Portrait of Elmbury (14 page)

There was something, to me, unutterably depressing in the atmosphere of a house where a furniture sale was being held. The carpetless rooms and staircases; the bare dingy walls with brighter patches where the pictures had hung; the accumulation of trivial bric-a-brac routed out of forgotten cupboards; the dust-sheets like shrouds; the books, once loved, heaped on the floor in lots which would be sold for a shilling apiece; the muddy footmarks everywhere. It was as if the house too were dead; the spirit gone, one saw only the husk which had contained it, trivial, ridiculous, irrelevant.

I was glad indeed when the auctioneer came to the end of his long pilgrimage which generally began in a top-floor bedroom (“Iron bedstead with spring mattress”) and finished in the outhouse or garden-shed (“Two dozen flower-pots and a bundle of raffia”). Game to the end, he still churned out his ancient and traditional joke when he offered for sale the very last lot of all. “This is the one the cobbler threw at his wife.” And the crowd, unflagging, laughed at the final joke which they had heard a hundred times before.

Two classes of people, as a rule, attended these sales: women
and dealers. The women were awful. Ordinary decent housewives suffered a terrible metamorphosis as soon as they entered the sale room, and became predatory, acquisitive, utterly ruthless, and at times even dishonest. Dealers, compared with them, were upright citizens; which is a measure of the behaviour of women at a furniture sale.

The dealers, of course, couldn't afford to be honest. It is the job and the livelihood of a dealer to buy cheap and to sell dear; if he fails to do that he goes bankrupt. In order to buy cheap he must either take pains to discredit the article he wants to buy, declaring in the presence of the whole company that it is a fake, its legs are broken, it isn't worth a pound, he bought one like it last week for five bob, et cetera, et cetera, meanwhile arranging with a friend to buy it on his behalf; or alternatively he must arrange with the other dealers present to form a “ring,” i.e. not to bid against each other, and to share out their purchases equally after the sale. Neither practice could be considered ethically sound; but if you are a dealer in anything you can't afford to consider ethics.

However, I suppose by a stretch of imagination you might call these tricks negatively honest rather than positively dishonest. The positive malpractices of the dealers are varied and ingenious. Elmbury had two firms of dealers who carried on business in the town. The one was Smith Brothers, the other Percy Parfitt. Mr. Parfitt was a craftsman as well as a crook; and later in this book I shall have occasion to pay him the tribute which is a craftsman's due. The Smith Brothers were altogether different. Albert was tall and flashy, Eric was squat and scruffy-looking. They preyed mainly upon country cottages and the inhabitants of the villages. Eric, riding upon a bicycle, would make the first reconnaissance, calling at the cottages and inquiring “whether the missus had any odd bits of furniture to sell.” If he was asked in and allowed to rout round he would deliberately fix his attention upon something trivial and worthless, declaring “That's a very nice engraving,” or “That's a very interesting little table—might be worth a lot of money if it's genuine.” Meanwhile he would perhaps discover something, let us say an antique oak chest,
which was really valuable; but he would appear to take no notice of it or would dismiss it as being worthless. Instead he would return again and again to the little table, shaking his head over it gravely: “Wish I knew more about antiques, Missus, I'm not much better than an old junk merchant myself. But I've got a hunch about this little table. Might be real Queen Anne. Might be worth a tenner. But I couldn't risk a tenner on it myself. Now I've got a friend in London who knows about these things. I do a bit of business with him—just junk, you know —and if ever he's down in these parts I'll bring him along to have a look at that little table of yourn.”

So saying, Mr. Eric Smith would depart upon his rickety bicycle. The cottager, being no fool, took the earliest opportunity to find out the real worth of the table; and found out that it was worth about ten bob. Guileless old women' are rare in country cottages; and the Smith Brothers and their kind had long ago discovered and fleeced the last of them. Eric and Albert relied now on making their profit not out of the guileless but out of the most cunning: the ones who would take the trouble to get the local connoisseur's opinion on the value of the table and who, finding it worthless, would eagerly await the coming of that mug who was Mr. Eric Smith's friend from London.

