The Wish House and Other Stories (42 page)

That is the second jest. It signifies that those who would desire to behold a proper memorial to Kurban Sahib must look out at the house. And, Sahib, the house is not there, nor the well, nor the big tank which they call dams, nor the little fruit trees, nor the cattle. There is nothing at all, Sahib, except the two trees withered by the fire. The rest is like the desert here – or my hand – or my heart. Empty, Sahib – all empty!

(From the Swedish of Stagnelius)

‘I
TS
a funny thing, this Marconi business, isn’t it?’ said Mr Shaynor, coughing heavily. ‘Nothing seems to make any difference, by what they tell me – storms, hills, or anything; but if that’s true we shall know before morning.’

‘Of course it’s true,’ I answered, stepping behind the counter. ‘Where’s old Mr Cashell?’

‘He’s had to go to bed on account of his influenza. He said you’d very likely drop in.’

‘Where’s his nephew?’

‘Inside, getting the things ready. He told me that the last time they experimented they put the pole on the roof of one of the big hotels here, and the batteries electrified all the water-supply, and’ – he giggled – ‘the ladies got shocks when they took their baths.’

‘I never heard of that.’

‘The hotel wouldn’t exactly advertise it, would it? Just now, by what Mr Cashell tells me, they’re trying to signal from here to Poole, and they’re using stronger batteries than ever. But, you see, he being the guvnor’s nephew and all that (and it will be in the papers too), it doesn’t matter how they electrify things in this house. Are you going to watch?’

‘Very much. I’ve never seen this game. Aren’t you going to bed?’

‘We don’t close till ten on Saturdays. There’s a good deal of influenza in town, too, and there’ll be a dozen prescriptions coming in before morning. I generally sleep in the chair here. It’s warmer than jumping out of bed every time. Bitter cold, isn’t it?’

‘Freezing hard. I’m sorry your cough’s worse.’

‘Thank you. I don’t mind the cold so much. It’s this wind that fair cuts me to pieces.’ He coughed again hard and hackingly, as an old lady came in for ammoniated quinine. ‘We’ve just run out of it in bottles, madam,’ said Mr Shaynor, returning to the professional tone, ‘but if you will wait two minutes, I’ll make it up for you, madam.’

I had used the shop for some time, and my acquaintance with the proprietor had ripened into friendship. It was Mr Cashell who revealed to me the purpose and power of Apothecaries’ Hall what
time a fellow-chemist had made an error in a prescription of mine, had lied to cover his sloth, and when error and lie were brought home to him had written vain letters.

‘A disgrace to our profession,’ said the thin, mild-eyed man, hotly, after studying the evidence. ‘You couldn’t do a better service to the profession than report him to Apothecaries’ Hall.’

I did so, not knowing what djinns I should evoke; and the result was such an apology as one might make who had spent a night on the rack. I conceived a great respect for Apothecaries’ Hall and esteem for Mr Cashell, a zealous craftsman who magnified his calling. Until Mr Shaynor came down from the North his assistants had by no means agreed with Mr Cashell. ‘They forget,’ said he, ‘that, first and foremost, the compounder is a medicine-man. On him depends the physician’s reputation. He holds it literally in the hollow of his hand, sir.’

Mr Shaynor’s manners had not, perhaps, the polish of the grocery and Italian warehouse next door, but he knew and loved his dispensary work in every detail. For relaxation he seemed to go no farther afield that the romance of drugs – their discovery, preparation, packing, and export – but it led him to the ends of the earth, and on this subject, and the Pharmaceutical Formulary, and Nicholas Culpepper, most confident of physicians, we met.

Little by little I grew to know something of his beginnings and his hopes – of his mother, who had been a school-teacher in one of the northern counties, and of his red-headed father, a small job-master at Kirby Moors, who died when he was a child; of the examinations he had passed and of their exceeding and increasing difficulty; of his dreams of a shop in London; of his hate for the price-cutting Co-operative stores; and, most interesting, of his mental attitude towards his customers.

‘There’s a way you get into,’ he told me, ‘of serving them carefully, and I hope, politely, without stopping your own thinking. I’ve been reading Christy’s
New Commercial Plants
all this autumn, and that needs keeping your mind on it, I can tell you. So long as it isn’t a prescription, of course, I can carry as much as half a page of Christy in my head, and at the same time I could sell out all that window twice over, and not a penny wrong at the end. As to prescriptions, I think I could make up the general run of ’em in my sleep, almost.’

