Here, as you pass through the brutal sprawl, the twenty miles of rails and rickets, of the South Chicago slums--here, in an unpainted shack, is a Negro boy, and, seeker, he is burning in the night. Behind him is a memory of the cotton-fields, the flat and mournful pineland barrens of the lost and buried South, and at the fringes of the pine another nigger shack, with mammy and eleven little niggers. Farther still behind, the slave-driver's whip, the slave ship, and, far off, the jungle dirge of Africa. And before him, what? A roped-in ring, a blaze of lights, across from him a white champion; the bell, the opening, and all round the vast sea-roaring of the crowd. Then the lightning feint and stroke, the black panther's paw--the hot, rotating presses, and the rivers of sheeted print! 0 seeker, where is the slave ship now?
Or there, in the clay-baked piedmont of the South, that lean and tan-faced boy who sprawls there in the creaking chair among admiring cronies before the open doorways of the fire department, and tells them how he pitched the team to shut-out victory to-day. What visions burn, what dreams possess him, seeker of the night? The packed stands of the stadium, the bleachers sweltering with their unshaded hordes, the faultless velvet of the diamond, unlike the clay-balked outfields down in Georgia. The mounting roar of eighty thousand voices and Gehrig coming up to bat, the boy himself upon the pitching mound, the lean face steady as a hound's; then the nod, the signal, and the wind-up, the rawhide arm that snaps and crackles like a whip, the small white bullet of the blazing ball, its loud report in the oiled pocket of the catcher's mitt, the umpire's thumb jerked upwards, the clean strike.
Or there again, in the East-Side Ghetto of Manhattan, two blocks away from the East River, a block away from the gas-house district and its thuggery, there in the swarming tenement, shut in its sweltering cell, breathing the sun-baked air through opened window at the fire-escape, celled there away into a little semblance of privacy and solitude from all the brawling and vociferous life and argument of his family and the seething hive round him, the Jew boy sits and pores upon his book. In shirt-sleeves, bent above his table to meet the hard glare of a naked bulb, he sits with gaunt, starved face converging to his huge beaked nose, the weak eyes squinting painfully through his thick-lens glasses, his greasy hair roached back in oily scrolls above the slanting cage of his painful and constricted brow. And for what? For what this agony of concentration? For what this hell of effort? For what this intense withdrawal from the poverty and squalor of dirty brick and rusty fire-escapes, from the raucous cries and violence and never-ending noise? For what? Because, brother, he is burning in the night. He sees the class, the lecture room, the shining apparatus of gigantic laboratories, the open field of scholarship and pure research, certain knowledge, and the world distinction of an Einstein name.
So, then, to every man his chance--to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity--to every man the right to live, to work to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him--this seeker, is the promise of America.
* * *
BOOK V. - EXILE AND DISCOVERY
After four longyears in Brooklyn, George Webber came out of the wilderness, looked round him, and concluded he had had enough of it. During this period he had learned much, both about himself and about America, but now he was seized again with wanderlust. His life had always seemed to shift between the poles of anchored loneliness and foot-loose voyagings--between wandering for ever, and then the earth again--and now the old and restless urgings of "Where shall we go? And what shall we do?" again became insistent, would not down, and demanded of him a new answer.
Ever since his first book bad been published be had been looking for a way to form and shape his next. Now he thought that he had found it. It was not the way, perhaps, but it was a way. The hundreds and thousands of separate and disjointed notes that he had written down had fallen at last into a pattern in his mind. He needed only to weave them all together, and fill in the blanks, and he would have a book. He felt that be could do this final job of organisation and revision better if he made a clean break in the monotony 'of his life. New scenes, new faces, and new atmospheres might clear his head and sharpen his perspective.
It would be a good thing, too, to get away from America for a while. Too much was happening here--it was too exciting and disturbing. The whole thing was in such a state of flux, in such a prophetic condition of becoming, that the sheer exhilaration of watching it made it hard to concentrate upon the immediate job he had to do. Perhaps in the older civilisation of Europe, where life was fixed and certain, moulded by the heritage of centuries, there would be fewer distractions to keep him from his work. He decided to go abroad, to England, and there drop anchor, there find even keel in placid waters--there complete his book.
So in the late summer of 1934 he sailed from New York, went straight to London, took a flat, and settled down to hard, intensive labour. All through the autumn and winter of that year he lived in London in his self-imposed exile. It was a memorable time for him, a time during which, as he was later to realise, he discovered an entire new world. All the events, the experiences, and the people that he met became engraved indelibly upon his life.
And the event which exercised the most profound influence upon him in that alien air was his meeting with the great American author, Mr. Lloyd McHarg. Everything seemed to lead up to that. And what made his meeting with Mr. McHarg so important to him was that now, for the first time, he met a living embodiment of his own dearest and most secret dream. For when Mr. Lloyd McHarg swept like a cyclone through his life, George knew that he was having his first encounter in the flesh with that fair Medusa, Fame herself Never before had he beheld the lady, or witnessed the effects of her sweet blandishments. Now he saw the whole thing for himself.
* * *
32. The Universe of Daisy Purvis
On arriving in London, George had the good fortune to sublet a flat in Ebury Street. The young military gentleman who condescended to let him have the place possessed one of those resounding double-jointed names that one comes across so often among the members of the upper or would-be-upper branches of English society. George was never able to get all the mouth-filling syllables of that grand name quite straight, but suffice it to say that his landlord was a Major Somebody Somebody Somebody Bixley-Dunton.
