The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories Part 28

'That's _your_ idea, is it, Mr. Lott? Well, it isn't mine. So, good morning!'

Again the timber-merchant seemed to meditate; his eyes wandered from Charles to the dining-room table.

'Just a minute more,' he resumed; 'I have another idea--not a new one; an idea that came to me long ago, when your father first began to have trouble about you. I happened to be in the shop one day--it was when you were living idle at your father's expense, young man--and I heard you speak to him in what I call a confoundedly impertinent way. Thinking it over afterwards, I said to myself: If I had a son who spoke to me like that, I'd give him the soundest thrashing he'd be ever likely to get. That was my idea, young man; and as I stood listening to you to-day, it came back into my mind again. Your father can't thrash you; he hasn't the brawn for it.

But as it's nothing less than a public duty, somebody _must_, and so--'

Charles, who had been watching every movement of the speaker's face, suddenly sprang forward, making for the door. But Mr. Lott had foreseen this; with astonishing alertness and vigour he intercepted the fugitive seized him by the scruff of the neck, and, after a moment's struggle, pinned him face downwards across the end of the table. His stick he had thrown aside; the riding-whip he held between his teeth. So brief was this conflict that there sounded only a scuffling of feet on the floor, and a growl of fury from Charles as he found himself handled like an infant; then, during some two minutes, one might have thought that a couple of very strenuous carpet-beaters were at work in the room. For the s.p.a.ce of a dozen switches Charles strove frantically with wild kicks, which wounded only the air, but all in silence; gripped only the more tightly, he at length uttered a yell of pain, followed by curses hot and swift. Still the carpet-beaters seemed to be at work, and more vigorously than ever. Charles began to roar. As it happened, there were only servants in the house. When the clamour had lasted long enough to be really alarming, knocks sounded at the door, which at length was thrown open, and the startled face of a domestic appeared. At the same moment Mr. Lott, his right arm being weary, brought the castigatory exercise to an end. Charles rolled to his feet, and began to strike out furiously with both fists.

'Just as you like, young man,' said the timber-merchant, as he coolly warded off the blows, 'if you wish to have it this way too. But, I warn you, it isn't a fair match. Sally, shut the door and go about your business.'

'Shall I fetch a p'liceman, sir?' shrilled the servant.

Her master, sufficiently restored to his senses to perceive that he had not the least chance in a pugilistic encounter with Mr. Lott, drew back and seemed to hesitate.

'Answer the girl,' said Mr. Lott, as he picked up his whip and examined its condition. 'Shall we have a policeman in?'

'Shut the door!' Charles shouted fiercely.

The men gazed at each other. Daffy was pale and quivering; his hair in disorder, his waistcoat torn open, collar and necktie twisted into rags, he made a pitiful figure. The timber-merchant was slightly heated, but his countenance wore an expression of calm contentment.

'For the present,' remarked Mr. Lott, as he took up his hat and stick, 'I think our business is at an end. It isn't often that a fellow of your sort gets his deserts, and I'm rather sorry we didn't have the policeman in; a report of the case might do good. I bid you good day, young man. If I were you I'd sit quiet for an hour or two, and just reflect--you've a _lot_ to think about.'

So, with a pleasant smile, the visitor took his leave.

As he walked away he again examined the riding-whip. 'It isn't often a thing happens so luckily,' he said to himself. 'First-rate whip; hardly a bit damaged. Harry'll like it none the worse for my having handselled it.'

At the station he found Mr. Daffy and Bowles, who regarded him with questioning looks.

'Nothing to be got out of him,' said Mr. Lott. 'Bowles, I want a talk with you and Jane; it'll be best, perhaps, if I go back home with you. Mr.

Daffy, sorry we can't travel down together. You'll catch the eight o'clock.'

'I hope you told him plainly what you thought of him,' said Mr. Daffy, in a voice of indignant shame.

'I did,' answered the timber-merchant, 'and I don't think he's very likely to forget it.'

FATE AND THE APOTHECARY

'Farmiloe. Chemist by Examination.' So did the good man proclaim himself to a suburb of a city in the West of England. It was one of those pretty, clean, fresh-coloured suburbs only to be found in the west; a few dainty little shops, everything about them bright or glistening, scattered among pleasant little houses with gardens eternally green and all but perennially in bloom; every vista ending in foliage, and in one direction a far glimpse of the Cathedral towers, sending forth their music to fall dreamily upon these quiet roads. The neighbourhood seemed to breathe a tranquil prosperity. Red-cheeked emissaries of butcher, baker, and grocer, order-book in hand, knocked cheerily at kitchen doors, and went smiling away; the ponies they drove were well fed and frisky, their carts spick and span. The church of the parish, an imposing edifice, dated only from a few years ago, and had cost its n.o.ble founder a sum of money which any church-going parishioner would have named to you with proper awe. The population was largely female, and every shopkeeper who knew his business had become proficient in bowing, smiling, and suave servility.