For reasons of my own, I was deeply interested in Marconi experiments at their outset in England; and it was of a piece with Mr Cashell’s unvarying thoughtfulness that, when his nephew the electrician appropriated the house for a long-range installation, he
should, as I have said, invite me to see the result.

The old lady went away with her medicine, and Mr Shaynor and I stamped on the tiled floor behind the counter to keep ourselves warm. The shop, by the light of the many electrics, looked like a Paris-diamond mine, for Mr Cashell believed in all the ritual of his craft. Three superb glass jars – red, green, and blue – of the sort that led Rosamond to parting with her shoes – blazed in the broad plate-glass windows, and there was a confused smell of orris, Kodak films, vulcanite, tooth-powder, sachets, and almond-cream in the air. Mr Shaynor fed the dispensary stove, and we sucked cayenne-pepper jujubes and menthol lozenges. The brutal east wind had cleared the streets, and the few passers-by were muffled to their puckered eyes. In the Italian warehouse next door some gay feathered birds and game, hung upon hooks, sagged to the wind across the left edge of our window-frame.

‘They ought to take these poultry in – all knocked about like that,’ said Mr Shaynor. ‘Doesn’t it make you feel perishing? See that old hare! The wind’s nearly blowing the fur off him.’

I saw the belly-fur of the dead beast blown apart in ridges and streaks as the wind caught it, showing bluish skin underneath. ‘Bitter cold,’ said Mr Shaynor, shuddering. ‘Fancy going out on a night like this! Oh, here’s young Mr Cashell.’

The door of the inner office behind the dispensary opened, and an energetic, spade-bearded man stepped forth, rubbing his hands.

‘I want a bit of tin-foil, Shaynor,’ he said. ‘Good evening. My uncle told me you might be coming.’ This to me, as I began the first of a hundred questions.

‘I’ve everything in order,’ he replied. ‘We’re only waiting until Poole calls us up. Excuse me a minute. You can come in whenever you like – but I’d better be with the instruments. Give me that tin-foil. Thanks.’

While we were talking, a girl – evidently no customer – had come into the shop, and the face and bearing of Mr Shaynor changed. She leaned confidently across the counter.

‘But I can’t,’ I heard him whisper uneasily – the flush on his cheek was dull red, and his eyes shone like a drugged moth’s. ‘I can’t. I tell you I’m alone in the place.’

‘No, you aren’t. Who’s
that?
Let him look after it for half an hour. A brisk walk will do you good. Ah, come now, John.’

‘But he isn’t —‘

‘I don’t care. I want you to; we’ll only go round by St Agnes’. If you don’t —‘

He crossed to where I stood in the shadow of the dispensary counter, and began some sort of broken apology about a lady-friend.

‘Yes,’ she interrupted. ‘You take the shop for half an hour – to oblige
me
, won’t you?’

She had a singularly rich and promising voice that well matched her outline.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it – but you’d better wrap yourself up, Mr Shaynor.’

‘Oh, a brisk walk ought to help me. We’re only going round by the church.’ I heard him cough grievously as they went out together.

I refilled the stove, and, after reckless expenditure of Mr Cashell’s coal, drove some warmth into the shop. I explored many of the glass-knobbed drawers that lined the walls, tasted some disconcerting drugs, and, by the aid of a few cardamoms, ground ginger, chloric-ether, and dilute alcohol, manufactured a new and wildish drink, of which I bore a glassful to young Mr Cashell, busy in the back office. He laughed shortly when I told him that Mr Shaynor had stepped out – but a frail coil of wire held all his attention, and he had no word for me bewildered among the batteries and rods. The noise of the sea on the beach began to make itself heard as the traffic in the street ceased. Then briefly, but very lucidly, he gave me the names and uses of the mechanism that crowded the tables and the floor.

‘When do you expect to get the message from Poole?’ I demanded, sipping my liquor out of a graduated glass.

‘About midnight, if everything is in order. We’ve got our installation-pole fixed to the roof of the house. I shouldn’t advise you to turn on a tap or anything tonight. We’ve connected up with the plumbing, and all the water will be electrified.’ He repeated to me the history of the agitated ladies at the hotel at the time of the first installation.

‘But what
is
it?’ I asked. ‘Electricity is out of my beat altogether.’

‘Ah, if you knew
that
you’d know something nobody knows. It’s just It – what we call electricity, but the magic – the manifestations-the Hertzian waves – are all revealed by
this.
The coherer, we call it.’

He picked up a glass tube not much thicker than a thermometer, in which, almost touching, were two tiny silver plugs, and between them an infinitesimal pinch of metallic dust. ‘That’s all,’ he said, proudly, as though himself responsible for the wonder. ‘That is the thing that will reveal to us the Powers – whatever the Powers may be – at work – through space – a long distance away.’

