Редьярд Джозеф Киплинг
Traffics and Discoveries
"Yes."
"Robert. Does your mamma keep a dog?"
"Yes. Why?"
"All right, Robert. I won't forget it."
I looked for an explanation.
"I saw his cabinet photograph in full uniform on the mantelpiece o' that cottage before faithful Fido turned up," Pyecroft whispered. "Ain't you glad it's all in the family somehow?"
We filled with water at a cottage on the edge of St. Leonard's Forest, and, despite our increasing leakage, made shift to climb the ridge above Instead Wick. Knowing the car as I did, I felt sure that final collapse would not be long delayed. My sole concern was to run our guest well into the wilderness before that came.
On the roof of the world – a naked plateau clothed with young heather – she retired from active life in floods of tears. Her feed-water-heater (Hinchcliffe blessed it and its maker for three minutes) was leaking beyond hope of repair; she had shifted most of her packing, and her water- pump would not lift.
"If I had a bit of piping I could disconnect this tin cartridge-case an' feed direct into the boiler. It 'ud knock down her speed, but we could get on," said he, and looked hopelessly at the long dun ridges that hove us above the panorama of Sussex. Northward we could see the London haze. Southward, between gaps of the whale-backed Downs, lay the Channel's zinc- blue. But all our available population in that vast survey was one cow and a kestrel.
"It's down hill to Instead Wick. We can run her there by gravity," I said at last.
"Then he'll only have to walk to the station to get home. Unless we take off 'is boots first," Pyecroft replied.
"That," said our guest earnestly, "would be theft atop of assault and very serious."
"Oh, let's hang him an' be done," Hinchcliffe grunted. "It's evidently what he's sufferin' for."
Somehow murder did not appeal to us that warm noon. We sat down to smoke in the heather, and presently out of the valley below came the thick beat of a petrol-motor ascending. I paid little attention to it till I heard the roar of a horn that has no duplicate in all the Home Counties.
"That's the man I was going to lunch with!" I cried. "Hold on!" and I ran down the road.
It was a big, black, black-dashed, tonneaued twenty-four horse Octopod; and it bore not only Kysh my friend, and Salmon his engineer, but my own man, who for the first time in our acquaintance smiled.
"Did they get you? What did you get? I was coming into Linghurst as witness to character – your man told me what happened – but I was stopped near Instead Wick myself," cried Kysh.
"What for?"
"Leaving car unattended. An infernal swindle, when you think of the loose carts outside every pub in the county. I was jawing with the police for an hour, but it's no use. They've got it all their own way, and we're helpless."
Hereupon I told him my tale, and for proof, as we topped the hill, pointed out the little group round my car.
All supreme emotion is dumb. Kysh put on the brake and hugged me to his bosom till I groaned. Then, as I remember, he crooned like a mother returned to her suckling.
"Divine! Divine!" he murmured. "Command me."
"Take charge of the situation," I said. "You'll find a Mr. Pyecroft on the quarter-deck. I'm altogether out of it."
"He shall stay there. Who am I but the instrument of vengeance in the hands of an over-ruling Providence? (And I put in fresh sparking-plugs this morning.) Salmon, take that steam-kettle home, somehow. I would be alone."
"Leggat," I said to my man, "help Salmon home with my car."
"Home? Now? It's hard. It's cruel hard," said Leggat, almost with a sob.
Hinchcliffe outlined my car's condition briefly to the two engineers. Mr. Pyecroft clung to our guest, who stared with affrighted eyes at the palpitating Octopod; and the free wind of high Sussex whimpered across the ling.
"I am quite agreeable to walkin' 'ome all the way on my feet," said our guest. "I wouldn't go to any railway station. It 'ud be just the proper finish to our little joke." He laughed nervously.
"What's the evolution?" said Pyecroft. "Do we turn over to the new cruiser?"
I nodded, and he escorted our guest to the tonneau with care. When I was in, he sat himself broad-armed on the little flap-seat which controls the door. Hinchcliffe sat by Kysh.
"You drive?" Kysh asked, with the smile that has won him his chequered way through the world.
"Steam only, and I've about had my whack for to-day, thanks."
"I see."
The long, low car slid forward and then dropped like a bullet down the descent our steam toy had so painfully climbed. Our guest's face blanched, and he clutched the back of the tonneau.
