(From _The London Mercury_)
High, high up in the spire of a New York office building (higher
than the forty storeys which is the maximum that the foreigner’s
imagination, even when abetted by observation, seems able to compass)
sat a depressed and lonely little man. He was lonely because he was
alone, and unaccustomed to so being; his present occupation was to
discover why he was depressed.
The little man was a very important person. On the door by which one
entered one might read in reverse, “Powell, Prescot and Shipton,
Publicity and Advertising Engineers. Henry J. Powell, Pres.” Though
the letters appeared black through the frosted pane, on the other side
they were bright gold. If, after entering one looked over Mr. Powell’s
head through the window beyond, where the streets and roofs of New York
extended to the south, one saw a few of the things for which he was
celebrated. Not many hundred yards out of that window is the famous
_Lesson in Economy_, the masterpiece commissioned by the Bungalow
Savings and Trust Company. It is an animated electric sign, which at
night shows the reception of depositors’ money at a window of the bank,
its passage to a huge transparent safe wherein the piles of currency
and checks undergo a metamorphosis into bricks, lumber, bathtubs, and
shrubbery, and fly away to a garden spot in the suburbs to arrange
themselves into neat little bungalows of an exact pattern with rows of
neighbours of similar origin. At the conclusion of the performance,
which requires about three minutes, all lights go out save those in the
most recent bungalow, on the steps of which are seen a man, a woman, a
small boy and a dog, above the ruby caption “You can Do This Too!”
A quarter of a mile further on is visible the radiantly coloured
_tableau vivant_ of the Searchlight Stores, entitled _Nothing Too Good
for Milady_, which, around the charming figure of a modish young woman,
exhibits, in smaller pictures, the Searchlight’s myrmidons stalking
tigers, leopards and cobras’ skins in the jungles of India, ostriches’
feathers in the deserts of Africa, caterpillars’ skeins in a sleepy
garden in Japan; one beholds the pearl divers in the shimmering waters
of the Orient, and chained gangs of Kaffirs plucking diamonds out of
the obdurate rock in Rhodesia. But a few steps further, on the other
side of the street, is the striking _Don’t Be Miserable When Enjoying
Yourself_, which presents an invalid and her nurse contentedly reading
novels while being wafted over the worst of roads in a monotone motor,
whilst on a parallel and greatly superior road a competing car and its
occupants are being gradually disintegrated. The editor of a magazine
for which Mr. Powell had once written an autobiographical article
had presented his contributor as “The Monarch of the Upper Reaches
of American Cities,” a just, but inadequate tribute to his manifold
activities.
For Mr. Powell was more than a mere creator of striking advertisement
displays. He was, in his way, a philosopher, and in the modern sense
a poet as well. In the article referred to he expounds the philosophy
of publicity as it has never been done before. He demonstrates clearly
and succinctly that publicity, like all the best poetry, is a form of
self-expression; only the advertiser, instead of informing the reader
of the state of his private feelings, often an awkward affair to the
latter, or proclaiming the beauty of Nature’s handiwork, which the
public is well able to observe and judge for itself, reveals the merit
of the thing which his (the advertiser’s) creative urge, and perhaps
Fate, have set him to producing. Publicity thus redounds to the common
weal in two ways: by holding the advertiser to a high standard and
by elevating the taste of the public to a level which it could never
attain without the explanatory counsels of the expert makers of the
things the public required. For example, the manufacturer of rubber
heels, by illustrating to the pedestrian reader the advantages of his
conception, makes a promise, sets for himself an ideal which it is
both his duty and pleasure to live up to; while the pedestrian, if
not thus made aware of the maker’s ideal, would either be sapping his
vitality by continuing to bustle about on leather heels, or his purse,
by ignorantly satisfying himself with inferior rubber ones. The article
concludes:
The world can’t _guess_ the work you’ve done,
’Tis _you_ must let it know,
’Twill give you then the prize you’ve won,
And, giving it, will glow.
