The Call of the Town Part 3

Henry shuffled his feet noisily, and plucked up courage to rap on the counter, for the market-clock had ceased its striking by quite a minute, and no one had witnessed his romantic punctuality.

In answer to the knocking there appeared from behind the part.i.tion a youngster of some twelve years, who seemed to have been disturbed in some pleasant but undutiful occupation. On seeing that the person at the counter was merely a youth, just old enough to make a boy wish to be his age, but not old enough to inspire him with respect, the youngster, without a word of inquiry or apology, stooped down and lifted on to the counter a little bull pup, which he stroked with all the pride of a fancier, challenging Henry with his eyes to produce its equal.

Loftily indifferent to the behaviour of the boy, and secretly wondering if Monte Cristo had ever been so absurdly received on any of the occasions when he opened a door as the clock struck the appointed hour of meeting, Henry said, with a touch of indignation in his voice:

"I am the new a.s.sistant, and I wish to see Mr. Griggs."

The boy gave a whistle of surprise, and eyed Henry boldly. Hastily stowing away the pup in some secret receptacle under the counter, he proceeded to the side-door, taking a backward glance at the new a.s.sistant, and disclosing under his snub nose a very wide and smiling mouth.

"Shop!" bawled the lad, as he opened the door.

Without another word, and leaving the door ajar, he went and perched himself on a stool, from which position he brazenly surveyed the new a.s.sistant.

Henry waited, quailing somewhat under the searching gaze of this juvenile servitor in the temple of literature. He surveyed at leisure the walls so thickly stacked with dusty volumes, and wondered why the youngster was not cleaning them or arranging the bundles on the floor, instead of sitting on the stool swaying his legs idly.

How different it all was from what he had expected! The books were there and in abundance, yet they were heaped about more like potatoes in a greengrocer's than things worthy of respect. It was difficult to connect this youthful dog-fancier with literary pursuits, and Henry could only hope that Mr. Griggs in his person would make up for what his establishment had lost in contrast with his ideal picture of it.

It was some little time before the shuffle of slip-shod feet was heard behind the back-door. The new a.s.sistant grew expectant. The shuffle suggested the approach of the venerable book-lover himself. There was a pause, during which Henry's heart thumped against his bosom, and then a large and tousled head was thrust inquiringly beyond the door, in a way that suggested a desire to conceal the absence of a collar and tie.

The head belonged to Mr. Ephraim Griggs, dealer in second-hand books and prints.

"Oh, it's young Charles, is it?" said Mr. Griggs, displaying a little more of his person, and showing that he was in the act of drying his hands. "Just come in here, will you?" he went on, jerking his head back towards the pa.s.sage. "I want your advice."

Wondering on what subject he might be capable of advising the veteran, he went through to the pa.s.sage, where Mr. Griggs, having finished with the towel, offered him a cold and flabby hand.

Henry felt tempted to laugh, and probably a little inclined to cry, when he stood before his employer, and found that his mental portrait of the man tallied in no particular with the person facing him.

There was little of the book-worm about Mr. Griggs. He did not even wear spectacles; an offence which Henry found hardest to forgive. Not so tall as Edward John, nor yet so stout, he was a long-bearded fellow, with a nasty habit of breathing heavily through his nose, as if that organ were clogged with dust from his books. As he stood before Henry he was in his shirt-sleeves, and, judging by the latter, the garment as a whole was ready for the wash. His waistcoat was glossy with droppings of snuff; his trousers, Henry noticed, were very baggy at the knees and appeared to be a size too large for him; while his feet were encased in ragged carpet slippers.

Evidently Mr. Griggs was in some trouble, and while Henry was speculating as to what the cause of his anxiety might be, the learned bookseller said, somewhat anxiously, and in a thin, wheezy voice:

"Tell me, do you know anythink about poultry?"

"Poultry!" gasped Henry.

"Yes," replied Mr. Griggs, with a solemnity which struck the new a.s.sistant as absurdly pathetic. "Hens," he explained further; "my best one is down with croup or somethink o' the kind. Your father has taken a many prizes with his birds, and I thought you might know all about 'em.

I've never had great success with 'em myself. Come outside and tell me what you think."

Without waiting for a reply, the bookseller shuffled through the pa.s.sage into a back-yard, and the youth followed as one in a dream.

The yard was almost entirely devoted to poultry, and if Mr. Griggs was an amateur at the pursuit, he had at least prepared for it in no mean way, three sides of the place being taken up with wired hen-runs and a wooden house for his stock. In a compartment by itself, gasping and choking, lay the object of the old man's solicitude.

"The finest layer I ever had," he declared despondingly. "An egg a day as reg'lar as clockwork. I'd rather lose two of the others."

His sorrow deepened when Henry said that he had never seen a hen in that state before, and did not know what was wrong with it.

"Then I'll be forced to ask old John Shakespeare, the grocer, what to do; although I 'ate the man, and don't want to be beholden to him for anythink. But he's our champion breeder, and what must be, must be."

Shakespeare, grocer, hens! Henry doubted seriously if his ears were doing their duty, but there was no mistaking the anxiety of Mr. Ephraim Griggs. He could not have been more perturbed if his wife had been dangerously ill. His wife? That reminded Henry that he had heard his father say Mrs. Griggs had been dead these many years. Perhaps that was why the bookseller was so untidy.

