THE LORD OF THE DYNAMOS

The chief attendant of the three dynamos that buzzed and rattled at Camberwell, and kept the electric railway going, came out of Yorkshire, and his name was James Holroyd.  He was a practical electrician, but fond of whisky, a heavy, red-haired brute with irregular teeth.  He doubted the existence of the deity, but accepted Carnot’s cycle, and he had read Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry.  His helper came out of the mysterious East, and his name was Azuma-zi.  But Holroyd called him Pooh-bah.  Holroyd liked a nigger help because he would stand kicking—­a habit with Holroyd—­and did not pry into the machinery and try to learn the ways of it.  Certain odd possibilities of the negro mind brought into abrupt contact with the crown of our civilisation Holroyd never fully realised, though just at the end he got some inkling of them.

To define Azuma-zi was beyond ethnology.  He was, perhaps, more negroid than anything else, though his hair was curly rather than frizzy, and his nose had a bridge.  Moreover, his skin was brown rather than black, and the whites of his eyes were yellow.  His broad cheek-bones and narrow chin gave his face something of the viperine V. His head, too, was broad behind, and low and narrow at the forehead, as if his brain had been twisted round in the reverse way to a European’s.  He was short of stature and still shorter of English.  In conversation he made numerous odd noises of no known marketable value, and his infrequent words were carved and wrought into heraldic grotesqueness.  Holroyd tried to elucidate his religious beliefs, and—­especially after whiskey—­lectured to him against superstition and missionaries.  Azuma-zi, however, shirked the discussion of his gods, even though he was kicked for it.

Azuma-zi had come, clad in white but insufficient raiment, out of the stoke-hole of the Lord Clive, from the Straits Settlements, and beyond, into London.  He had heard even in his youth of the greatness and riches of London, where all the women are white and fair, and even the beggars in the streets are white, and he had arrived, with newly-earned gold coins in his pocket, to worship at the shrine of civilisation.  The day of his landing was a dismal one; the sky was dun, and a wind-worried drizzle filtered down to the greasy streets, but he plunged boldly into the delights of Shadwell, and was presently cast up, shattered in health, civilised in costume, penniless, and, except in matters of the direst necessity, practically a dumb animal, to toil for James Holroyd and to be bullied by him in the dynamo shed at Camberwell.  And to James Holroyd bullying was a labour of love.