259: In Bombay harbor, ...
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 3 continues
In Bombay harbor, Tom, Nathaniel, and Tudor pace the deck, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the Sultan of Gujarat and representatives of the British East India Company. When they arrive, Tom, in an inspired scene, delivers two simultaneous sales pitches, one directed toward the interests of the Indians, one toward the British. The final disclosure of the ice is a huge success with both. Tom offers a sample piece to the Sultan as a gift.
The cargo of ice is being unloaded when hundreds of fierce, armed Indians arrive and surround the wharf. The Sultan himself arrives, in high dudgeon, and appeals to the British for justice. He’s been tricked. The ice he was given yesterday is gone. Much chuckling about this on the part of the British, who explain that this is melting, something ice always does, but that fortunately Tudor has leased to them the exclusive rights to build icehouses in Bombay, following the secret methods discovered in America after long and arduous effort.
Back in Boston, some time later, on the wharves, Lavinia and Katherine wait, and watch, and worry. Lavinia, peering through a spyglass, suddenly cries, “There!” It’s the Tuscany! Both peer through their spyglasses, looking for a sign that will tell them whether the trip has been a success or a failure. At last they spot Tudor, Tom, and Nathaniel, standing in the bow of the first ship, decked out in flamboyant outfits. For some reason not made clear in the film, the Sultan of Gujarat, his attendants, his guards, a bevy of girls in harem pants, four elephants, and a delegation of British colonial officials have come along with them. They are all singing, “Hooray for Freddie Tudor,” a number that is, it must be admitted, a pallid reworking of “Hooray for Captain Spaulding.” It is sung to the same tune:
Hooray for Freddie Tudor!
Yo ho! The iceman cometh!
“Did someone call me goniff?”
Yo ho! Yo ho! Yo ho!
THE TRIUMPH didn’t last for the Pipers, although ice made Tom Piper a wealthy man. When he died in 1852, he left a considerable fortune, including stock in Tudor’s ice business, but within two years his two sons and two daughters had lost it all.
Tom Piper’s eldest son, Eleazer, visited a palmist on the day after his father was buried. The thrust of the palmist’s remarks was that Eleazer was about to go through a key pivotal time in his life, and that prospects were not good, but that Eleazer could make the best of things by trusting his intuition. Eleazer left the palmist’s with his head reeling. In the course of his walk home, he decided to act in accordance with a hunch he’d had for some time. He had been keeping an eye on a British patent medicine, Tono-Bungay. Its sales had grown phenomenally. Eleazer had tried to persuade his father to invest in it, but Thomas Piper’s interest in ice had been so consuming that he had paid little attention to his son; Eleazer suspected that his father thought little of his business abilities. The Tono-Bungay company was just beginning to make a serious move toward expansion beyond the British Isles, and Eleazer’s intuition told him that now was the time to strike. If he could persuade his siblings to invest, they might obtain an American monopoly in Tono-Bungay, which ought to put them on a surer footing in the coming turbulent times that the palmist had predicted. This was surer than ice, as sure as sure can be.
The sons and daughters of Thomas Piper agreed, swept up by the force of Eleazer’s conviction and his hereditary gift for salesmanship. They divested themselves of everything ice had brought them and bid for and won exclusive rights to the American market for Tono-Bungay.
Within a month, Tono-Bungay collapsed. The Ponderevos, who had launched the business in Britain, and the Pipers, who had hoped to advance it in America, were paupers. The palmist, confronted by a blubbering, drunk, and disheveled Eleazer Piper, told him that he had actually been extremely lucky. “If you hadn’t followed your hunch in this matter,” she said, “there’s no telling what might have happened. Of this, however, I am certain: things would have been far worse.”
In the years that followed, the Piper fortunes rose and fell within a narrower range on the scale of success and failure. When they rose, they rose only to the level where there was enough for dinner and a little extra in case someone dropped by; when they fell, they fell to the level where there wasn’t enough for dinner, and if someone dropped by, one of the children would answer the door and say that Father was out.
[to be continued on Monday, May 16, 2022]
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In Topical Guide 259, Mark Dorset considers Popular Culture: Songs: “Hooray for Captain Spaulding” and Schemes, Swindles, and Scams: Tono-Bungay from this episode.
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