He was a good-looking man, tall, young, ruddy, with the lean and well-conditioned figure of a cavalryman. He was an engaging kind of fellow, too—so engaging that when he made the arrangements which permitted George to take over the premises, he managed to insinuate into his bill for rent a thumping sum that covered all the electricity and gas he had used in the preceding two quarters. And electricity and gas, as George was to discover, came high in London. You read and worked by one, sometimes not only through the night, but also through the pea-soup opacity of a so-called day. And you bathed and shaved and cooked and feebly warmed yourself by the other. George never did figure out just exactly how the engaging Major Bixley-Dunton did it, but he managed it so adroitly that George was half-way back to America some six months later before it dawned on his unsuspecting mind that he had occupied the modest dwelling only two quarters but had paid four whacking assessments for the whole year’s gas and electricity.
George thought he was getting a bargain at the time, and perhaps he was. He paid Major Bixley-Dunton in quarterly instalments—in advance, of course—at the rate of two pounds ten shillings a week, and for this sum he had the advantage of being the sole occupant, at night at least, of a very small but distinctly authentic London house. It was really a rather tiny house, and certainly a very inconspicuous one, in a section noted for the fashionable spaciousness and magnificence of its dwellings. The building was three storeys tall, and George had the top floor. Below him a doctor had his offices, and the ground floor was occupied by a small tailor shop. These other tenants both lived elsewhere and were present only during the day, so at night George had the whole house to himself.
He had a good deal of respect for the little tailor shop. The venerable and celebrated Irish writer, Mr. James Burke, had his pants pressed there, and George had the honour of being present in the shop one night when the great man called for them. It was a considerable moment in Webber’s life. He felt that he was assisting at an impressive and distinguished ceremony. It was the first time he had ever been in such intimate contact with such exalted literary greatness, and most fairminded people will agree that there are few things in the world more intimate than a pair of pants. Also, even at the moment that Mr. Burke entered the shop and demanded his trousers, George was requesting the return of his own. This homely coincidence gave him a feeling of perfectly delightful understanding and identity of purpose with a gentleman whose talents had for so many years been an object of his veneration. It gave him an easy and casual sense of belonging to the inner circle, and he could imagine someone saying to him:
“Oh, by the way, have you seen anything of James Burke lately?”
“Oh yes,” he could nonchalantly reply, “I ran into him the other day in the place where we both go to have our pants pressed.”
And night after night as he worked in his sitting-room on the third floor, at that hour the solitary lord and master of that little house, toiling on the composition of a work which he hoped, but did not dare believe, might rival in celebrity some of James Burke’s own, he would get at times the most curious and moving sense of companionship, as if a beneficent and approving spirit were there beneath that roof with him; and through the watches of the night it would speak to him with the eloquence of silence, saying:
“Toil on, son, and do not lose heart or hope. Let nothing you dismay. You are not utterly forsaken. I, too, am here—here in the darkness waiting, here attentive, here approving of your labour and your dream.”
Ever sincerely yours,
James Burke’s Pants
One of the most memorable experiences of George Webber’s six months in London was his relationship with Daisy Purvis.
Mrs. Purvis was a charwoman who lived at Hammersmith and for years had worked for “unmarried gentlemen” in the fashionable districts known as Mayfair and Belgravia. George had inherited her, so to speak, from Major Bixley-Dunton, and when he went away he gave her back to him, to be passed on to the next young bachelor gentleman—a man, George hoped, who would be worthy of her loyalty, devotion, idolatry, and humble slavery. He had never had a servant in his life before. He had known Negro servants during his boyhood in the South; since then he had had people come in once or twice a week to clean up the various places where he had lived; but never before had he owned a servant body and soul, to the degree that her interests became his interests and her life his life; never before had he had anyone whose whole concern was the preservation of his comfort and welfare.
In appearance, Mrs. Purvis might have been the prototype of a whole class. She was not one of those comic figures so often pictured in the drawings of Belcher and Phil May, those pudgy old women who wear shawls and little Queen Victoria bonnets perched upon their heads, whose most appropriate locale seems to be the pub, and whom one actually does see in London pubs, sodden with beer and viciousness. Mrs. Purvis was a self-respecting female of the working class. She was somewhere in her forties, a woman inclined to plumpness, of middling height, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and pink-complexioned, with a pleasant, modest face, and a naturally friendly nature, but inclined to be somewhat do her dignity with strangers. At first, although she was at all times courteous, her manner towards her new employer was a little distant. She would come in in the morning and they would formally discuss the business of the day—what they were going to have for lunch, the supplies they were going to “git in”, the amount of money it would be necessary to “lay out”.