The photograph of the author, which accompanied the article was at
first sight disappointing. One anticipated that a man who had done big
things would keep his appearance in harmony with his achievements; but
instead of the burly shoulders, broad face, square jaw, thin lips and
aquiline nose which the reader expected to see, he was confronted with
the portrait of a round, stoop-shouldered little man, whose black hair
was brushed back from his forehead in Beethoven fashion, whose eyes
were deep-set and speculative rather than keen, and whose chin violated
all the canons by merely rounding off in a perfunctory way the boyish
contours of his cheeks. He wore a black coat of ministerial cut and a
flowing black tie. Yet, to those who knew him, Powell’s appearance was
the best possible index to his character. They were astounded by his
miracles, but stood in awe of his dreams.
Now, for the first time in forty years of activity, he felt lonely
and depressed. His success, achieved always in the company of men
and by dint of untiring effort, had hitherto left no room for either
emotion. There was always something to do, somebody to see, at best
and worst some pleasant creative vision to think about. But a week
since, business being dull, his associates had departed in a body and
gone their separate ways to observe the ritual of Old Home Week. This
latter, a ceremony springing jointly from native sentimentality and
respect for humble beginnings, requires that the men in the cities who
have made their way in the big world should retrace their steps to the
towns and villages which have given them birth and join in tribute to
its virtues. All the absent are welcome, but the occasion is dedicated
rather to the successful than to the prodigal sons.
So Prescot and Shipton and the younger partners, Wynn, Jacobson,
Bottinelli, Senkowsky, and the rest took leave, and now, five days
later, the head of the firm sat in his studio of gleaming mahogany,
leather and brass, perusing their exuberant accounts of the various
local festivities. Prescot wrote from a little desert village in the
Southwest of a Chamber of Commerce dinner in his honour, of a political
conference for the selection of a congressional candidate in which
his opinion was deferred to, of being asked to lead the subscription
towards a War Memorial in the public square. Wynn, in his best “copy”
manner, chronicled a round of rustic frolics in Minnesota. Bottinelli
sent him a clipping from a newspaper in a Southern California town,
which related the installation of a stained glass window in the church
where the young Italian had been christened and in which he now made
the dedicatory address. And so on, each in his turn contributing to
his chief’s forlorn sense of being out of it all. He had few friends
besides associates, and they were absent on similar missions, as
he knew from a week of solitary luncheons and dinners. It was a
dreadful thing, he reflected, for a man to have no interests outside
his profession. These others had something to carry them on, to look
forward to. It made life more complete, more harmonious, to have the
roots of one’s aspirations in one’s beginnings, to wish to honour one’s
past by means of one’s future.
He looked back and recalled the early years from which his manhood
had so completely divorced itself. Born in a village in southeastern
England, he had emigrated with his father, long since dead, to New
York. Many other images now intervened between himself and the one he
was trying to reconstruct, the dormant blur of red roofs and green
fields which was Edginden as he had last seen it. Gradually the focus
became clearer and he saw a valley and two intersecting roads which
wound their yellow lengths rapidly away over the surrounding hills and
disappeared. At their intersection was a gray church steeple, a few
shops clustered in two rows on the north-and-south road, some grey,
some yellow, some burnt red, a few timbered or brick houses more openly
spaced, then the fields beyond, with the white wall or tiled gable of a
farmhouse revealed through the trees--old, old trees, sycamores, tall
oaks, chestnuts in full white bloom; he wondered what an Old Home Week
would be like in Edginden.
He doubted that it would be a success. Very few of Edginden’s sons went
away. Those that did seldom came back, never for the purpose of paying
a tribute of sentiment to their birthplace. Besides, there was little
that Edginden wanted, very little indeed. It grumbled extensively,
but seemed only in need of those things which Providence alone could
supply. He tried to picture himself returning to join with other absent
ones in receiving welcome and admiration, in dispensing bounty of cheer
and money. He found that he could not even recall the faces of any
absent ones, or in fact of any one likely to be still alive. Of what
good----
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.”
