Latest / The H. G. Wells Library / Tono-Bungay Book 3 Chapter 1 - Parts 4-6

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Tono-Bungay Book 3 Chapter 1 - Parts 4-6 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Book, third chapter, first parts four to six of Tono Bungay.
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  Speaker 1: This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
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  Speaker 1: the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
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  Speaker 1: visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by William Tomko Tono Bungay
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  Speaker 1: by H. G. Wells, Book, third chapter, first parts four
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  Speaker 1: to six. Four. I passed the Hardingham ever and again,
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  Speaker 1: and glance aside through the great archway of the fountain
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  Speaker 1: and the ferns, and think of those receding days when
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  Speaker 1: I was so near the center of our eddy of
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  Speaker 1: greed and enterprise. I see again my uncle's face, white
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  Speaker 1: and intent, and hear him discourse. Hear him make consciously
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  Speaker 1: napoleonic decisions, grip his nettles, put his finger on the spot,
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  Speaker 1: bluff say. He became particularly addicted to the last idiom.
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  Speaker 1: Towards the end, every conceivable act took the form of saying, snap.
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  Speaker 1: The odd fish that came to us, And among others
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  Speaker 1: came Gordon Nasmyth, that queer blend of romance and egality,
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  Speaker 1: who was destined to drag me into the most irrelevant
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  Speaker 1: adventure in my life, the Mordet Island Affair. And leave me,
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  Speaker 1: as they say, with blood upon my hands. It is
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  Speaker 1: remarkable how little it troubles my conscience and how much
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  Speaker 1: it stirs my imagination. That particular memory of the life
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  Speaker 1: I took. The story of Mordet Island has been told
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  Speaker 1: in a government report, and told all wrong. There are
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  Speaker 1: still excellent reasons for leaving it wrong in places, but
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  Speaker 1: the liveliest appeals of discretion forbid my leaving it out altogether.
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  Speaker 1: I've still the vividest memory of Gordon Nasmyth's appearance in
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  Speaker 1: the Inner Sanctum, a lank, sunburnt person in tweeds, with
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  Speaker 1: a yellow brown hatchet face and one faded blue eye.
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  Speaker 1: The other was closed and sunken lid. And now he
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  Speaker 1: told us, with a stiff affectation of ease, his incredible
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  Speaker 1: story of this great heap of quap that lay abandoned
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  Speaker 1: or undiscovered on the beach behind Mordot's Island, among white
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  Speaker 1: dead mangroves and the black ooze of brackish water. What's quap,
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  Speaker 1: said my uncle, on the fourth repetition of the word.
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  Speaker 1: They call it quap or quab or quab, said Gordon Nasmyth.
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  Speaker 1: But our relations weren't friendly enough to get the accent right.
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  Speaker 1: But there's the stuff is for the taking. They don't
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  Speaker 1: know about it. Nobody knows about it. I got down
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  Speaker 1: to the damned place in a canoe alone. The boys
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  Speaker 1: wouldn't come. I pretended to be a botanizing to begin with.
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  Speaker 1: Gordon Nasmyth was inclined to be dramatic. Look here, he
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  Speaker 1: said when he first came in, shutting the door rather
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  Speaker 1: carefully behind him as he spoke. Do you two men,
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  Speaker 1: yes or no? Want to put up six thousand four
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  Speaker 1: a clear good chance of fifteen hundred percent on your
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  Speaker 1: money in a year. We're always getting chances like that,
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  Speaker 1: said my uncle, cocking his cigar offensively, wiping his glasses
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  Speaker 1: and tilting his chair back. We stick to a save twenty.
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  Speaker 1: Gordon Asmus's quick temper showed in a slight stiffening of
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  Speaker 1: his attitude. Don't you believe him, said I, getting up
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  Speaker 1: before he could reply, you're different and I know your books.
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  Speaker 1: We're very glad you've come to us. Confounded uncle, it's
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  Speaker 1: Gordon Asmyth. Sit down, what is it? Minerals? Clap? Said
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  Speaker 1: Gordon Asmyth, fixing his eye on me. In heaps in
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  Speaker 1: heaps said my uncle softly, with his glasses very oblique.
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  Speaker 1: You're only fit for the grocery, said gordonasmyth scornfully, sitting
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  Speaker 1: down and helping himself to one of my uncle's cigars.
