Part 25

He went to the window. Over the roofs and spires of New York he could see the Atlantic glittering in the setting sun. A slim silvery object was moving rapidly out into the bay, its ribbon of smoke settling slowly down on the unruffled water behind it. He unconsciously put his hands behind his back, in Napoleon fashion, and narrowed his eyes. It was worth the trying, anyway, he decided; at least he knew that nothing else would ease the new-born ache in his heart.

* * * * *

London pleased and puzzled him. It gave him an impression, first, of vast size; through mile upon mile of small brick houses, one just like the other, the train raced to Waterloo Station--so many miles of repetition; he felt as one does in a semi-dream, when time loses all proportion; only his watch showed him that the row he was seeing at any instant was an actual extension in space, not in his imagination, of all the others he recalled seeing. The bustle of the station, huge and ugly, the ceaseless, punctuated buzz of queer vocal inflections that awoke old echoes, the enormous taxicab, more like a private car, save for its dirt and decrepitude, and again rows of houses as like as peas. It was endless--infinitely larger than New York, with its variety and its immovable water boundaries. It was late at night when he finished his dinner, and he was too tired to leave the hotel for further investigation, but he fell asleep with the curious reflection that all comparisons he had seen or heard of between New York and London were the exact reverse of the truth ... the latter was infinitely the greater in its mass of teeming life, but rough, inchoate, not nearly so finished as the former.

Next day confirmed his impression. He sauntered about, examining everything attentively, minutely, reconstructively, he might have said, the while unconscious of the curious glances he attracted; the broad black hat which he affected intensified the peculiar inward concentration of his eyes and enhanced the contrast with the youthful, indecisive curve of the lips and jaw above the negligé collar and flowing black tie. What opportunities to remake this enormous London, to shape this formless monster’s endless possibilities! The buildings seemed stunted, totally inadequate to house the world-famous businesses whose clumsy signs he saw on them. He found his London correspondents, a firm of indisputable skill, importance and solvency, in a side street, occupying a narrow house four storeys high, and entered by a former servants’ doorway; its floors sagged, its stairways creaked, and no amount of paint and electricity could raise it to his conception of what was due to the business it housed. After long search he stumbled by mere chance on the offices of a periodical with which he annually spent thousands, to find its affairs placidly going on in a converted stable in an old courtyard. The narrow streets offered, on a larger scale, the tangle of horse, vehicle and pedestrian to be seen in any American farm town overcrowded by market day. The electric signs of Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square which would have caused his associates to guffaw, brought a frown to his forehead. So many people, so much riches--and how carelessly employed.

Before long he began to wish that he could start at the beginning and put some system into this amiable, haphazard metropolis. His desire was extremely practical. He knew it would not do to take the whole thing down and build it up again on carefully planned lines. That would be too expensive, and he was aware that there might be prejudices against so drastic a proceeding. He merely desired earnestly to use in a proper manner the material now being so sinfully wasted. As an instance, one couldn’t straighten the Thames, of course, useful as that might be; but one could put to better purpose the many open spaces of its bridge-heads to relieve their uninformative blackness at night--although in this respect he saw immature efforts at improvement. He wanted to knock out the dingy shop windows that prevailed everywhere, even in the West End, and replace them with something worthy of Fifth Avenue.

Even outside the question of rebuilding, on small scale or large, Powell was pained by the neglect of opportunities that fairly shrieked at him for recognition and adoption. To disregard them indicated either lack of vision in the English, or downright sloth. Perhaps it was due to the race’s well-known self-satisfaction. But what just a little imagination could do. He recalled with what eagerness he had undertaken the publicity for a New York restaurant which boasted seventy-five years of active life. “The stock which conquered the West and fought the Civil War found sustenance at this historic hostelry. Lincoln ate here while on his arduous campaign for the Presidency; it was Grant’s first stopping place after being banquetted in all the palaces of the world. Three-quarters of a century’s experience in the polite art of entertaining ensures you those amenities which, to the epicure, are _sine qua non_ when dining out.” And here almost hourly he saw restaurants scattered from Richmond to the City whose weatherbeaten signs diffidently proclaimed three hundred years of uninterrupted cookery. What could they not boast of in the way of association, of rich material for justifiable _réclame_. Without doubt there were still extant tables in those places under which Cromwell and Wellington had put their boots, pegs on which plumed Cavalier and stiff Puritan hats had hung side by side. A complacent smile lingered for a moment as he recalled how neatly he had effected the sale of Schindler, the antique dealer’s, two colonial chairs, in which Clay and Webster were supposed to have sat while visiting a famous Concord wit. _The Seats of the Mighty_ was the neat caption by which the attention of newspaper readers was attracted to the photograph of the chairs convincingly occupied by the shades of the departed statesmen, and within twenty-four hours a millionaire had purchased them for ten thousand dollars.

