"You don't think, then, that they----"
"Them!" said Mrs. Purvis strongly. "Them! Not in a million years, sir! Never! Never!...'E"--her voice fairly soared to a cry of powerful conviction--"'E's the one! 'E's always been the one! And when the time comes, sir, 'E--'E will be King!"
In the complete and unquestioning loyalty of her character, Mrs. Purvis was like a large and gentle dog. Indeed, her whole relation to life was curiously animal-like. She had an intense concern for every member of brute creation, and when she saw dogs or horses in the streets she always seemed to notice first the animal and then the human being that it belonged to. She had come to know and recognise all the people in Ebury Street through the dogs they owned. When George questioned her one clay about a distinguished-looking old gentleman with a keen hawk's face whom he had passed several times on the street, Mrs. Purvis answered immediately, with an air of satisfaction:
"Ah-h, yes. 'E's the one that 'as the rascal in 27. Ah-h, and 'e is a rascal, too," she cried, shaking her head and laughing with affectionate remembrance. "Big, shaggy fellow 'e is, you know, comin' along, swingin' 'is big shoulders, and looking' as if butter wouldn't melt in 'is mouth. 'E is a rascal."
George was a little bewildered by this time and asked her if she meant the gentleman or the dog.
"Oh, the dog," cried Mrs. Purvis. "The dog! A big Scotch shepherd 'e is. Belongs to the gentleman you were speakin' of. Gentleman's some sort of scholar or writer or professor, I believe. Used to be up at Cambridge. Retired now. Lives in 27."
Or again, looking out of the window one day into the pea-soup drizzle of the street, George saw an astonishingly beautiful girl pass by upon the other side. He called Mrs. Purvis quickly, pointed out the girl, and excitedly demanded:
"Who is she? Do you know her? Does she live here on the street?"
"I can't say, sir," Mrs. Purvis answered, looking puzzled. "It seems I must 'ave seen 'er before, but I can't be sure. But I will just keep my eyes open and I'll let you know if I find out where she lives."
A few days later Mrs. Purvis came in from her morning's shopping tour, beaming with satisfaction and full of news. "Ah-h," she said, "I 'ave news for you. I found out about the girl."
"What girl?" he said, looking up startled from his work.
"The girl you asked about the other day," said Mrs. Purvis. "The one you pointed out to me."
"Oh yes," he said, getting up. "And what about her? Does shelive here in the street?"
"Of course," said Mrs. Purvis. "I've seen 'er a 'undred times. I should 'ave known 'er in a second the other day, only she didn't 'ave 'im with 'er."
"Him? Who?"
"Why, the rascal down at 46. That's who she is."
"That's who who is, Mrs. Purvis?"
"Why, the great Dane, of course. You must 'ave seen 'im. 'E's big as a Shetland pony," she laughed. "'E's always with 'er. The only time I ever saw 'er without 'im was the other day, and that's why," she cried triumphantly, "I didn't know 'er. But to-day, they were out takin' a walk together and I saw 'em comin'...Then I knew who she was. They're the ones in 46. And the rascal"--here shelaughed affectionately--"ah-h, what a rascal 'e is! Oh, a fine fellow, you know. So big and strong 'e is. I sometimes wonder where they keep 'im, 'ow they found a 'ouse big enough to put 'im in."
Hardly a morning passed that she didn't return from her little tour of the neighbourhood flushed with excitement over some new "rascal", some "fine fellow", some dog or horse she had observed and watched. She would go crimson with anger over any act of cruelty or indifference to an animal. She would come in boiling with rage because she had passed a horse that had been tightly bridled:
"...And I gave 'im a piece of my mind, too," she would cry, referring to the driver. "I told 'im that a man as mistreated a hanimal in that way wasn't fit to 'ave one. If there'd been a constable about, I'd 'ave 'ad 'im took in custody, that's what I'd 'ave done. I told 'im so, too. Shockin', I calls it. The way some people can b'ave to some poor, 'elpless beast that 'as no tongue to tell what it goes through. Let 'em 'ave a bridle in their mouth a bit! Let 'em go round for a while with their faces shut up in a muzzle! Ah-h," she would say grimly, as if the idea afforded her a savage pleasure, "that'd teach 'em! They'd know then, all right!"
