“This place,” said my uncle, surveying it from his open doorway in the dignified stillness of a summer afternoon, “wants Waking Up!”
I was sorting up patent medicines in the corner.
“I’d like to let a dozen young Americans loose into it,” said my uncle. “Then we’d see.”
I made a tick against Mother Shipton’s Sleeping Syrup. We had cleared our forward stock.
“Things must be happening somewhere, George,” he broke out in a querulously rising note as he came back into the little shop. He fiddled with the piled dummy boxes of fancy soap and scent and so forth that adorned the end of the counter, then turned about petulantly, stuck his hands deeply into his pockets and withdrew one to scratch his head. “I must do something,” he said. “I can’t stand it.
“I must invent something. And shove it.... I could.
“Or a play. There’s a deal of money in a play, George. What would you think of me writing a play eh?... There’s all sorts of things to be done.
“Or the stog-igschange.”
He fell into that meditative whistling of his.
“Sac-ramental wine!” he swore, “this isn’t the world—it’s Cold Mutton Fat! That’s what Wimblehurst is! Cold Mutton Fat!—dead and stiff! And I’m buried in it up to the arm pits. Nothing ever happens, nobody wants things to happen ‘scept me! Up in London, George, things happen. America! I wish to Heaven, George, I’d been born American—where things hum.