Unknown (100 page)

“Yes; you've found another, Mr. Robinson. That'3 the seventh!”

Mr. Robinson, who had a friend among the apothecaries, now uttered a mysterious chemical formula. And then, immediately

tin m

afterwards, looking Mr. Merry cheerfully in the face, pronounced the single syllable—'“to.”

“It's the helement, hain't hit, Sir, what the Romans used to trade in; them that wore the himperial purple?”

"I've known this was coming for twenty years,'* thought the distracted curator, his face changing from animation to profound dismay.

He looked sharply at his interrogator. How much did this fellow know? He wasn't a chemist. He wTasn't an antiquary. Could he be palmed off with a learned lie, or covlixit he? But Mr. Merry as a result of his scrutiny decided that lies were useless. “It's begun!” he said to himself. “It's begun! This fellow will take it to Crow; sure as I'm a dizzard. The beauty of Wookey Hole is departed! Crow will start quarrying the moment he sees this. The wonder is that he has missed it himself; he's always going down there—with his electricity. This is the end; the end of all those lovely stalactite caves that Clement of Alexandria talks about!”

“I can see, Sir,” said Mr. Robinson rising to his feet, “that my hinformant was right; and that it his the helement after which the Corinthians------”

“Not Corinthians, my good man; Carthaginiansl” cried the curator, “and what you've got there isn't an element you must understand. It's a chemical deposit, precipitated from the subterranean river down there and brought up from some deep mineral pocket in the Mendips.”

“0 lordy! lordy! lordy!” he thought to himself, “why can't I hold my silly old tongue?”

“It's the hold Roman metal, henny-'ow,” said Mr. Robinson with emphatic assurance. “I thought it was myself; but I thought I'd just run in to-die and arst so as to mike sure. I'm not cryzy about telling people what hisn't their business any more nor you be, as I plinely see! But in dies like these dies, it's best to be sife!”

Mr. Robinson buttoned his coat complacently over the inner pocket containing the specimen he had brought.

“A mineral the harticle is then, Sir; a nice little mineral! And this sime mineral is what the himperial Romans used? I thought so. I thought there weren't no mistike; but I said to myself, 'tis best to get the word of sich has knows!”

He put on his cap, adjusted it carefully, though with a touch of rakishness, gave a contemptuous glance at the Lake Village pottery—as much as to say: “No himperial metal in your die!” and then, as he said afterwards to his mother, “took me bleedin' 'ook, leaving the old gent, and small blime to 'im, not knowing 'is 'ead from 'is tile.”

The next person Red Robinson went to see was a small chemist in High Street of the name of Harry Stickles, a remote relative of Tossie's. He got into the shop just before it closed; and when the last shutter was put up, Mr. Stickles took him out into his little back garden; where they sat down, in that drowsy autumn noonday on a bench beneath the wall. Opposite them was a pear tree and under the pear tree a big yellow cat. Several brooms and mops were propped up against the wall and a broken earthenware bowl lay at their feet.

“'Ad yer dinner, 'Arry?” said Red.

“What do you suppose, you bloody Londoner? I dines at twelve sharp, I'd have you to know, and what's more I've got as tidy a little missus as any tradesman in town, and don't you forget it,—when it comes to the cookery department-------”

Red looked at the yellow cat.

“Where is your lidy now, then, 'Arry? Washin' the soup-lidles?”

Mr. Stickles made a gesture with his thumb and a slight motion with one of his eyebrows. This signified that the mistress of the house was upstairs just above their heads, and that if they were to talk blood and iron business it would be wise to lower their voices.

“You've 'it the mark, 'Arry; you've 'it it strite this time! Tis that nice, little metal what mide them hemperors so rich. You've got it. You've got it! The honely question now his, 'ow much will you be 'ighbel to soak 'im for.”

Red took off his cap and laid it down at his feet, upside down. The joy of his “ 'ate,” and the thought >of “soaking” his enemy had caused drops of sweat to moisten the front of this object; and upon this 'ate-sweat a blue-bottle fly began to feed with such intense avidity that one might have thought there was a nourishing potency in Mr. Robinson's wrath.

Harry Stickles did not reply for a while. Both men now took out their pipes and contented themselves with contemplating the yellow cat, as their smoke ascended in filmy-blue curves into the misty air. The cat stretched out its front paws and yawned voluptuously, displaying a throat as pink as a wild rose. Then Mr. Stickles said, in a carefully modulated voice, so that his wife, even if she was listening at the window above, could hardly have caught his words:

“The number of sixpences I've a-spent overlooking for this here thing in Wookey would keep me in tobacco for a year. But there's a big lot of it down there—a big lot! It only wants digging for. There be tons and tons, I shouldn't wonder.”

