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 tonight into the street. It sifts and settles like a cloak, until one sees the street no longer. And where the shop 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 tonight, 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.
The American novelist, Mr. Lloyd McHarg, had just published a new book which had been instantly and universally acclaimed as a monument of national significance, as well as the crowning achievement in McHarg’s brilliant literary career. George had read in the English press brief accounts of the book’s tremendous success, but now he began to receive enlargements on the news from his friends at home. Mr. McHarg, it seemed, had given an interview to reporters, and to the astonishment of everyone had begun to talk, not about his own book, but about Webber’s. Cuttings of the interview were sent to George. He read them with astonishment, and with the deepest and most earnest gratitude.