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  Speaker 1: I'm sorry I came, but still now I'm here. And first,
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  Speaker 1: as to cuap, quap, sir, is the most radioactive stuff
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  Speaker 1: in the world. That's cuap. It's a festering mass of
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  Speaker 1: earths and heavy metals, polonium, radium, ethorium, thorium, carrium, and
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  Speaker 1: new things too. There's a stuff called x K. Provisionally
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  Speaker 1: there they are mucked up together in a sort of
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  Speaker 1: rotting sand. What it is, how it got made? I
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  Speaker 1: don't know. It's like as if some young creator had
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  Speaker 1: been playing about there. There it lies in two heaps,
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  Speaker 1: one small, one great, and the world for miles about
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  Speaker 1: it is blasted and scorched and dead. You can have
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  Speaker 1: it for the getting. You've got to take it. That's
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  Speaker 1: all that sounds all right, said I have you samples? Well?
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  Speaker 1: Should I? You can have anything up to two ounces?
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  Speaker 1: Where is it? His blue eye smiled at me and
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  Speaker 1: scrutinized me. He smoked and was fragmentary for a time
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  Speaker 1: fending off my questions. Then his story began to piece
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  Speaker 1: itself together. He conjured up a vision of this strange,
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  Speaker 1: forgotten kink in the world's literal, Of the long, meandering
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  Speaker 1: channels that spread and divaricate and spend their burden of
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  Speaker 1: mud and silt within the thunder belt of Atlantic surf,
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  Speaker 1: Of the dense tangled vegetation that creeps into the shimmering
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  Speaker 1: water with root and succor. He gave a sense of
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  Speaker 1: heat and a perpetual reek of vegetable decay, and told
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  Speaker 1: how at last comes a break among these things, an
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  Speaker 1: arena fringed with bone white dead trees, a sight of
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  Speaker 1: the hard blue sea line beyond the dazzling surf, and
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  Speaker 1: a wide desolation of dirty single and mud, bleached and scarred.
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  Speaker 1: A little way off, among charred, dead weeds stands the
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  Speaker 1: abandoned station, abandoned because every man who stayed two months
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  Speaker 1: at that station stayed to die, eaten up mysteriously like
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  Speaker 1: a leper, with its dismantled sheds and its decaying pier
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  Speaker 1: of worm, rotten and oblique piles and planks still insecurely possible,
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  Speaker 1: and in the midst two clumsy heaps shaped like the
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  Speaker 1: backs of hogs, one small one grate sticking out under
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  Speaker 1: a rib of rock that cuts the space across quap
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  Speaker 1: There it is, said Gordon Nasmyth, worth three pounds an ounce,
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  Speaker 1: if it's worth a penny. Two great heaps of it,
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  Speaker 1: rotten stuff and soft, ready to shovel and wheel, and
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  Speaker 1: you may get it by the ton. How did it
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  Speaker 1: get there? God knows? There it is for the taking
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  Speaker 1: in the country where you mustn't trade, in a country
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  Speaker 1: where the company waits for good kind men to find
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  Speaker 1: it riches and then take him away from him. There
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  Speaker 1: you have it, derelict. Can't you do any sort of deal.
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  Speaker 1: They're too damn stupid. You've got to go and take it.
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  Speaker 1: That's all. They might catch you. They might, of course,
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  Speaker 1: but they're not great at catching. We went into the
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  Speaker 1: particulars of that difficulty. They wouldn't catch me because I'd think, first,
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  Speaker 1: give me a yacht, said Gordon Nasmyth. That's all I need.
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  Speaker 1: But if you get caught, said my uncle, I am
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  Speaker 1: inclined to think. Gordon Nasmyth imagined we would give him
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  Speaker 1: a check for six thousand pounds on the strength of
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  Speaker 1: his talk. It was very good talk. But we didn't
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  Speaker 1: do that. I stipulated for samples and his stuff for analysis,
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  Speaker 1: and he consented reluctantly. I think on the whole he
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  Speaker 1: would rather I didn't examine samples. He made a motion
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  Speaker 1: pocket words that gave us an invincible persuasion that he
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  Speaker 1: had a sample upon him, and that at the last
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  Speaker 1: instant he decided not to produce it prematurely. There was
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  Speaker 1: evidently a curious strain of secretiveness in him. He didn't
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  Speaker 1: like to give us samples, and he wouldn't indicate within
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  Speaker 1: three hundred miles the position of this Mordet island of his.