Mr. Farmiloe, it is to be feared, had no very profound acquaintance with his business from any point of view. True, he was 'chemist by examination,'

but it had cost him repeated efforts to reach this una.s.sailable ground and more than one pharmaceutist with whom he abode as a.s.sistant had felt it a measure of prudence to dispense with his services. Give him time, and he was generally equal to the demands of suburban customers; hurry or interrupt him, and he showed himself anything but the man for a crisis.

Face and demeanour were against him. He had exceedingly plain features, and a persistently sour expression; even his smile suggested sarcasm. He could not tune his voice to the tradesman note, and on the slightest provocation he became, quite unintentionally, offensive. Such a man had no chance whatever in this flowery and bowery little suburb.

Yet he came hither with hopes. One circ.u.mstance seemed to him especially favourable: the shop was also a post-office, and no one could fail to see (it was put most impressively by the predecessor who sold him the business) how advantageous was this blending of public service with commercial interest; especially as there was no telegraphic work to make a skilled a.s.sistant necessary. As a matter of course, people using the post-office would patronise the chemist; and a provincial chemist can add to his legitimate business sundry pleasant little tradings which benefit himself without provoking the jealousy of neighbour shopmen. 'It will be your own fault, my dear sir, if you do not make a very good thing of it indeed. The sole and sufficient explanation of--of the decline during this last year or two is my shocking health. I really have _not_ been able to do justice to the business.'

Necessarily, Mr. Farmiloe entered into negotiation with the postal authorities; and it was with some little disappointment that he learnt how very modest could be his direct remuneration for the responsibilities and labours he undertook. The Post-Office is a very shrewdly managed department of the public service; it has brought to perfection the art of obtaining _maximum_ results with a _minimum_ expenditure. But Mr. Farmiloe remembered the other aspect of the matter; he would benefit so largely by this ill-paid undertaking that grumbling was foolish. Moreover, the thing carried dignity with it; he served his Majesty, he served the nation.

And--ha, ha!--how very odd it would be to post one's letters in one's own post-office. One might really get a good deal of amus.e.m.e.nt out of the thought, after business hours. His age was eight-and-thirty. For some years he had pondered matrimony, though without fixing his affections on any particular person. It was plain, indeed, that he ought to marry. Every tradesman is made more respectable by wedlock, and a chemist who, in some degree, resembles a medical man, seems especially to stand in need of the matrimonial guarantee. Had it been feasible, Mr. Farmiloe would have brought a wife with him from the town where he had lived for the past few years, but he was in the difficult position of knowing not a single marriageable female to whom he could address himself with hope or with self-respect. Natural shyness had always held him aloof from reputable women; he felt that he could not recommend himself to them--he who had such an unlucky apt.i.tude for saying the wrong word or keeping silence when speech was demanded. With the men of his acquaintance he could relieve his sense of awkwardness and deficiency by becoming aggressive; in fact, he had a reputation for cantankerousness, for pugnacity, which kept most of his equals in some awe of him, and to perceive this was one solace amid many discontents. Nicely dressed and well-spoken and good-looking women above the cla.s.s of domestic servants he worshipped from afar, and only in vivacious moments pictured himself as the wooer of such a superior being.

It seemed as though fate could do nothing with Mr. Farmiloe. At six-and-thirty he suffered the shock of learning that a relative--an old woman to whom he had occasionally written as a matter of kindness (Farmiloe could do such things)--had left him by will the sum of 600. It was strictly a shock; it upset his health for several days, and not for a week or two could he realise the legacy as a fact. Just when he was beginning to look about him with a new air of confidence, the solicitors who were managing the little affair for him drily acquainted him with the fact that his relative's will was contested by other kinsfolk whom the old woman had pa.s.sed over, on the ground that she was imbecile and incapable of conducting her affairs. There followed a law-suit, which consumed many months and cost a good deal of money; so that, though he won his case, Mr.

Farmiloe lost all satisfaction in his improved circ.u.mstances, and was only more embittered against the world at large.

Then, no sooner had he purchased his business, than he learnt from smiling neighbours that he had paid considerably too much for it. His predecessor, beyond a doubt, would have taken very much less; had, indeed, been on the point of doing so just when Mr. Farmiloe appeared. This kind of experience is a trial to any man. It threw Mr. Farmiloe into a silent rage, with the result that two or three customers who chanced to enter his shop declared that they would never have anything more to do with such a surly creature.