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 d
eal 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".
"What would you like for lunch to-day, sir?" Mrs. Purvis would say. "'Ave you decided?"
"No, Mrs. Purvis. What would you suggest? Let's see. We had the chump chop yesterday, didn't we, and the sprouts?"
"Yes, sir," Mrs. Purvis would reply, "and the day before--Monday, you may recall--we 'ad rump steak with potato chips."
"Yes, and it was good, too. Well, then, suppose we have rump steak again?"
"Very good, sir," Mrs. Purvis would say, with perfect courtesy, but with a rising intonation of the voice which somehow suggested, delicately and yet unmistakably, that he could do as he pleased, but mat she rather thought his choice was not the best.
Feeling this, George would immediately have doubts. He would say:
"Oh, wait a minute. We've been having steak quite often, haven't we?"
"You 'ave 'ad it quite a bit, sir," she would say quietly, not with reproof, but with just a trace of confirmation. "Still, of course----" She would not finish, but would pause and wait.
"Well, rump steak is good. All that we've had was first-rate. Still, maybe we could have something else to-day, for a change. What do you think?"
"Should think so, sir, if you feel that way," she said quietly. "After all, one does like a bit of variety now and then, doesn't one?"
"Of course. Well, then, what shall it be? What would you suggest, Mrs. Purvis?"
"Well, sir, if I may say so, a bit of gammon and peas is rather nice sometimes," with just a trace of shyness and diffidence, mixed with an engaging tinge of warmth as she relented into the informality of mild enthusiasm. "I 'ad a look in at the butcher's as I came by this mornin', and the gammon was nice, sir. It was a prime bit, sir," she said now with genuine warmth. "Prime."
After this, of course, he could not tell her that he had not the faintest notion what gammon was. He could only look delighted and respond:
"Then, by all means, let's have gammon and peas. I think it's just the thing to-day."
"Very good, sir." She had drawn herself up again; the formal intonation of the words had put her back within the fortress of aloofness, and had put him back upon his heels.
It was a curious and disquieting experience, one that he was often to have with English people. Just when he thought that finally the bars were down and the last barriers of reserve broken through, just when they had begun to talk with mutual warmth and enthusiasm, these English would be back behind the barricade, leaving him to feel that it was all to do over again.
"Now for your breakfast to-morrow mornin'," Mrs. Purvis would continue. "'Ave you decided what you'd like?"
"No, Mrs. Purvis. Have we anything on hand? How are our supplies holding out?"
"They are a bit low, sir," she admitted. "We 'ave eggs. There is still butter left, and 'arf a loaf of bread. We're gittin' low on tea, sir. But you could 'ave eggs, sir, if you like."
Something in the faint formality of the tone informed him that even though he might like to have eggs, Mrs. Purvis would not approve, so he said quickly:
"Oh, no, Mrs. Purvis. Get the tea, of course, but no more eggs. I think we've had too many eggs, don't you?"
"You 'ave, sir, you know," she said gently--"for the last three mornin's, at any rate. Still--" Again she paused, as if to say that if he was determined to go on having eggs, he should have them.
"Oh, no. We mustn't have eggs again. If we keep on at this rate, we'll get to the point where we can't look an egg in the face again, won't we?"
She laughed suddenly, a jolly and full-throated laugh. "We will, sir, won't we?" said Mrs. Purvis, and laughed again. "Excuse me for larfin', sir, but the way you put it, I 'ad to larf. It was quite amusin', really."
"Well, then, Mrs. Purvis, maybe you've got some ideas. It's not going to be eggs, that's one thing sure."
"Well, sir, 'ave you tried kippers yet? Kippers are quite nice, sir," she went on, with another momentary mellowing into warmth. "If you're lookin' for a change, you could do worse than kippers. Really you could, sir."
"Well, then, we'll have kippers. They're the very thing."
"Very good, sir," She hesitated a moment and then said: "About your supper, sir--I was thinkin'----"
"Yes, Mrs. Purvis?"
"It just occurred to me, sir, that, seein' as I'm not h
ere at night to cook you a 'ot meal, we might lay in somethin' you could prepare for yourself. I was thinkin' the other day, sir, workin' as you do, you must get 'ungry in the middle of the night, so it wouldn't be a bad idea, would it, sir, if you could have somethin' on 'and?"
"I think it would be a wonderful idea, Mrs. Purvis. What do you have in mind?"
"Well, sir," she paused briefly again, reflecting quietly, "we might git in a bit of tongue, you know. A bit of cold tongue is very tasty. I should think you'd find it most welcome in the middle of the night. Or a bit of 'am. Then, sir, you would 'ave your bread and butter and your mustard pickle, and I could even git in a jar of chutney, if youlike, and you know 'ow to make tea yourself, don't you, sir?"
"Of course. It's a good idea. By all means, get in tongue or ham and chutney. Is that all, now?"
"Well, sir," she reflected a moment longer, went to the buffet sideboard, opened it, and looked in. "I was just wonderin' 'ow you are for beer, sir...Ah-h," she exclaimed, nodding with satisfaction, "it is gittin' a bit low, sir. You 'ave only two bottles left. Shall we lay in a 'arf-dozen bottles?"
"Yes. No--wait a minute. Better make it a dozen, then you won't have to be running out to order it again so soon."
"Very good, sir." Again the formal rising intonation, this time, he thought, with approval. "And what do you prefer, the Worthington or Bass?"