My uncle smoked a similar cigar in an habituated manner, and he looked energetic and knowing and luxurious and most unexpectedly a little bounder, round the end of it. It was just a trivial flaw upon our swagger, perhaps that we both were clear our cigars had to be "mild." He got obliquely across the spaces of his great armchair so as to incline confidentially to my ear, he curled up his little legs, and I, in my longer way, adopted a corresponding receptive obliquity. I felt that we should strike an unbiased observer as a couple of very deep and wily and developing and repulsive persons.
"I want to let you into this"--puff--"George," said my uncle round the end of his cigar. "For many reasons."
His voice grew lower and more cunning. He made explanations that to my inexperience did not completely explain. I retain an impression of a long credit and a share with a firm of wholesale chemists, of a credit and a prospective share with some pirate printers, of a third share for a leading magazine and newspaper proprietor.
"I played 'em off one against the other," said my uncle. I took his point in an instant. He had gone to each of them in turn and said the others had come in.
"I put up four hundred pounds," said my uncle, "myself and my all. And you know--"
He assumed a brisk confidence. "I hadn't five hundred pence. At least--"
For a moment he really was just a little embarrassed. "I DID" he said, "produce capital. You see, there was that trust affair of yours--I ought, I suppose--in strict legality--to have put that straight first. Zzzz....
"It was a bold thing to do," said my uncle, shifting the venue from the region of honour to the region of courage. And then with a characteristic outburst of piety, "Thank God it's all come right!
"And now, I suppose, you ask where do YOU come in? Well, fact is I've always believed in you, George. You've got--it's a sort of dismal grit. Bark your shins, rouse you, and you'll go!
You'd rush any position you had a mind to rush. I know a bit about character, George--trust me. You've got--" He clenched his hands and thrust them out suddenly, and at the same time said, with explosive violence, "Wooosh! Yes. You have! The way you put away that Latin at Wimblehurst; I've never forgotten it.
Wo-oo-oo-osh! Your science and all that! Wo-oo-oo-osh! I know my limitations. There's things I can do, and" (he spoke in a whisper, as though this was the first hint of his life's secret)
"there's things I can't. Well, I can create this business, but I can't make it go. I'm too voluminous--I'm a boiler-over, not a simmering stick-at-it. You keep on HOTTING UP AND HOTTING UP.
Papin's digester. That's you, steady and long and piling up,--then, wo-oo-oo-oo-osh. Come in and stiffen these niggers.
Teach them that wo-oo-oo-oo-osh. There you are! That's what I'm after. You! Nobody else believes you're more than a boy. Come right in with me and be a man. Eh, George? Think of the fun of it--a thing on the go--a Real Live Thing! Wooshing it up!
Making it buzz and spin! Whoo-oo-oo." --He made alluring expanding circles in the air with his hand. "Eh?"
His proposal, sinking to confidential undertones again, took more definite shape. I was to give all my time and energy to developing and organising. "You shan't write a single advertisement, or give a single assurance" he declared. "I can do all that." And the telegram vas no flourish; I was to have three hundred a year. Three hundred a year. ("That's nothing," said my uncle, "the thing to freeze on to, when the time comes, is your tenth of the vendor's share.")
Three hundred a year certain, anyhow! It was an enormous income to me. For a moment I was altogether staggered. Could there be that much money in the whole concern? I looked about me at the sumptuous furniture of Schafer's Hotel. No doubt there were many such incomes.
My head was spinning with unwonted Benedictine and Burgundy.
"Let me go back and look at the game again," I said. "Let me see upstairs and round about."
I did.
"What do you think of it all?" my uncle asked at last.
"Well, for one thing," I said, "why don't you have those girls working in a decently ventilated room? Apart from any other consideration, they'd work twice as briskly. And they ought to cover the corks before labelling round the bottle"
"Why?" said my uncle.
"Because--they sometimes make a mucker of the cork job, and then the label's wasted."
"Come and change it, George," said my uncle, with sudden fervour "Come here and make a machine of it. You can. Make it all slick, and then make it woosh. I know you can. Oh! I know you can."
II
I seem to remember very quick changes of mind after that lunch.
The muzzy exaltation of the unaccustomed stimulants gave way very rapidly to a model of pellucid and impartial clairvoyance which is one of my habitual mental states. It is intermittent; it leaves me for weeks together, I know, but back it comes at last like justice on circuit, and calls up all my impression, all my illusions, all my willful and passionate proceedings. We came downstairs again into that inner room which pretended to be a scientific laboratory through its high glass lights, and indeed was a lurking place. My uncle pressed a cigarette on me, and I took it and stood before the empty fireplace while he propped his umbrella in the corner, deposited the new silk hat that was a little too big for him on the table, blew copiously and produced a second cigar.
It came into my head that he had shrunken very much in size since the Wimblehurst days, that the cannon ball he had swallowed was rather more evident and shameless than it had been, his skin less fresh and the nose between his glasses, which still didn't quite fit, much redder. And just then he seemed much laxer in his muscles and not quite as alertly quick in his movements. But he evidently wasn't aware of the degenerative nature of his changes as he sat there, looking suddenly quite little under my eyes.
"Well, George!" he said, quite happily unconscious of my silent criticism, "what do you think of it all?"
