“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 naïve 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!