"New commander's evidently been trained on a destroyer," said Hinchcliffe.
"What's 'is wonderful name?" whispered Pyecroft. "Ho! Well, I'm glad it ain't Saul we've run up against – nor Nimshi, for that matter. This is makin' me feel religious."
Our impetus carried us half-way up the next slope, where we steadied to a resonant fifteen an hour against the collar.
"What do you think?" I called to Hinchcliffe.
"'Taint as sweet as steam, o' course; but for power it's twice the Furious against half the Jaseur in a head-sea."
Volumes could not have touched it more exactly. His bright eyes were glued on Kysh's hands juggling with levers behind the discreet backward sloping dash.
"An' what sort of a brake might you use?" he said politely.
"This," Kysh replied, as the last of the hill shot up to one in eight. He let the car run back a few feet and caught her deftly on the brake, repeating the performance cup and ball fashion. It was like being daped above the Pit at the end of an uncoiled solar plexus. Even Pyecroft held his breath.
"It ain't fair! It ain't fair!" our guest moaned. "You're makin' me sick."
"What an ungrateful blighter he is!" said Pyecroft. "Money couldn't buy you a run like this … Do it well overboard!"
"We'll just trundle up the Forest and drop into the Park Row, I think," said Kysh. "There's a bit of good going hereabouts."
He flung a careless knee over the low raking tiller that the ordinary expert puts under his armpit, and down four miles of yellow road, cut through barren waste, the Octopod sang like a six-inch shell.
"Whew! But you know your job," said Hinchcliffe. "You're wasted here. I'd give something to have you in my engine-room."
"He's steering with 'is little hind-legs," said Pyecroft. "Stand up and look at him, Robert. You'll never see such a sight again!"
"Nor don't want to," was our guest's reply. "Five 'undred pounds wouldn't begin to cover 'is fines even since I've been with him."
Park Row is reached by one hill which drops three hundred feet in half a mile. Kysh had the thought to steer with his hand down the abyss, but the manner in which he took the curved bridge at the bottom brought my few remaining hairs much nearer the grave.
"We're in Surrey now; better look out," I said.
"Never mind. I'll roll her into Kent for a bit. We've lots of time; it's only three o'clock."
"Won't you want to fill your bunkers, or take water, or oil her up?" said Hinchcliffe.
"We don't use water, and she's good for two hundred on one tank o' petrol if she doesn't break down."
"Two hundred miles from 'ome and mother and faithful Fido to-night, Robert," said Pyecroft, slapping our guest on the knee. "Cheer up! Why, I've known a destroyer do less."
We passed with some decency through some towns, till by way of the Hastings road we whirled into Cramberhurst, which is a deep pit.
"Now," said Kysh, "we begin."
"Previous service not reckoned towards pension," said Pyecroft. "We are doin' you lavish, Robert."
"But when's this silly game to finish, any'ow?" our guest snarled.
"Don't worry about the when of it, Robert. The where's the interestin' point for you just now."
I had seen Kysh drive before, and I thought I knew the Octopod, but that afternoon he and she were exalted beyond my knowledge. He improvised on the keys – the snapping levers and quivering accelerators – marvellous variations, so that our progress was sometimes a fugue and sometimes a barn-dance, varied on open greens by the weaving of fairy rings. When I protested, all that he would say was: "I'll hypnotise the fowl! I'll dazzle the rooster!" or other words equally futile. And she – oh! that I could do her justice! – she turned her broad black bows to the westering light, and lifted us high upon hills that we might see and rejoice with her. She whooped into veiled hollows of elm and Sussex oak; she devoured infinite perspectives of park palings; she surged through forgotten hamlets, whose single streets gave back, reduplicated, the clatter of her exhaust, and, tireless, she repeated the motions. Over naked uplands she droned like a homing bee, her shadow lengthening in the sun that she chased to his lair. She nosed up unparochial byways and accommodation- roads of the least accommodation, and put old scarred turf or new-raised molehills under her most marvellous springs with never a jar. And since the King's highway is used for every purpose save traffic, in mid-career she stepped aside for, or flung amazing loops about, the brainless driver, the driverless horse, the drunken carrier, the engaged couple, the female student of the bicycle and her staggering instructor, the pig, the perambulator, and the infant school (where it disembogued yelping on cross-roads), with the grace of Nellie Farren (upon whom be the Peace) and the lithe abandon of all the Vokes family. But at heart she was ever Judic as I remember that Judic long ago – Judic clad in bourgeois black from wrist to ankle, achieving incredible improprieties.