In due course the friend from London arrived. This was Albert, dressed in fearful plus-fours and driving a respectable motor-car. “My friend, Mr. Smith,” said Albert, “told me you might let me have a look at your little table. …”

Having examined it, shaken his head over it, turned it upside down and looked at the worm-holes through a magnifying glass, Albert would inform the delighted cottager that it might—it might just possibly—be genuine Queen Anne; and he'd be prepared to take a risk and offer fifteen pounds for it. The cottager, knowing the thing was worth ten shillings, would promptly accept the offer; and then Albert would count up his money and find that he only had five pounds.

“I could write you a cheque,” he would say doubtfully, “but I couldn't expect you to trust me, could I, being a stranger?”

The cottager, wise in the ways of crooks from London, would indicate politely that he preferred to receive cash.

“Quite right,” said Albert cheerfully. “No offence taken, I assure you. But I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll be passing this way to-morrow and I'll bring the cash then. Meanwhile you'll keep the table for me?”

That sounded fair and honest enough. Albert shook hands with his victim and prepared to leave; but as he was putting on his coat his glance fell upon that valuable oak chest which brother Eric had told him of. He took a casual look at it and said: “It's not a bad little chest; but there's not much sale for such things to-day. If you like—since I'm buying the table—I'll give you another ten bob and take the chest as well.”

Now the cottager, probably, didn't know the value of the chest; but even if she thought that it was- worth two or three pounds, she felt inclined to let it go, in view of the huge price she was getting for the table. Perhaps she haggled a bit, then said:

“Very well, you can have it for a pound.”

“Done,” said Albert, “and since I've got the cash I'll pay you for the chest straight away. I shan't have room in the car for both chest and table when I call to-morrow.”

So Albert went off with the chest, having bought it for a pound, whereas it was worth twenty. “See you to-morrow,” he called out from the car. “Don't sell the table to any one else, mind, before I come back!”

But of course he never came back. He never meant to come back. The cottager was left with her worthless table; and it was generally quite a long time before she realised that Mr. Smith's friend from London had cheated her out of nineteen pounds.

And when she did realise it, she had no remedy; for Albert hadn't committed any offence for which she could prosecute him. He had simply changed his mind about buying the table; and a chap couldn't be punished for changing his mind.

Forty years in business, said the Smith Brothers, and a tricky business at that; and never broke the law once save when Albert forgot to renew his driving licence and when an interfering bobby
copped Eric for bicycling without a light: things that might happen to anybody. Virtuous citizens of Elmbury were the Smith Brothers, and great respecters of the Law; unlike some people they might name but wouldn't, who stooped to practices abominable in the eyes of Albert and Eric and all upright men—practices, for example, such as those of Mister P. P. (no names, no pack-drill) who had a workshop behind his business premises, and what went on in that workshop, in the way of faking and fiddling and turning modern junk into genuine antiques—well, the Smith Brothers would blush to tell you.

For my part I liked Mr. Parfitt a great deal better than I liked the Smiths. I liked him for his merry crinkled smile, for his craftsman's love of his trade (even though it was a dishonest trade), and for the fact that he never cheated anybody who didn't deserve to be cheated; which was more than you could say of Albert and Eric.

He had a shop in the unfashionable part of the High Street. Over the door hung the simple, austere and untruthful sign, “ANTIQUES.” You went into a small low room which was always very dark (it was necessary that it should be dark) and out of the shadows, himself like a Shade, there came shuffling towards you the small, wizened form of Mr. Parfitt. He peered at you with bright, inquisitive eyes and asked you rather tersely what you wanted. He was never obsequious to his customers; he always seemed reluctant to sell anything; and indeed he had been known to weep at parting with a fine old Welsh dresser which, he said, was his proudest possession. His tears weren't faked; though the dresser was. He was indeed proud of it, and he grieved to part with it, for he had spent long days and nights fashioning it, with skill and ingenuity and loving care, out of some odd bits of old, dark oak which he'd picked up at a sale.

Mr. Parfitt was probably the best carpenter in three counties, and he had a right to be proud of his job, which was the most
difficult in all the carpenter's trade. It was much more difficult, for example, for Mr. Parfitt to fake a Chippendale chair than it had been for Thomas Chippendale to make the original; but I assure you that Mr. Parfitt would make you a very passable Chippendale chair for about ten guineas. An expert could detect the forgery; but he would have to be a real expert, for Mr. Parfitt knew all the old tricks, and had a few new ones of his own. For instance, if you bought, in his shop, one of those convex mirrors, period about 1800, which are much sought after, and you took the precaution of taking out the glass, you would find behind it, separating it from the frame, a sheet from a newspaper bearing the correct date. And if you were an old junk merchant you would be aware that you could always get a few shillings from Mr. Parfitt for a bundle of newspapers dated round about 1800.