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  Speaker 1: He had it clear in his mind that he had
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  Speaker 1: a secret of immense value, and he had no idea
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  Speaker 1: at all of just how far he ought to go
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  Speaker 1: with business people. And so presently, to gain time for
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  Speaker 1: these hesitations of his, he began to talk of other things.
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  Speaker 1: He talked very well. He talked of the Dutch East Indies,
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  Speaker 1: and of the Congo of Portuguese East Africa and Paraguay,
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  Speaker 1: of Malays and rich Chinese merchants, Dayaks and Negroes, and
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  Speaker 1: the spread of the Mahometan world in Africa to day,
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  Speaker 1: And all this time he was trying to judge if
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  Speaker 1: we were good enough to trust with his adventure. Our
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  Speaker 1: cozy inner office became a little place, and all our
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  Speaker 1: business cold and lifeless exploits. Beside his glimpses of strange
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  Speaker 1: minglings of men, of slayings, unavenged and curious customs of trade,
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  Speaker 1: were no writs run, and the dark treacheries of eastern
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  Speaker 1: ports and uncharted channels. We had neither of us gone
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  Speaker 1: abroad except for a few vulgar raids on Paris. Our
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  Speaker 1: world was England, and the places of origin of half
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  Speaker 1: the raw material of the goods we sold had seemed
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  Speaker 1: to us as remote as fairy land or the forest
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  Speaker 1: of Arden. But Gordon Nasmyth made it so real and
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  Speaker 1: intimate for us that afternoon, for me, at any rate,
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  Speaker 1: that it seemed like something seen and forgotten and now
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  Speaker 1: again remembered. And in the end he produced his sample,
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  Speaker 1: a little lump of muddy clay speckled with brownish grains,
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  Speaker 1: in a glass bottle, wrapped about with lead and flannel,
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  Speaker 1: red flannel. It was, I remember a hue, which is,
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  Speaker 1: I know, popularly supposed to double all the mystical efficacies
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  Speaker 1: of flannel don't carry it about on you, said Gordon Asmyth,
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  Speaker 1: it makes a sore. I took the stuff to Thorold,
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  Speaker 1: and Thorold had the exquisite agony of discovering two new
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  Speaker 1: elements in what was then a confidential analysis. He has
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  Speaker 1: christened them and published since. But at the time Gordon
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  Speaker 1: Nasmyth wouldn't hear for a moment of our republication of
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  Speaker 1: any facts at all. Indeed, he flew into a violent
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  Speaker 1: passion and abused me mercilessly, even for showing the stuff
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  Speaker 1: to Thorold. I thought you were going to analyze it yourself,
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  Speaker 1: he said, with the touching persuasion of the layman that
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  Speaker 1: a scientific man knows and practices at the sciences. I
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  Speaker 1: made some commercial inquiries, and there seemed even then much
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  Speaker 1: truth in Gordon Nasmuth's estimate of the value of the stuff.
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  Speaker 1: It was before the days of Capern's discovery of the
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  Speaker 1: value of canadium and his use of it in the
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  Speaker 1: Capern filament. But the syrium and thorium alone were worthy
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  Speaker 1: the money he extracted for the gas mantles then in vogue.
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  Speaker 1: There were, however, doubts, indeed, there were numerous doubts. What
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  Speaker 1: were the limits of the gas mantle trade. How much thorium,
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  Speaker 1: not to speak of syrium could they take at a maximum?
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  Speaker 1: Suppose that quantity was high enough to justify our shipload.
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  Speaker 1: Came doubts in another quarter. Were the heaps up to sample?
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  Speaker 1: Were they as big as he said? Was Gordon nasmyth imaginative?
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  Speaker 1: And if these values held, could we after all get
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  Speaker 1: the stuff? It wasn't ours, It was unforbidden ground. You see.
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  Speaker 1: There were doubts of every grade and class in the
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  Speaker 1: way of this adventure. We went some way, nevertheless, in
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  Speaker 1: the discussion of his project, though I think we tried
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  Speaker 1: his patience. Then suddenly he he vanished from London, and
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  Speaker 1: I saw no more of him for a year and
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  Speaker 1: a half. My uncle said that was what he had expected.
