and tell you plans and exchange idees—you sneer at me. You do. You don't see—it's a big thing. It's a big thing. You got to get used to new circumstances. You got to face what lies before us. You got to drop that tone."
IX
My uncle was not altogether swallowed up in business and ambition. He kept in touch with modern thought. For example, he was, I know, greatly swayed by what he called "This Overman idee, Nietzsche—all that stuff."
He mingled those comforting suggestions of a potent and exceptional human being emancipated from the pettier limitations of integrity with the Napoleonic legend. It gave his imagination a considerable outlet. That Napoleonic legend! The real mischief of Napoleon's immensely disastrous and accidental career began only when he was dead and the romantic type of mind was free to elaborate his character. I do believe that my uncle would have made a far less egregious smash if there had been no Napoleonic legend to misguide him. He was in many ways better and infinitely kinder than his career. But when in doubt between decent conduct and a base advantage, that cult came in more and more influentially: "think of Napoleon; think what the inflexibly-wilful Napoleon would have done with such scruples as yours;" that was the rule, and the end was invariably a new step in dishonour.
My uncle was in an unsystematic way a collector of Napoleonic relics; the bigger the book about his hero the more readily he bought it; he purchased letters and tinsel and weapons that bore however remotely upon the Man of Destiny, and he even secured in Geneva, though he never brought home, an old coach in which Buonaparte might have ridden; he crowded the quiet walls of Lady Grove with engravings and figures of him, preferring, my aunt remarked, the more convex portraits with the white vest and those statuettes with the hands behind the back which threw forward the figure. The Durgans watched him through it all, sardonically.
And he would stand after breakfast at times in the light of the window at Lady Grove, a little apart, with two fingers of one hand stuck between his waistcoat-buttons and his chin sunken, thinking,—the most preposterous little fat man in the world. It made my aunt feel, she said, "like an old Field Marshal—knocks me into a cocked hat, George!"
Perhaps this Napoleonic bias made him a little less frequent with his cigars than he would otherwise have been, but of that I cannot be sure, and it certainly caused my aunt a considerable amount of vexation after he had read Napoleon and the Fair Sex, because for a time that roused him to a sense of a side of life he had in his commercial preoccupations very largely forgotten. Suggestion plays so great a part in this field. My uncle took the next opportunity and had an "affair"!