And now began his torment--a form of exasperation peculiar to his dual capacity of shopkeeper and manager of a post-office. All day long he stood on the watch for customers--literally stood, now behind the counter, now in front of it, his eager and angry eyes turning to the door whenever the steps of a pa.s.ser-by sounded without. If the door opened his nerves began to tingle, and he straightened himself like a soldier at attention. For a moment he suffered an agony of doubt. Would the person entering turn to the counter or to the post-office? And seldom was his hope fulfilled; not one in four of the people who came in was a genuine customer; the post-office, always the post-office. A stamp, a card, a newspaper wrapper, a postal-order, a letter to be registered--anything but an honest purchase across the counter or the blessed tendering of a prescription to make up.

From vexation he pa.s.sed to annoyance, to rage, to fury; he cursed the post-office, and committed to eternal perdition the man who had waxed eloquent upon its advantages.

Of course, he had hired an errand-boy, and never had errand-boy so little legitimate occupation. Resolved not to pay him for nothing, Mr. Farmiloe kept him cleaning windows, washing bottles, and the like, until the lad fairly broke into rebellion. If this was the sort of work he was engaged for he must have higher wages; he wasn't over strong and his mother said he must lead an open-air life--that was why he had taken the place. To be bearded thus in his own shop was too much for Mr. Farmiloe, he seized the opportunity of giving his wrath full swing, and burst into a frenzy of vilification. Just as his pa.s.sion reached its height (he stood with his back to the door) there entered a lady who wished to make a large purchase of disinfectants. Alarmed and scandalised at what was going on, she had no sooner crossed the threshold than she turned again, and hurried away. Her friends were not long in learning from her that the new chemist was a most violent man, a most disagreeable person--the very last man one could think of doing business with.

The home was but poorly furnished, and Mr. Farmiloe had engaged a very cheap general servant, who involved him in dirt and discomfort. It was a matter of talk among the neighbouring tradesmen that the chemist lived in a beggarly fashion. When the dismissed errand-boy spread the story of how he had been used, people jumped to the conclusion that Mr. Farmiloe drank.

Before long there was a legend that he had been suffering from an acute attack of delirium tremens.

The post-office, always the post-office. If he sat down at a meal the shop-bell clanged, and hope springing eternal, he hurried forth in readiness to make up a packet or concoct a mixture; but it was an old lady who held him in talk for ten minutes about rates of postage to South America. When, by rare luck, he had a prescription to dispense (the hideous scrawl of that pestilent Dr. Bunker) in came somebody with letters and parcels which he was requested to weigh; and his hand shook so with rage that he could not resume his dispensing for the next quarter of an hour.

People asked extraordinary questions, and were surprised, offended, when he declared he could not answer them. When could a letter be delivered at a village on the north-west coast of Ireland? Was it true that the Post-Office contemplated a reduction of rates to Hong-Kong? Would he explain in detail the new system of express delivery? Invariably he betrayed impatience, and occasionally he lost his temper; people went away exclaiming what a _horrid man_ he was!

'Mr. What's-your-name,' said a shopkeeper one day, after receiving a short answer, 'I shall make it my business to complain of you to the Postmaster-General. I don't come here to be insulted.'

'Who insulted you?' returned Farmiloe like a sullen schoolboy.

'Why, you did. And you are always doing it.'

'I'm not.'

'You are.'

'If I did'--terror stole upon the chemist's heart--'I didn't mean it, and I--I'm sure I apologise. It's a way I have.'

'A d.a.m.ned bad way, let me tell you. I advise you to get out of it.'

'I'm sorry--'

'So you should be.'

And the tradesman walked off, only half appeased.

Mr. Farmiloe could have shed tears in his mortification, and for some minutes he stood looking at a bottle of laudanum, wishing he had the courage to have done with life. Plainly he could not live very long unless things improved. His ready money was coming to an end, rents and taxes loomed before him. An awful thought of bankruptcy haunted him in the early morning hours.

The most frequent visitor to the post-office was a well-dressed, middle-aged man, who spoke civilly, and did his business in the fewest possible words. Mr. Farmiloe rather liked the look of him, and once or twice made conversational overtures, but with no encouraging result. One day, feeling bolder than usual the chemist ventured to speak what he had in mind. After supplying the grave gentleman with stamps and postal-orders, he said, in a tone meant to be conciliatory--

'I don't know whether you ever have need of mineral waters, sir?'

'Why, yes, sometimes. My ordinary tradesman supplies them.'

'I thought I'd just mention that I keep them in stock.'