He made profound calculations on the revenue Westminster Abbey would derive from the proper dissemination of facts regarding its peculiar relation to the nation’s great dead; a quantity of judiciously prepared, wisely distributed newspaper paragraphs illustrating in word and picture the glory of _The Fane of Fame_, as he mentally entitled it, would probably, in the course of ten years or so, enable it to double its available space for coronations, etc. He wandered about the Tower with a guide and a compatriot, and received the latter’s cordial agreement to a suggestion that a special ’bus line from Charing Cross would not only make the great monument more accessible, but would soon pay for itself if the vehicles were made in the form of tumbrils (he was not quite sure whether sixteenth-century England employed tumbrils, but that could be adjusted later), and the driver and the conductor attired, say, as Walter Raleigh and a headsman.

He left Victoria Station in the morning, having purchased half-a-dozen magazines to beguile the journey, but as the train issued into open country, which he had previously traversed in the dark, he forgot them in an unexpected interest in the countryside. In a very few minutes he had gained a more favourable impression of British advertising capacities than a week in London had given him. The signs were, indeed, fewer to the mile than in the best parts of the United States, but they were undeniably on the increase. From a professional point of view he found them sufficiently large and colourful, and on the whole well designed as regards employment of space. His only criticism was directed at their literary weakness. Here, for instance, was a blue background, a red and white tin, and the legend “Buy Tucker’s Tinned Spinach--it saves Time.” The alliteration was not bad, but the idea was primitive, an archaism in advertising. Here, a mile further along, was a merry Roundhead in a green coat offering the passer-by a glass of liquid with the words “I drank it in 1650--it’s even better today.” That was all right to begin with, he thought, his lips pursed like an infant’s in doubt, but more could be made of it. He reflected a moment, and smiled happily to himself as the vision of the board repainted flashed on him:

We distilled our first whisky in 1650. We have averaged 10,000 cases a year since. No customer of ours ever voted for Prohibition.

It was only a rough sketch, but it pleased him, and he looked forward to his mission with content.

He arrived at Edginden before he was aware, and for a moment looked about him in bewilderment. What had been an adventurous descent forty years ago had passed unnoticed in the railway carriage, and the little grey railroad station failed to fit into the picture. He passed down the stone platform, noticing coloured posters inviting one to exotic south coast watering places he had never heard of, engaged a lonely Ford and in a quarter of an hour found himself at the Unicorn. As he stepped out of the car the smoke of the railroad train was just fading into the trees at the brow of the hill to the west. It vanished, and Edginden seemed to appear from behind it unchanged from half-a-century before. The Unicorn himself, imperceptibly faded, was pawing with his forelegs one side of the shield-shaped sign from the top of which his horn protruded. Through the low curtained bow-window was still faintly visible the portrait of a rubicund gentleman in wig and red coat; the only sounds might have been echoes from the past--chickens flapping their wings in a nearby yard, the rumble of a distant cart, the creak and drip of water being drawn from a well. Suddenly he heard a winnowing machine; he lifted his head, detected a faint odour of petrol, looked about inquiringly, and pushed the green door of the inn.

An ample, white-haired old lady gave him an unsmiling welcome, ignored his request for a room with a bath, informed him that dinner would be cold and served at half-past seven, and disappeared. A red-faced maid, in black calico dress and white apron immediately issued from another door and led the way up a flight of narrow, steep and noisy stairs. Her long legs moved so rapidly that his short ones were unable to keep up, and he only found his room by searching around until he perceived his black patent leather bag on a bed almost as high as himself. The maid had gone, but reappeared several moments later with a pitcher of hot water, following her own knock so closely that he had no time to recover the substantial portion of his garments he had already removed.

The window of his room gave on the hills; for a long time he stood regarding their smooth rectangular patches of emerald and bronze; his eye followed the road past fence and house and barn to the purple of the crest; and a feeling of forlornness came over him compared to which the lonesomeness of the week in New York was vague and feeble. It being due merely to the absence of people he cared about, their return sooner or later would have made it right. For this there was no cure; it came out of the essential isolation in which all human beings live, that terrible isolation against which men devise the most fantastic

## activities, in order to avoid facing it. It was like his first illness

after his mother’s death, when his pains and fears seemed to mean nothing to any one. He decided to go downstairs and have a drink with the landlady.

