Their souls were like the asphalt visages of city streets. Each day the violent colours of a thousand new sensations swept across them, and each day all sound and sight and fury were erased from their unyielding surfaces. Ten thousand furious days had passed about them, and they had no memory. They lived like creatures born full-grown into present time, shedding the whole accumulation of the past with every breath, and all their lives were written in the passing of each actual moment.
And they were sure and certain, for ever wrong, but always confident. They had no hesitation, they confessed no ignorance or error, and they knew no doubts. They began each morning with a gibe, a shout, an oath of hard impatience, eager for the tumult of the day. At noon they sat strongly in their seats and, through fumes of oil and hot machinery, addressed their curses to the public at the tricks and strategies of cunning rivals, the tyranny of the police, the stupidity of pedestrians, and the errors of less skilful men than they. Each day they faced the perils of the streets with hearts as calm as if they were alone upon a country road. Each day, with minds untroubled, they embarked upon adventures from which the bravest men bred in the wilderness would have recoiled in terror and desolation.
In the raw days of early spring they had worn shirts of thick black wool and leather jackets, but now, in summer, their arms were naked, tattooed, brown, and lean with the play of whipcord muscles. The power and precision with which they worked stirred in George a deep emotion of respect, and also touched him with humility. For whenever he saw it, his own life, with its conflicting desires, its uncertain projects and designs, its labours begun in hope and so often ended in incompletion, by comparison with the lives of these men who, had learned to use their strength and talents perfectly, seemed faltering, blind, and baffled.
At night, too, five times a week, the mighty vans would line up at the kerb in an immense and waiting caravan. They were covered now with great tarpaulins, small green lamps were burning on each side, and the drivers, their faces faintly lit with the glowing points of cigarettes, would be talking quietly in the shadows of their huge machines. Once George had asked one of the drivers the destination of these nightly journeys, and the man had told him that they went to Philadelphia, and would return again by morning.
The sight of these great vans at night, sombre, silent, yet alive with powerful expectancy as their drivers waited for the word to start, gave George a sense of mystery and joy. These men were part of that great company who love the night, and he felt a bond of union with them. For he had always loved the night more dearly than the day, and the energies of his life had risen to their greatest strength in the secret and exultant heart of darkness.
He knew the joys and labours of such men as these. He could see the shadowy procession of their vans lumbering through the sleeping towns, and feel the darkness, the cool fragrance of the country, on his face. He could see the drivers hunched behind the wheels, their senses all alert in the lilac dark, their eyes fixed hard upon the road to curtain off the loneliness of the land at night. And he knew the places where they stopped to eat, the little all-night lunch-rooms warm with greasy light, now empty save for the dozing authority of the aproned Greek behind the counter, and now filled with the heavy shuffle of the drivers’ feet, the hard and casual intrusions of their voices.
They came in, flung themselves upon the row of stools, and gave their orders. And as they waited, their hunger drawn into sharp focus by the male smells of boiling coffee, frying eggs and onions, and sizzling hamburgers, they took the pungent, priceless, and uncostly solace of a cigarette, lit between cupped hand and strong-seamed mouth, drawn deep and then exhaled in slow fumes from the nostrils. They poured great gobs and gluts of thick tomato ketchup on their hamburgers, tore with blackened fingers at the slabs of fragrant bread, and ate with jungle lust, thrusting at plate and cup with quick and savage gulpings.
Oh, he was with them, of them, for them, blood brother of their joy and hunger to the last hard swallow, the last deep, ease of sated bellies, the last slow coil of blue expiring from their grateful lungs. Their lives seemed glorious to him in the magic dark of summer. They swept cleanly through the night into the first light and bird song of the morning, into the morning of new joy upon the earth; and as he thought of this it seemed to him that the secret, wild, and lonely heart of man was young and living in the darkness, and could never die.
Before him, all that summer of 1929, in the broad window of the warehouse, a man sat at a desk and looked out into the street, in a posture that never changed. George saw him there whenever he glanced across, yet he never saw him do anything but look out of the window with a fixed, abstracted stare. At first the man had been such an unobtrusive part of his surroundings that he had seemed to fade into’ them, and had gone almost unnoticed. Then Esther, having observed him there, pointed to him one day and said merrily:
“There’s our friend in the Distributing Corp again! What do you suppose he distributes? I’ve never seen him do anything! Have you noticed him — hah?” she cried eagerly. “God! It’s the strangest thing I ever saw!” She laughed richly, made a shrug of bewildered protest, and, after a moment, said with serious wonder: “Isn’t it queer? What do you suppose a man like that can do? What do you suppose he’s thinking of?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” George said indifferently. “Of nothing, I suppose.”
Then they forgot the man and turned to talk of other things, yet from that moment the man’s singular presence was pricked out in George’s mind and he began to watch him with hypnotic fascination, puzzled by the mystery of his immobility and his stare.
And after that, as soon as Esther came in every day, she would glance across the street and cry out in a jolly voice which had in it the note of affectionate satisfaction and assurance that people have when they see some familiar and expected object:
“Well, I see our old friend, The Distributing Corp, is still looking out of his window! I wonder what he’s thinking of today.”
She would turn away, laughing. Then, for a moment, with her childlike fascination for words and rhythms, she gravely meditated their strange beat, silently framing and pronouncing with her lips a series of meaningless sounds —“Corp–Borp-Forp–Dorp-Torp”— and at length singing out in a gleeful chant, and with an air of triumphant discovery:
“The Distributing Corp, the Distributing Corp, He sits all day and he does no Worp!”
George protested that her rhyme made no sense, but she threw back her encrimsoned face and screamed with laughter.
But after a while they stopped laughing about the man. For, obscure as his employment seemed, incredible and comical as his indolence had been when they first noticed it, there came to be something impressive, immense, and formidable in the quality of that fixed stare. Day by day, a thronging traffic of life and business passed before him in the street; day by day, the great vans came, the drivers, handlers, and packers swarmed before his eyes, filling, the air with their oaths and cries, irritably intent upon their labour but the man in the window never looked at them, never gave any, sign that he heard them, never seemed to be aware of their existence — he just sat there and looked out, his eyes fixed in an abstracted stare.
In the course of George Webber’s life, many things of no great importance in themselves had become deeply embedded in his memory, stuck there like burs in a scottie’s tail; and always they were little things which, in an instant of clear perception, had riven his heart with some poignant flash of meaning. Thus he remembered, and would remember for ever, the sight of Esther’s radiant, earnest face when, unexpectedly one night, he caught sight of it as it flamed and ‘vanished in a crowd of grey, faceless faces in Times