England -- Fiction; Patent medicines -- Marketing -- Fiction; Pharmaceutical industry -- Fiction; Satire; Science fiction
There was, I seem to remember, a secular intensification of his
features; his nose developed character, became aggressive, stuck out at
the world more and more; the obliquity of his mouth, I think,
increased. From the face that returns to my memory projects a long
cigar that is sometimes cocked jauntily up from the higher corner, that
sometimes droops from the lower;—it was as eloquent as a dog’s tail,
and he removed it only for the more emphatic modes of speech. He
assumed a broad black ribbon for his glasses, and wore them more and
more askew as time went on. His hair seemed to stiffen with success,
but towards the climax it thinned greatly over the crown, and he
brushed it hard back over his ears where, however, it stuck out
fiercely. It always stuck out fiercely over his forehead, up and
forward.
He adopted an urban style of dressing with the onset of Tono-Bungay and
rarely abandoned it. He preferred silk hats with ample rich brims,
often a trifle large for him by modern ideas, and he wore them at
various angles to his axis; his taste in trouserings was towards fairly
emphatic stripes and his trouser cut was neat; he liked his frock-coat
long and full, although that seemed to shorten him. He displayed a
number of valuable rings, and I remember one upon his left little
finger with a large red stone bearing Gnostic symbols. “Clever chaps,
those Gnostics, George,” he told me. “Means a lot. Lucky!” He never had
any but a black mohair watch-chair. In the country he affected grey and
a large grey cloth top-hat, except when motoring; then he would have a
brown deer-stalker cap and a fur suit of esquimaux cut with a sort of
boot-end to the trousers. Of an evening he would wear white waistcoats
and plain gold studs. He hated diamonds. “Flashy,” he said they were.
“Might as well wear—an income tax-receipt. All very well for Park Lane.
Unsold stock. Not my style. Sober financier, George.”
So much for his visible presence. For a time it was very familiar to
the world, for at the crest of the boom he allowed quite a number of
photographs and at least one pencil sketch to be published in the
sixpenny papers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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