The latter had no objection to his drinking, but declined to join him. The bar was empty, it being outside of hours. He ordered a whisky and soda, and drank it slowly; he detested the stuff and was a teetotaller on principle, but lacked the courage to drink his favourite orange squash in this environment. Besides he realised that the latter was not an avenue to the sociability he craved.

“Nice place you have here,” he began.

“There’s worse,” she replied.

Not being in a position to debate this he began afresh.

“Do you get many Americans here?”

“Some. Are you an American?”

He warmed at this first indication of personal interest slight as it was. “Yes--that is, I live there. As a matter of fact, I was born in England.”

“Couldn’t tell it any more,” she commented, wiping up the counter and significantly setting out a fresh glass. “Which part?”

He had braced himself for this moment. “Right here, in Edginden,” he said, in the soft voice he reserved for the announcement of his most startling projects.

This time she was clearly interested. She scrutinised him carefully and said, “It’s queer I don’t remember you. I know everybody who has ever lived in these parts this sixty years.”

“My father was George Powell.”

She reflected an instant. “I remember,” she finally declared. “He was from Portsmouth and married Jacob Gunn’s girl; the old man set them up in a shop there, but it didn’t go and they came here to live on the farm. I remember when you were born; you were only a little fellow when your mother died and your father took you off to America.” She mused a moment. “Just fancy, you being Sarah Gunn’s boy.” In her abstraction she returned the glass to its place on the shelf behind her.

Thus was Powell welcomed home. In a general way his reception elsewhere resembled Mrs. Unicorn’s (This being the name by which he thought of the landlady). Those that remembered him as a boy, like those that did not, viewed him with curiosity as a tripper rather than as a son come home. When he gave an impressive sum toward the restoration of the church roof, which had for years bided this event, relying meantime on the slender revenue derived from the solicitation of a torn sheet of paper in the vestibule, he received a formal letter of thanks from a committee and a shy, grateful handshake from the rector, but neither mentioned his sentimental reason for the act, nor treated it as other than the gift of a whimsically-minded rich man.

The end of a week found him as far removed from the end of his mission as if he had never come. By now he had company to drink with him in the bar and most of the natives greeted him in the street, pointing him out as the donor of the large sum toward the church’s restoration; but any of this might have happened to any stranger. He wanted to be there as of right, to be at home while he remained, regretted as a departing son when he left. He realized that thus far he had moved little towards that happy goal. He had made no enduring impression; these people were as far from understanding the warm impulse he felt to pour out his energies in their behalf, to receive their cordial assurance of mutual bond and kinship, as he was from understanding how they found life permanently tolerable without electric light, gas or bathtubs. He wanted earnestly to plant some seed which would not only blossom into a thing of utility and beauty for Edginden, but would in its very nature prove to succeeding generations of its children that only one of themselves could have conceived the idea of it.

Numerous tentative projects floated through his brain, but the most favoured children of his imagination all seemed ill-suited to his purpose. The best, the only gift worthy of the name was the power of growth, and he could see no possibility of expansion in Edginden. He might set on foot tactfully a wide publicity campaign to set forth the unique advantages of the place, but he frankly doubted that it had any. There was no manufacturing, and no logical reason why any enterprising manufacturer should choose it for a site. He was reasonably certain that it would not, unlike the thriving small towns of America, buy up tracts of land and offer them gratis as an inducement. Nor could he conceive that the local squire, a stentorian fox-hunting giant who owned the land at both ends of the village, would sanction the placing of signboards, no matter how artistic, and for no matter what public purpose, in his domain. He was sure that these people wanted their town to grow, that was only human. But how to achieve it, how to overcome their dimly perceived prejudices and make them all pull together toward this end, for that he was beginning to despair of finding a solution.

Then, one day, he unexpectedly found it. He was passing Roger Martin’s shop and decided to drop in. Martin was his most intimate acquaintance in Edginden. Each vaguely remembered the other as a boyhood playmate, and each had a dislike of whisky, which drew them together in a corner of the Unicorn’s cosy pub. Martin had an unlimited curiosity about the New World, and Powell a tireless pleasure in gratifying it.