Just then Mr Shaynor returned alone and stood coughing his heart out on the mat.

‘Serves you right for being such a fool,’ said young Mr Cashell, as annoyed as myself at the interruption. ‘Never mind – we’ve all the night before us to see wonders.’

Shaynor clutched the counter, his handkerchief to his lips. When he brought it away I saw two bright red stains.

‘I’ve – I’ve got a bit of a rasped throat from smoking cigarettes,’ he panted. ‘I think I’ll try a cubeb.’

‘Better take some of this. I’ve been compounding while you’ve been away.’ I handed him the brew.

“Twon’t make me drunk, will it? I’m almost a teetotaller. My word! That’s grateful and comforting.’

He set down the empty glass to cough afresh.

‘Brr! But it was cold out there! I shouldn’t care to be lying in my grave a night like this. Don’t
you
ever have a sore throat from smoking?’ He pocketed the handkerchief after a furtive peep.

‘Oh, yes, sometimes,’ I replied, wondering, while I spoke, into what agonies of terror I should fall if ever I saw those bright-red danger-signals under my nose. Young Mr Cashell among the batteries coughed slightly to show that he was quite ready to continue his scientific explanations, but I was thinking still of the girl with the rich voice and the significantly cut mouth, at whose command I had taken charge of the shop. It flashed across me that she distantly resembled the seductive shape on a gold-framed toilet-water advertisement whose charms were unholily heightened by the glare from the red bottle in the window. Turning to make sure, I saw Mr Shaynor’s eyes bent in the same direction, and by instinct recognized that the flamboyant thing was to him a shrine. ‘What do you take for your – cough?’ I asked.

‘Well, I’m on the wrong side of the counter to believe much in patent medicines. But there are asthma cigarettes and there are pastilles. To tell you the truth, if you don’t object to the smell, which is very like incense, I believe, though I’m not a Roman Catholic, Blaudett’s Cathedral Pastilles relieve me as much as anything.’

‘Let’s try.’ I had never raided a chemist’s shop before, so I was thorough. We unearthed the pastilles – brown, gummy cones of benzoin – and set them alight under the toilet-water advertisement, where they fumed in thin blue spirals.

‘Of course,’ said Mr Shaynor, to my question, ‘what one uses in the shop for one’s self comes out of one’s pocket. Why, stock-taking in our business is nearly the same as with jewellers – and I can’t say more than that. But one gets them’ – he pointed to the pastille-box – ’at trade prices.’ Evidently the censing of the gay, seven-tinted
wench with the teeth was an established ritual which cost something.

‘And when do we shut up shop?’

‘We stay like this all night. The guv – old Mr Cashell, doesn’t believe in locks and shutters as compared with electric light. Besides, it brings trade. I’ll just sit here in the chair by the stove and write a letter, if you don’t mind. Electricity isn’t my prescription.’

The energetic young Mr Cashell snorted within, and Shaynor settled himself up in his chair over which he had thrown a staring red, black, and yellow Austrian jute blanket, rather like a table-cover. I cast about, amid patent-medicine pamphlets, for something to read, but finding little, returned to the manufacture of the new drink. The Italian warehouse took down its game and went to bed. Across the street blank shutters flung back the gaslight in cold smears; the dried pavement seemed to rough up in gooseflesh under the scouring of the savage wind, and we could hear, long ere he passed, the policeman flapping his arms to keep himself warm. Within, the flavours of cardamoms and chloric-ether disputed those of the pastilles and a score of drugs and perfume and soap scents. Our electric lights, set low down in the windows before the tun-bellied Rosamond jars, flung inward three monstrous daubs of red, blue, and green, that broke into kaleidoscopic lights on the faceted knobs of the drug-drawers, the cut-glass scent flagons, and the bulbs of the sparklet bottles. They flushed the white-tiled floor in gorgeous patches; splashed along the nickel-silver counter-rails, and turned the polished mahogany counter-panels to the likeness of intricate grained marbles – slabs of porphyry and malachite. Mr Shaynor unlocked a drawer, and ere he began to write, took out a meagre bundle of letters. From my place by the stove, I could see the scalloped edges of the paper with a flaring monogram in the corner and could even smell the reek of chypre. At each page he turned toward the toilet-water lady of the advertisement and devoured her with over-luminous eyes. He had drawn the Austrian blanket over his shoulders, and among those warring lights he looked more than ever the incarnation of a drugged moth – a tiger-moth as I thought.