Mr. Stickles was a short man, even a dwarfish one, with long muscular arms and a face like a mad baby. His face was a soft, round, roguish face, with pleasant dimples; but into it, as if in some fantastic experimentation, had been thrust a pair of eyes that glittered with insane avarice. The truth was that long before Philip had begun charging sixpences for the privilege of visiting Wookey Hole, Mr. Stickles had been wont to spend Sunday after Sunday among those stalactites.

“Don't yer let 'im horf under a 'undred thousand!” said Red Robinson cheerfully.

“Lucky if I get a hundred quid out of him,” whispered the other; “but he can't have found it or 'twould have been in the paper.”

“Piper be 'anged!” whispered Red ferociously. “What price 9im putting 'is gines and 'is tikings in the piper! What eel do to-die, we pore dawgs will know tomorrow, and that's hall there's to it!”

Mr. Stickles contemplated his yellow cat with intense and concentrated attention. Suddenly he slapped his hands on his knees.

“I'd catch him just about right—after he's had his lunch and all—if I were to go round and see him now—straight off the blooming reel!”

Red Robinson squirmed and fidgetted on hearing his friend's bold utterance. In the secret malice of his heart he had seen himself as the one, dedicated by a just providence, to dangle the metal of Carthage and Rome before the eyes of the greedy manufacturer.

“He's been flying all hover Europe; so 'is pilot's landlidy in Butts' Alley told Sally Jones . . . stealin' secrets from they foreign dye-works; so 'tisn't likely he'll be in The Helms to-die.”

Mr. Stickles was however already upon his feet, while his yellow cat, as if to give oracular encouragement to his daring master, left the pear tree and rubbed himself against his legs.

“Maybe 'twould be better if someone helse, someone that 'adn't no hinterest in the money, someone who were a good friend o' both parties, some quiet honlooker, you might say, willin' to serve hall and sundry, were to go and talk to 'im, rather than he who's the principal hagent!”

“Meaning?” whispered the gnome-like discoverer of tin, with a leer. “Meaning?”

But Robinson had drawn back in some disquietude; for the dwarfish chemist had suddenly thrust his face very close to his face, and was displaying, between his thin lips, the flickering point of a red tongue.

“Well—why not?” said the cautious foreman of the municipal factory. “Why shouldn't you ring 'is bell henny-'ow, and tell the servant you kime? No 'arm in that! Henny gent may ring henny other gent's front door-bell and arst to see 'is collection of bricky-backs. No 'arm in thatl”

But Mr. Stickles did not feel the, same inspiration, or the same sympathy, in his friend's voice that he had felt in the yellow cat's uplifted tail.

“I'm off,” he said abruptly. “I don't suppose you want to wait here all the afternoon, till I come back, eh?” he added.

“Oh, you'll come back, quicker nor that I” cried the other. “Eel not be for arstin' yer to stay and drink fizz with 'im, all the afternoon, hunder 'is shady helms.”

No sooner were both men gone than the head of a pretty, fair-haired young woman appeared at the window.

“Goin' tQ see Mr, Crow, are ye?” she murmured to herself.

“Going xo surpr^e your little Nancv with a hundred pounds— I don't think!”

And then, kneeling on the floor with her elbows on the window-sill, Nancy Stickles caught sight of young Mrs. Glover and her baby reclining in a wicker chair by the edge of her tiny lawn, while Mr. Glover—the ironmonger—with a larse pair of garden scissors was trimming the straggling border of a bed of London Pride.

At once the girl's thoughts ceased to be malicious, or vindictive, or even self-pitiful! She thrust her fingers into her apron pocket and extracted a little, sticky paper bag. Out of this she took a lemon-drop and put it into her mouth.

“He'll be twelve months old, next Thursday, Billy Glover will! It's nice for Betsy Jane the way Mr. Glover do stay at home on closing-days and tidy up garden.”

It was as if some great consolatory spirit in things, perfectly indifferent to the blood-and-iron activities of her mate and her mate's ally, now began to pour out upon this head at the window, lemon-drop and all, everything that it had to bestow.