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  Speaker 1: And when at last Gordon Nasmuth reappeared and mentioned in
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  Speaker 1: an incidental way that he had been to Paraguay on
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  Speaker 1: private and we guessed passionate affairs, the business of the
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  Speaker 1: quap expedition had to be begun again. At the beginning,
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  Speaker 1: my uncle was disposed to be altogether skeptical, but I
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  Speaker 1: wasn't so decided. I think I was drawn by its
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  Speaker 1: picturesque aspects but we neither of us dreamt of touching
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  Speaker 1: it seriously. Until Capern's discovery. Nasmuth's story had laid hold
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  Speaker 1: of my imagination like one small intense picture of tropical
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  Speaker 1: sunshine hung on a wall of gray business affairs. I
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  Speaker 1: kept it going during Gordon Nasmuth's intermittent appearances in England.
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  Speaker 1: Every now and then he and I would meet and
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  Speaker 1: reinforce its effect. We would lunch in London, or he
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  Speaker 1: would come to see my gliders at Crest Hill and
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  Speaker 1: make new projects for getting at those heaps again, now
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  Speaker 1: with me now alone. At times they became a sort
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  Speaker 1: of fairy story, with us an imaginative exercise. And there
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  Speaker 1: came Caperine's discovery of what he called the ideal filament,
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  Speaker 1: and with it an altogether less problematical quality about the
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  Speaker 1: business side of quap For the ideal filament needed five
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  Speaker 1: percent of canadium, and canadium was known to the world
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  Speaker 1: only as a newly separated constituent of a variety of
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  Speaker 1: the rare mineral rooteel. But to Thorold it was better
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  Speaker 1: known as an element in a mysterious sample brought to
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  Speaker 1: him by me, And to me it was known as
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  Speaker 1: one of the elements in Quap, I told my uncle,
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  Speaker 1: and we jumped on to the process. At once. We
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  Speaker 1: found that Gordon Nasmyth, still unaware of the altered value
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  Speaker 1: of the stuff, and still thinking of the experimental prices
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  Speaker 1: of radium and the rarity value of syrium, had got
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  Speaker 1: hold of a cousin named Pollack, made some extraordinary transaction
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  Speaker 1: about his life insurance policy, and was buying a brig.
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  Speaker 1: We put in, put down three thousand pounds, and forthwith
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  Speaker 1: the life insurance transaction, and the Pollack side of this
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  Speaker 1: finance vanished into thin air, leaving Pollack, I regret to say,
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  Speaker 1: in the brig and in the secret except so far
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  Speaker 1: as Canadian, and the filament went as residuum. We discussed
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  Speaker 1: earnestly whether we should charter a steamer or go on
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  Speaker 1: with the brig. But we decided on the brig as
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  Speaker 1: a less conspicuous instrument for an enterprise that was, after all,
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  Speaker 1: to put it, plainly, stealing. But that was one of
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  Speaker 1: our last enterprises before our great crisis, and I will
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  Speaker 1: tell of it in its place. So it was Quap
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  Speaker 1: came into our affairs, came in as a fairy tale,
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  Speaker 1: and became real more and more real. It grew, until
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  Speaker 1: at last it was real, Until at last I saw
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  Speaker 1: with my eyes the heaps my imagination had seen for
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  Speaker 1: so long, and felt between my fingers again that half gritty,
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  Speaker 1: half soft texture of cuap like sanded moist sugar mixed
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  Speaker 1: with clay, in which there stirs something. One must feel
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  Speaker 1: it to understand. Five. All sorts of things came to
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  Speaker 1: the Hardingham and offer themselves to my uncle Gordon Nasmuth stands,
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  Speaker 1: but only because he played a part at last in
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: the crisis of our fortunes. So much came to us
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  Speaker 1: that it seemed to me at times as though the
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  Speaker 1: whole world of human affairs was ready to prostitute itself
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  Speaker 1: to our real and imaginary millions. As I look back,
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: I am still dazzled and incredulous to think of the
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  Speaker 1: quality of our opportunities. We did the most extraordinary things,
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  Speaker 1: things that it seems absurd to me to leave to
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  Speaker 1: any casual man of wealth and enterprise who cares to
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  Speaker 1: do them. I had some amazing perceptions of just how
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  Speaker 1: modern thought and the supply of fact to the general
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: mind may be controlled by money. Among other things that
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  Speaker 1: my uncle offered for he tried very hard to buy
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  Speaker 1: the British Medical Journal and the Lancet and run them
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: on what he called modern lines, And when they resisted him,
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: he talked very vigorously for a time of organizing a
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  Speaker 1: rival enterprise. That was a very magnificent idea. Indeed, in