Not only was Mr. Parfitt a fine craftsman, but he was also something of a pioneer. He discovered, long before anybody else, the enormous possibilities of Elmbury's tourist trade. Here was El Dorado, lying at every tradesman's doorstep; but nobody realised it until Mr. Parfitt began to sell curios which had “local associations” to the visitors who came in summer to see the Abbey. Soon others imitated him, and there grew up a brisk trade in guide-books, picture postcards, drinking mugs inscribed “A Present from Elmbury,” and even in pink sticks of Elmbury rock. But Mr. Parfitt, as befitted the discoverer of this El Dorado, continued to reap the greatest riches from it, ever mining deeper into the tourists' pockets and finding new deposits of gold. It was he, for example, who started a new archæological legend concerning the existence of the Long Man of Elmbury. Spending a summer holiday in Dorset, he happened to visit Cerne Abbas where he duly marvelled at the huge phallic giant whose chalky outline sprawls across the hill. It appears that somebody in the village turned the tables on him—the biter bit indeed!—by selling him a curio; it was a rough-carved model of the Long Man, and it cost a pound. The carving itself was only worth a few shillings; but you paid extra for the magic: the thing was supposed to be a charm for child-bearing, and Mr. Parfitt, whose wife was barren, greatly desired a child.

He brought it home, and what Mrs. Parfitt said about it we cannot know; she was probably very shocked indeed, for the Long Man, as you must know if you have seen him, has very little respect for the modesty of middle-aged ladies who run the Women's Quiet Hour for the Methodist Church.

Whatever the reason, the thing didn't work. Priapus refused to take the hint; and Mr. Parfitt remained childless. Doubtless he cursed the crafty carpenter of Cerne Abbas, who had thus cheated him out of a pound; and doubtless he reflected that here would be a profitable sideline for himself if only the ancients of Elmbury had had the sense to delineate a phallic symbol upon the side of the nearest hill.

From this speculation it wasn't very far—it was no farther than the distance to Mr. Parfitt's workshop with its chisels and saws—to experimental attempts to remedy the ancients' custom. Before long Mr. Parfitt had manufactured with very great skill and artistry a Long Man, in a sense indeed an even longer man, which he placed in the darkest corner of his shop to await the coming of an archæologist.

Heaven sent one that very summer: an earnest curate on a bicycling tour who had stopped to take some brass-rubbings in the Abbey. He went into Mr. Parfitt's shop with the innocent intention of buying a picture postcard of the West Window to send to his vicar. He came out with the Long Man of Elmbury discreetly wrapped up in three thicknesses of brown paper.

We may suppose that the curate mentioned the matter to a fellow-student one night over a glass of port. (“Deplorable, of course, these pagan superstitions, but their survival in the countryside is not without interest.”) At any rate, next season there was no lack of customers, clerical, professorial and otherwise, who furtively entered Mr. Parfitt's dark shop and whispered to him when he came sidling out of the shadows that they'd heard tell of certain—er—primitive statues which were carved in the district and were associated with certain rites of interest only to anthropologists. And there were plenty of little statues to be had, for Mr. Parfitt had occupied himself during the long winter evenings in carving them.

Folk-lorists, as Mr. Parfitt had long ago discovered, are singularly gullible people. They will believe any old wives' tale, give credence to the wandering wits of any old gaffer in a pub. Folk-lore, in fact, is made up of old wives' and old gaffers' tales. So there wasn't much difficulty in answering their questions about the Long Man. “Where was the original figure?” “On the side of Brensham Hill, some say; but others have it that 'twas at Towbury.” “What happened to it?” “The parson had it filled in long, long ago; set twelve men to work, he did, and promised them each a gallon of ale in addition to their wages so long as no mortal trace of it should remain. So my grandfather told me; and he had the story from one of the men who did the digging. When was that, Mister? 'Tis hard to say. My granfer was a boy at the time and the man a greybeard. … Granfer used to tell us that Parson got rid of it because he said it set a bad example to the maids. But there still be a few as remembers how to carve the likeness of it.”