The American cogitated a moment. “I don’t see that,” he affirmed
presently. “Copper is copper, and brass is brass, and if you get the
right material and see that it’s made right, you will have done your
part of the job. You can turn out the same designs a thousand times
faster, and give employment to a thousand more men. Can’t you see the
difference it will make? We’ll get the railroad to run right into the
town instead of three miles off--why we’ll put the place on the map!”
Martin became of a sudden very serious. “I--I’m not sure we want that.
We had a hard time keeping the railroad out of here in the first place,
and I’m afraid we couldn’t do with a lot of strangers. It would turn
things upside down. I’ve always done my best to please the people here
and I know what they like. And when I bought a bed from Sam Greene or
clothes from Bartlett or medicine from Rollo Hines I knew they were
giving me their best, just what _I_ wanted. We are sort of used to each
other and understand each other. I don’t think we should get along so
well if we had a lot of new people to deal with.” He was apologetic,
diffident, eager to explain his position, but underneath, Powell felt,
stubborn in his prejudices; for the first time he began to be slightly
exasperated. Convinced not only of the worth of his intentions but of
the soundness of the plan that had taken hold of him, feeling himself
on the verge of bringing a great boon to Edginden, he was annoyed
at the other’s failure to fall into step with him. He was already
visualizing the miraculous, mushroom growth with which he was familiar,
for which he had often been largely responsible, and the unlooked for
opposition dumbfounded him. He had often had difficulty in selling an
idea, in convincing people that they would get their money’s worth;
he had never as yet encountered, even remotely, opposition to his
underlying philosophy. It had never occurred to him that men might look
otherwise on expansion. Martin, sweet of temper, and shy in manner,
began to symbolise an obtuse, almost sullen unresponsiveness in the
people he was so eager to serve. If only he could come to some common
ground, if he could argue against objections he could understand. His
hopes were being dashed to pieces on a rock so unsubstantial that he
could not even see it.
“But what would the world be like if everybody--” he began, when the
door opened and the proprietress of the Unicorn joined them, her parade
to the back of the shop punctuated by the clatter of furniture and
the toppling of metal ware. The aisle was narrow and irregular, Mrs.
Unicorn very wide and quite direct in her progress. She carried in her
hand a copper tea-kettle of unusual pattern, the spout coming from the
top of the kettle and issuing through a large, graceful handle.
She ignored Powell and addressed Martin directly.
“Roger, that girl of mine has gone and smashed this kettle against the
stove,” she said, exhibiting a gash in the fair copper surface. “Can
you mend it?”
He took it from her and examined it carefully. A pathetic look of
distress settled on his face. “I’ll try, Miriam,” he observed finally,
“I shall let you know if I can’t.”
“Well, do it as soon as you can, and don’t let it cost too much,” she
said pointedly, and took her departure.
As soon as she was out of the door Powell laughed. “Serve her right
if you made her scrap this and sold her another kettle,” he remarked,
“she’s tight as a vice.”
Martin did not reply for a moment. He continued to examine the
kettle, real pain showing in his eyes. He put aside the vase from San
Francisco, selecting some tools, lit his brazier. Finally he said to
his companion, “I hope I can make this right. It’s one of the best
things I’ve ever turned out of this shop.” He turned back to his work.
Powell’s smile faded. The three-coloured, full-page advertisement he
had been inwardly contemplating, which was to blazon to the world
“Edginden for Excellence--Martin’s Metalware is as durable and
beautiful as the English village in which it was made” crumpled up and
disappeared as if it had been dropped into a large fire. He pondered
the other’s words a moment, noting keenly at the same time how he
fondled the injured utensil. An expression of understanding crept
slowly over his face, and he stole out softly without disturbing the
absorbed craftsman.