There was something disturbing and unwholesome about the extravagance of this feeling for animals. George observed Mrs. Purvis closely in her relations with people and found out that she was by no means so agitated at the spectacle of human suffering. Her attitude towards the poor, of whom she was one, was remarkable for its philosophic acceptance. Her feeling seemed to be that the poor are always with us, that they are quite used to their poverty, and that this makes it unnecessary for anybody to bother about it, least of all the miserable victims themselves. It had certainly never entered her head that anything should be done about it. The sufferings of the poor seemed to her as natural and as inevitable as the London fog, and to her way of thinking it was just as much a waste of honest emotion to get worked up about the one as about the other.
Thus, on the same morning that she would come in blazing with indignation over the mistreatment of a dog or horse, George would sometimes hear her speak sharply, curtly, and without a trace of feeling to the dirty, half-starved, and half-naked devil of a boy who always delivered the beer from the liquor shop. This wretched child was like some creature out of Dickens--a living specimen of that poverty which, at its worst, has always seemed to be lower and more degraded in England than anywhere else. The thing that gives it its special horror is that in England people of this type appear to be stogged to their misery, sucked down in a swamp of inherited wretchedness which is never going to be any better, and from which they know they can never escape.
So it was with this God-forsaken boy. He was one of the Little People--that race of dwarfs and gnomes which was suddenly and' terribly revealed to George that winter in London. George discovered that there arc really two different orders of humanity in England, and they are so far apart that they hardly seem to belong to the same species. They are the Big People and the Little People.
The Big People are fresh-skinned, ruddy, healthy, and alert; they show by their appearance that they have always had enough to eat. At their physical best, they look like great bulls of humanity. On the streets of London one sees these proud and solid figures of men and women, magnificently dressed and cared for, and one observes that their faces wear the completely vacant and imperturbable expressions of highly bred cattle. These are the British Lords of Creation. And among the people who protect and serve them, and who are really a part of their own order, one also sees some magnificent specimens--strapping Guardsmen, for example, six feet five inches tall and as straight as lances, with the same assured look in their faces, which says plainly that though they may not be the Lords of Creation themselves, at any rate they are the agents and instruments of the Lords.
But if one stays in England long enough, all of a sudden one day he is going to discover the Little People. They are a race of gnomes who look as if they have burrowed in tunnels and lived for so many centuries in underground mines that they have all become pale and small and wizened. Something in their faces and in the gnarled formations of their bodies not only shows the buried lives they live, but also indicates that their fathers and mothers and grandparents for generations before them were similarly starved of food and sunlight and were bred like gnomes in the dark and deep-delved earth.
One hardly notices them at first. But then, one day, the Little People swarm up to the surface of the earth, and for the first time one sees them. That is the way the revelation came to George Webber, and it was an astounding discovery. It was like a kind of terrible magic to realise suddenly that he had been living in this English world and seeing only one part of it, thinking it was the whole. It was not that the Little People were few in number. Once he saw them, they seemed to be almost the whole population. They outnumbered the Big People ten to one. And after he saw them, he knew that England could never
look the same to him again, and that nothing he might read or hear about the country thereafter would make sense to him if it did not take the Little People into account.
The wretched boy from the liquor shop was one of them. Everything about him proclaimed eloquently that he had been born dwarfed and stunted into a world of hopeless poverty, and that he had never had enough to eat, or enough clothes to warm him, or enough shelter to keep the cold fogs from seeping through into the very marrow of his bones. It was not that he was actually deformed, but merely that his body seemed to be shrivelled and shrunk and squeezed of its juices like that of an old man. He may have been fifteen or sixteen years old, though there were times when he seemed younger. Always, however, his appearance was that of an under-grown man, and one had the horrible feeling that his starved body had long since given up the unequal struggle and would never grow any more.