The shop, in a more pretentious locality, would have been called an antique shop. Here it served a more humble and daily need; though filled with quantities of old vases, pots, bowls, urns, cups and other household articles in copper, pewter and brass, with a fair sprinkling of old chairs, tables and chests in oak and walnut, its chief business was to supply Edginden homes, and particularly its kitchens, with the commonplace utensils necessary for containing and cooking. The sale of old things was subordinate to their mending, and to the making of new things.

Powell enjoyed watching almost any form of human activity, and found his place in Martin’s old wing armchair soothing; it was where he always sat while exchanging sentences with the latter between the agreeable strokes of hammer on copper. The place was silent, however, as he entered, and its owner was standing by his work-table, which was pushed against the rear windows of the shop, overlooking a tiny walled garden now abloom with red tulips and purple iris. Martin was a little man, smaller even than Powell; his grey hair was thin at the top, but thick, crisp and curly over his neck and ears; his distinguishing features were red, wrinkled cheeks which dimpled when he smiled, merry twinkling eyes, a disorderly white and black moustache, and prominent upper teeth. At the moment he was attentively examining a bronze vase, in the form of a cylinder imposed on the flattened top of a sphere. He nodded over his shoulder to his visitor.

“This has just come over from your country,” he said. “A lady who passed this way once and bought some of my things sent it to me from San Francisco to see if I could copy it. She wants to make them both into lamps. Isn’t it a beauty?” He lovingly fingered the dull patine of the bronze, lifting it in both hands.

Powell was impressed by something else, however. So this little fellow had a clientele extending to San Francisco. Strange. “Do you often sell things in America?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” responded the smith, still caressing the vase “I’ve a number now to go to New York and Boston. There are some of my things in India and Australia, too,” he added proudly. “Hardly a month passes without my getting an order from abroad.”

Powell remained silent, thinking rapidly. So there was an activity of Edginden with a fame beyond its confines. These bits of brass and copper were known and desired by folk living at the ends of the earth.

“Why do you keep such a small shop?” he demanded suddenly.

Martin set the vase down; it gave the deep-toned ring of the G string of a violin gently brushed in passing. “It’s bigger than I need now,” he said, turning round in surprise.

“But you could extend the business, couldn’t you? If you already have customers in San Francisco and Sydney, in New York and--” the alliteration failed him and he hurried on, “Why man, you could make a big thing of this.”

Martin had before this failed to follow the American’s mental flights; now he stood puzzled, his hands holding the shoulder-straps of his long blue apron, his head on one side like a sparrow’s, looking down on the other.

“But all that doesn’t keep me and Jim busy full time.” Jim, the assistant, was at this moment occupied in wheeling a crying infant up and down the walk in front of the shop, the while its mother was at the chemist’s two doors away. “I’ve had more work outside of Edginden this year than ever before, and I still have plenty of space and time to spare.”

“Yes, but listen, man!” Powell was in the full ecstasy of sudden inspiration. He got up and walked over to the other; his eyes seemed to come out of their shadowy retreat and were flashing. “Don’t you see that if there is a little demand for your stuff, you can make a big one? It isn’t as if you were limited to this place. Put your wares out into the world. Advertise! I’ll bet all I’ve got you can triple your business in a year and make it a hundred times as big in three. People are going in for the old-fashioned stuff. Why, I’ll do the job for you for nothing. I’ll make your shop and Edginden famous. This is the chance I’ve been looking for. Give me a free rein and Martin’s Brass and Copper will be known wherever English is spoken, and then some!” He was aflame with his vision. He saw himself at last in his proper rôle, his ordained relation to his native place.

“But how?” persisted the bewildered little shopkeeper. “If you just doubled the business it would be too big for me; I couldn’t do the work.”

“You wouldn’t have to,” snapped the other; then, lowering his voice and putting his hand on the other’s shoulder, continued, “Quantity production! That’s the answer. It’s my function in the world to show people how to sell large quantities of things. That’s efficiency, economy. It makes more and better things, and everybody happier. We’ll instal the proper equipment, and you will just watch and see that the thing’s done right. We’ll put up a model plant, get in outside labour--why man, can’t you see what this will mean to you and your town?”

But Martin’s troubled expression, instead of vanishing, became more anxious. “I don’t think you can make these things with machinery,” he explained plaintively, “I’ve made most of the metal utensils in the village myself, but sometimes they buy them outside, and very soon they are brought in for repair. Most often they are not worth the trouble. They are like that table in the garden--when Jim came to help me we were too busy to make one for him, so I had that one sent down from London. It’s no good after two years. You can see how the top is warped and the legs have gone to pieces. This one I’m using my grandfather made.”