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  Speaker 1: its way it would have given a tremendous advantage in
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  Speaker 1: the handling of innumerable specialties. And indeed I scarcely know
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  Speaker 1: how far it would not have put the medical profession
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  Speaker 1: in our grip. It still amazes me. I shall die
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: amazed that such a thing can be possible in the
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  Speaker 1: modern state. If my uncle failed to bring the thing off,
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: some one else may succeed. But I doubt even if
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: he had got both these weeklies whether his peculiar style
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: would have suited them. The change of purpose would have
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: shown he would have found it difficult to keep up
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  Speaker 1: their dignity. He certainly did not keep up the dignity
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: of the Sacred Grove, an important critical organ, which he
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: acquired one day by saying snap for eight hundred pounds.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: He got it lock stock and Beryl, under one or
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: other of which three aspects the editor was included. Even
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  Speaker 1: at that price, it didn't pay. If you are a
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  Speaker 1: literary person, you will remember the bright new cover he
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: gave that representative organ of British intellectual culture, and how
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: his sound business instincts jarred with the exalted pretensions of
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: a vanished age. One old wrapper I discovered the other
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: day runs the Sacred Grove Weekly Magazine of Art, philosophy, science,
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: and Belle Lettre. Have you a nasty taste in your mouth?
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: It is liver. You need one twenty three pill, just one,
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: not a drug, but a live American remedy. Contents, a
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: hitherto unpublished letter from Walter Pater, Charlotte Bronte's maternal great aunt.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: A new Catholic history of England, The genius of Shakespeare, correspondence,
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: the Mendelian hypothesis, the split infinitive commence or begin clever House,
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: Socialism and the individual. The dignity of letters, folklore, gossip,
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: the stage, the paradox of acting, travel, biography, verse fiction,
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: et cetera. The best pill in the world for an
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: irregular liver. I suppose it is some lingering traces of
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: the blades over a tradition to me that makes this
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: combination of letters and pills seem so incongruous, just as
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: I suppose it is a lingering trace of Plutarch and
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: my ineradicable boyish imagination that, at bottom our state should
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: be wise, sane and Dignit that makes me think a
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: country which leaves its medical and literary criticism, or indeed
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: any such vitally important criticism entirely to private enterprise and
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: open to the advances of any purchaser, must be in
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: a frankly hopeless condition. These are ideal conceptions of mind.
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, nothing would be more entirely
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: natural and representative of the relations of learning, thought, and
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: the economic situation in the world at the present time
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  Speaker 1: than this cover of the Sacred Grove, the quiet conservatism
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  Speaker 1: of the one element embedded in the aggressive brilliance of
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  Speaker 1: the other, the contrasted notes of bold physiological experiment and
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: extreme mental immobility. Six There comes back two among these
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: Hardingham memories. An impression of a drizzling November day, and
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: how we looked out of the windows upon a procession
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: of the London unemployed. It was like looking down a
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: well into some momentarily revealed nether world. Some thousands of needy,
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: ineffectual men had been raked together to trail their spiritless
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: misery through the West Aire with an appeal that was also,
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: in its way, a weak and insubstantial threat. It is work,
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: we need, not charity. There they were half fatomed through
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: the fog, a silent foot dragging interminable gray procession. They
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: carried wet, dirty banners. They rattled boxes for pence, These
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: men who had not said snap in the right place,
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: the men who had snapped too eagerly, the men who
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: had never said snap, the men who had never had
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  Speaker 1: a chance of saying snap. A shambling, shameful stream they made,
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: oozing along the street, the gutter waste of competitive civilization.
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: And we stood high out of it all, as high
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  Speaker 1: as if we looked godlike from another world, standing in
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  Speaker 1: a room beautifully lit and furnished, skillfully warmed, filled with
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  Speaker 1: costly things. There thought I, but for the grace of God,
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: go George and Edward ponderevo. But my uncle's thoughts ran
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: in a different channel, and he made that vision the
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: test of a spirited but inconclusive harangue upon tariff reform.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: End of book, third chapter, first parts four to six.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: Recording by William tom Coe