He wore a greasy, threadbare little jacket, tightly buttoned, from the sleeves of which his raw wrists and large, grimy, work-reddened hands protruded with almost indecent nakedness. His trousers, tight as a couple of sausage skins, were equally greasy and threadbare, and were inches too short for him. His old and broken shoes were several sizes too big, and from the battered look of them they must have helped to round the edges of every cobble-stone in stony-hearted London. This costume was completed by a shapeless old hulk of a cap, so large and baggy that it slopped over on one side of his head and buried the ear.
What his features were like it was almost impossible to know, because he was so dirty. His flesh, what one could see of it through the unwashed grime, had a lifeless, opaque pallor. The whole face was curiously blurred and blunted, as if it had been moulded hastily and roughly out of tallow. The nose was wide and flat, and turned up at the end to produce great, flaring nostrils. The mouth was thick and dull, and looked as if it had been pressed into the face with a blunt instrument. The eyes were dark and dead.
This grotesque little creature even spoke a different language. It was Cockney, of course, but not sharp, decisive Cockney; it was a kind of thick, catarrhal jargon, so blurred in the muttering that it was almost indecipherable. George could hardly understand him at all. Mrs. Purvis could make better sense of it, but even she confessed that there were times when she did not know what he was talking about. George would hear her beginning to rail at him the instant he came staggering into the house beneath the weight of a heavy case of beer:
"'Ere, now, mind where you're goin', won't you? And try not to make so much noise with those bottles! Why can't you wipe those muddy boots before you come in the 'ouse? Don't come clumpin' up the stairs like an 'orse!...Oh," she would cry in despair, turning to George, "'e is the clumsiest chap I ever saw!...And why can't you wash your face once in a while?" she would say, striking again at the urchin with her sharp tongue. "A great, growin' chap like you ought to be ashamed goin' about where people can see you with a face like that!"
"Yus," he muttered sullenly, "goin' abaht wiv a fyce lahk that. If you 'ad to go abaht the wye I do, you'd wash your fyce, wouldn't yer?"
Then, still muttering resentfully to himself, he would clump down the stairs and go away, and from the front window George would watch him as he trudged back up the street towards the wine and liquor shop in which he worked.
This store was small, but since the neighbourhood was fashionable the place had that atmosphere of mellow luxury and quiet elegance--something about it a little worn, but all the better for being a little worn--that one finds in small, expensive shops of this sort in England. It was as if the place were mildly tinctured with fog, touched a little with the weather, and with the indefinable but faintly exciting smell of soft coal smoke. And over everything, permeating the very woods of the counter, shelves, and floor, hung the fragrance of old wines and the purest distillations of fine liquors.
You opened the door, and a little bell tinkled gently. You took a half-step down into the shop, and immediately its atmosphere made you feel at peace. You felt opulent and secure. You felt all the powerful but obscure seductions of luxury (which, if you have money, you can feel in England better than anywhere else). You felt rich and able to do anything. You felt that the world was good, and overflowing with delectable delicacies, and that all of them were yours for the asking.
The proprietor of this luxurious little nest of commerce seemed just exactly the man for such an office. He was middle-aged, of medium height, spare of build, with pale brown eyes and brown moustaches--wispy, rather long, and somewhat lank. He wore a wing collar, a black necktie, and a scarf-pin. He usually appeared in shirt-sleeves, but he dispelled any suggestion of improper informality by wearing arm protectors of black silk. This gave him just the proper touch of unctuous yet restrained servility. He was middle class--not middle class as America knows it, not even middle class as the English usually know it--but a very special kind of middle class, serving middle class, as befitted a purveyor of fine comforts to fine gentlemen. He was there to serve the gentry, to live upon the gentry, to exist by, through, and for the gentry, and always to bend a little at the waist when gentry came.