"You had better go back to the shop, my lad," said he, in a voice which meant he was now resigned to the worst, "and take a look round. I'll be in there directly."

When Henry returned to the shop he found that Mr. Pemble, the senior a.s.sistant, had arrived; but for the moment that young gentleman was so engrossed with the study of his features in a broken looking-gla.s.s that he did not notice Henry's entrance. Mr. Pemble's anxiety seemed to be centred around the tardy growth of an incipient moustache, which, when an illuminating ray of sunshine fell upon his upper lip, was readily visible to the naked eye.

A somewhat prim and characterless person, with more teeth than his mouth seemed able to accommodate, Mr. Pemble was the _bete noir_ of Jenks, the dog-loving shop-boy, who, with a sly wink to Henry and an expressive grimace, indicated unmistakably his opinion of the senior a.s.sistant.

This was a sign to the new-comer that if he cared to make common cause against Mr. Pemble, Jenks was with him to the death; but Henry, either in his rustic simplicity or his lofty indifference to the youngster, did not respond, and waited for Mr. Pemble to languidly acknowledge his presence.

"Ah, you're the new a.s.sistant Mr. Griggs was speaking of," he said at length.

"Yes, sir," replied Henry, and at the delicious sound of the flattering "sir" Mr. Pemble endeavoured to tug his laggard moustache. "Mr. Griggs says I'm to have a look round until he is ready," Henry went on, casting a dubious glance at the walls and the thickly-strewn floor.

"Oh, that's all right," drawled Mr. Pemble, who now turned his attention to some small parcels that had arrived by the morning's post.

In a little while Mr. Griggs appeared, fully clothed, by the addition of a faded black morning coat and a creased white collar. He beckoned Henry into the back-parlour, which served as a sort of office and a general lumber-room.

"Sit you down, my lad, and let's see what we have here," he said, pointing to a crazy arm-chair beside an old Pembroke table, on which a broken ink-bottle and some rusty pens lay, together with a muddle of notepaper.

The bookseller then turned to a large case of old volumes recently acquired at the sale of a country house, and picking up several of these he flapped the dust from them, puffing and blowing like a walrus.

Glancing briefly at the t.i.tle-pages of the first two, he threw them in a corner with a brief but emphatic "Rubbish!" The next fished forth satisfied him better, and taking up one of his latest catalogues, he showed Henry how to write down the t.i.tle and description of the book.

So he proceeded for a time, initiating the youth in the art of cataloguing, which with Mr. Griggs did not take a particularly exalted form. He eschewed such aids to ready references as alphabetical entry, and was content so long as the princ.i.p.al items of his stock appeared on his printed list, quite irrespective of order or value. These lists, villainously printed, were a source of unfailing amus.e.m.e.nt to the educated book-buyers into whose hands they fell, for every page contained the most hilarious blunders, whereby the best-known cla.s.sics a.s.sumed new and surprising disguises.

Henry took to the simple work eagerly, and displayed far greater interest than his employer did in the books that came to light as the case was gradually emptying. Now and again during the forenoon Mr.

Griggs would suddenly disappear from the parlour, as his thoughts reverted to his suffering Dorking, only to return from his visit to the poultry with a gloomy shake of the head.

When dinner-time arrived, Henry and Jenks were left in charge of the shop while Mr. Pemble went home to dine, and the old bookseller shambled upstairs to some of the unknown domestic rooms. Jenks, unabashed by Henry's obvious determination not to familiarise with him, boldly asked if he knew how to play that great and universal game of boyhood called "knifey." When Henry said that he didn't, and hadn't time to think of it, Jenks was filled with disgust, for he found it a delightful pastime when the hours hung heavy on his hands, and he had been at the trouble to import a specially soft piece of wood for the purpose of playing "knifey" whenever an opportunity occurred. Failing Henry's a.s.sistance, he brazenly proceeded to engage in the pastime by himself.

The task of cataloguing occupied but little of the afternoon, and for the remainder of the day there was nothing to do but idling. Indeed, Henry found himself wondering by what means Mr. Griggs contrived to exist, as nothing seemed to matter beyond his devotion to the poultry and Mr. Pemble's frequent inspections of his upper lip.

On the whole, the impression left by his first day at business was by no means bright, as he could not suppose there would be books to catalogue every day, and he had not seen more than half-a-dozen customers in the shop.

CHAPTER IV

MR. TREVOR SMITH, IF YOU PLEASE

TEN days had pa.s.sed, and the new a.s.sistant was more than ever at a loss to understand how a business so laxly conducted and apparently so unremunerative could provide a living for Mr. Griggs, Pemble, and Jenks.

Henry knew that he, at least, was no burden on his employer's finances; but he was not yet aware that Mr. Pemble was there on a similar footing, while Jenks's labours were rewarded weekly with half-a-crown.

But this morning a bright and new star swung into his ambit, when a young man of about twenty years of age sauntered jauntily into the shop, his hat stuck on one side of his head and a cigarette drooping from his lips, where grew a moustache which must have struck envy into the soul of Mr. Pemble. The new-comer winked cheerily to Jenks, nodded a "How d'you do?" to the senior a.s.sistant, and then, to Henry's surprise, he said:

"I suppose you're the chap that Mrs. Filbert's been telling me about.

We're both in the same digs."

"I beg your pardon!" Henry stammered.