A wood pigeon's voice became audible in the small lime trees at the bottom of Mr. Glover's garden; and in spite of the noise of the traffic in the street in front, it was possible to catch the pleasant sound of a lawn-mower in the garden beyond Mr. Glover's. That mysterious relaxing of everything hard, everything tense and strung-up, that comes with autumn was all around Nancy as she looked out, breathing a vague cider-sweet smell of apples. If moss and primroses were the dominant spring scent in Glastonbury, apples were the autumn one.

This particular day was indeed as characteristic of autumn in Somerset as any day could be. A blue haze was over everything, so thick and intense, that it was as if the blueness in the sky had fallen upon the earth, leaving only a vague grey hollo wness in the upper air. This blue haze invaded everything. It crept through gaps in hedges; it floated over old crumbling walls; it slipped into open stickhouses and haysheds. And though it was blue in colour, it smelled strongly of brown mud and of yellow apples. This blue mist, reeking of cider-juice and ditches, seems to possess a peculiar somnolent power. Travellers from the north, or from the east, coming into Glastonbury by train through Wareham, may be sitting erect and alert as they pass Stalbridge and Templecombe but they will find it difficult to keep their eyes on the landscape when the train has carried them beyond Evercreech and they come into the purlieus of Avalon.

Sleep seems to emanate from this district like a thin, penetrating anaesthetic, possessed of a definite healing power, and it is a sleep full of dreams; not of the gross, violent, repulsive dreams of the night, but of lovely, floating, evasive day-dreams, lighter, more voluptuous, nearer the heart's desire, than the raw, crude, violent visions of the bed.

Nancy Stickles felt a wave of delicious languor steal over her as she contemplated the Glover family enjoying themselves on their little lawn and as she watched the blue mists floating over the old walls and lying in hollows between the narrow alleys, and hovering in pigsty doors, and privy doors and fowl-run doors, and flowing like the vaporous essence of some great blue apple of the orchards of space over everything she could see. She felt quite friendly to her husband. He never struck her. He never abused her. He always gave her exactly the same sum of money every Saturday, whatever receipts the shop brought in. He didn't drink. He praised her cooking. But on the other hand—oh, how happy she always was when he was well out of the way and she was left alone!

There must have been something in Nancy of the unconquerable zest for life that the gods had given to old Mother Legge who was her great-aunt. She was an extraordinarily pretty girl; and she had so fair and clear a complexion and such a rounded figure that people turned to look at her as she went by. But Nancy had no self-pity. It never occurred to her that she had been wronged by God or by humanity because her father died in the workhouse and her mother in the county asylum; or because she had been cajoled by the accident of propinquity into marrying the poorest and most miserly of all Glastonbury's tradesmen.

She did not like it very much when Red Robinson, her husband's friend, showed a tendency to take liberties with her; but she managed to rebuff him without "making trouble/' and as soon as he was out of sight she had the power of casting him from her thoughts. Nancy Stickles was perhaps more perfectly adjusted to the ways of Nature, and to the terms upon which we all live upon this earth, than any other conscious person in Glastonbury except Mr. Wollop and Bert Cole. But Nancy had a double advantage over both these adherents of the visible world in the fact that she included many undertones and overtones of a psychological character completely out of reach of Bert and the ex-Mayor.

She shared with her great-aunt a certain Rabelaisian habit of mind, or at least a habit of mind that liked life none the worse because of its animal basis.

At this moment, for example, when it became clear that Billy Glover had “forgot where he was” and was being carried kicking and screaming into the house, Nancy Stickles felt no repugnance. If she'd been called upon at this moment to give Billy Glover a bath she would have gone into Billy's room without the flicker of a sigh, and been soon looking out of Billy's window, just as she was now looking out of Harry's!

When not in acute physical pain, or in the presence of acute physical pain, Nancy Stickles enjoyed every moment of life. She liked to touch life, hear life, smell life, taste life, see life; but she went far beyond Mr. Wollop and Bert, as she did indeed beyond everybody in Glastonbury, except its present Mayor, in the enjoyment of religion. To Nancy Stickles, God was a dignified, well-meaning, but rather helpless Person, like Parson Dekker; Christ was a lovable, but rather disturbing Person, like Sam Dekker; the Holy Spirit was, quite simply and quite reverently, a very large and very voluble Wood Pigeon; but all these Entities moved to 'and fro in an inner, behind-stage Glastonbury; a Glastonbury with greener fields, a redder Chalice Well, yellower apples and even bluer mists, than the one Nancy knew best, but one—all the same—that she felt frequently conscious of, and towards which her deepest feminine soul expanded in delicious waves of admiration, hope and love.