As you entered the shop, he would come forward behind his counter, say "Good evening, sir," with just the proper note of modified servility, make some remark about the weather, and then, arching his thin, bony, sandily-freckled hands upon the counter, he would bend forwards slightly--wing collar, black necktie, black silk arm protectors, moustache, pale brown eyes, pale, false smile, and all the rest of him--and with servile attentiveness, not quite fawning, would wait to do your bidding.
"What is good to-day? Have you a claret, a sound yet modestly-priced vintage you can recommend?"
"A claret, sir?" in silken tones. "We have a good one, sir, and not expensive either. A number of our patrons have tried it. They all pronounce it excellent. You'll not go wrong, sir, if you try this one."
"And how about a Scotch whisky?"
"A Haig, sir?" Again the silken tones. "You'll not go wrong on Haig, sir. But perhaps you'd like to try another brand, something a trifle rare, a little more expensive, perhaps a little more mature. Some of our patrons have tried this one, sir. It costs a shilling more, but if you like the smoky flavour you'll find it worth the difference."
Oh, the fond, brisk slave! The fond, neat slave! The fond slave bending at the waist, with bony fingers arched upon his counter! The fond slave with his sparse hair neatly parted in the middle, and the narrow forehead arched with even corrugations of pale wrinkles as the face lifted upwards with its thin, false smile! Oh, this fond, brisk pander to fine gentlemen--and that wretched boy! For suddenly, in the midst of all this show of eager servitude, this painted counterfeit of warmth, the man would turn like a snarling cur upon that miserable child, who stood there sniffling through his catarrhal nose, shuffling his numbed feet for circulation, and chafing his reddened, chapped, work-coarsened hands before the cheerful, crackling fire of coals:
"Here, now, what are you hanging round the shop for? Have you delivered that order to Number 12 yet? Be on your way, then, and don't keep the gentleman waiting any longer!"
And then immediately the grotesque return to silken courtesy, to the pale, false smile again, to the fawning unctions of his "Yes, sir. A dozen bottles, sir. Within thirty minutes, sir. To Number 42--oh, quite so, sir. Good night."
And good night, good night, good night to you, my fond, brisk slave, you backbone of a nation's power. Good night to you, staunch symbol of a Briton's rugged independence. Good night to you, and to your wife, your children, and your mongrel tyranny over their lives. Good night to you, my little autocrat of the dinner-table. Good night to you, my lord and master of the Sunday leg of mutton. Good night to you, my gentlemen's pander in Ebury Street.
And good night to you, as well, my wretched little boy, my little dwarf, my gnome, my grimy citizen from the world of the Little People.
The fog drifts thick and fast to-night into the street. It sifts and settles like a cloak, until one sees the street no longer. And where the sho
p light shines upon the fog, there burns a misty glow, a blurred and golden bloom of radiance, of comfort, and of warmth. Feet pass the shop, men come ghostwise from the fog's thick mantle, are for a moment born, are men again, are heard upon the pavement, then, wraithlike, vanish into fog, are ghosts again, are lost, are gone. The proud, the mighty, and the titled of the earth, the lovely and protected, too, go home--home to their strong and sheltered walls behind the golden nimbus of other lights, fog-flowered. Four hundred yards away the tall sentries stamp and turn and march again. All's glory here. All's strong as mortared walls. All's loveliness and joy within this best of worlds.
And you, you wretched child, so rudely and unfitly wrenched into this world of glory, wherever you must go to-night, in whatever doorway you must sleep, upon whatever pallet of foul-smelling straw, within whatever tumbled warren of old brick, there in the smoke, the fog-cold welter, and the swarming web of old, unending London--sleep well as can be, and hug the ghosts of warmth about you as you remember the forbidden world and its imagined glory. So, my little gnome, good night. May God have mercy on us all.
* * *
33. Enter Mr. Lloyd McHarg
During the late autumn and early winter of that year occurred an event which added to Webber's chronicle the adventure of an extraordinary experience. He had received no news from America for several weeks when, suddenly in November, he began to get excited letters from his friends, informing him of a recent incident that bore directly on his own career.