We were silent – Hinchcliffe and Pyecroft through professional appreciation; I with a layman's delight in the expert; and our guest because of fear.
At the edge of the evening she smelt the sea to southward and sheered thither like the strong-winged albatross, to circle enormously amid green flats fringed by martello towers.
"Ain't that Eastbourne yonder?" said our guest, reviving. "I've a aunt there – she's cook to a J.P. – could identify me."
"Don't worry her for a little thing like that," said Pyecroft; and ere he had ceased to praise family love, our unpaid judiciary, and domestic service, the Downs rose between us and the sea, and the Long Man of Hillingdon lay out upon the turf.
"Trevington – up yonder – is a fairly isolated little dorp," I said, for I was beginning to feel hungry.
"No," said Kysh. "He'd get a lift to the railway in no time… Besides, I'm enjoying myself… Three pounds eighteen and sixpence. Infernal swindle!"
I take it one of his more recent fines was rankling in Kysh's brain; but he drove like the Archangel of the Twilight.
About the longitude of Cassocks, Hinchcliffe yawned. "Aren't we goin' to maroon our Robert? I'm hungry, too."
"The commodore wants his money back," I answered.
"If he drives like this habitual, there must be a tidyish little lump owin' to him," said Pyecroft. "Well, I'm agreeable."
"I didn't know it could be done. S'welp me, I didn't," our guest murmured.
"But you will," said Kysh. And that was the first and last time he addressed the man.
We ran through Penfield Green, half stupefied with open air, drugged with the relentless boom of the Octopod, and extinct with famine.
"I used to shoot about here," said Kysh, a few miles further on. "Open that gate, please," and he slowed as the sun touched the sky-line. At this point we left metalled roads and bucked vigorously amid ditches and under trees for twenty minutes.
"Only cross-country car on the market," he said, as we wheeled into a straw-yard where a lone bull bellowed defiance to our growlings. "Open that gate, please. I hope the cattle-bridge will stand up."
"I've took a few risks in my time," said Pyecroft as timbers cracked beneath us and we entered between thickets, "but I'm a babe to this man, Hinch."
"Don't talk to me. Watch him! It's a liberal education, as Shakespeare says. Fallen tree on the port bow, Sir."
"Right! That's my mark. Sit tight!"
She flung up her tail like a sounding whale and buried us in a fifteen- foot deep bridle-path buttressed with the exposed roots of enormous beeches. The wheels leaped from root to rounded boulder, and it was very dark in the shadow of the foliage.
"There ought to be a hammer-pond somewhere about here." Kysh was letting her down this chute in brakeful spasms.
"Water dead ahead, Sir. Stack o' brushwood on the starboard beam, and – no road," sang Pyecroft.
"Cr-r-ri-key!" said Hinchcliffe, as the car on a wild cant to the left went astern, screwing herself round the angle of a track that overhung the pond. "If she only had two propellers, I believe she'd talk poetry. She can do everything else."
"We're rather on our port wheels now," said Kysh; "but I don't think she'll capsize. This road isn't used much by motors."
"You don't say so," said Pyecroft. "What a pity!"
She bored through a mass of crackling brushwood, and emerged into an upward sloping fern-glade fenced with woods so virgin, so untouched, that William Rufus might have ridden off as we entered. We climbed out of the violet-purple shadows towards the upland where the last of the day lingered. I was filled to my moist eyes with the almost sacred beauty of sense and association that clad the landscape.
"Does 'unger produce 'alluciations?" said Pyecroft in a whisper. "Because I've just seen a sacred ibis walkin' arm in arm with a British cock- pheasant."
"What are you panickin' at?" said Hinchcliffe. "I've been seein' zebra for the last two minutes, but I 'aven't complained."
He pointed behind us, and I beheld a superb painted zebra (Burchell's, I think), following our track with palpitating nostrils. The car stopped, and it fled away.
There was a little pond in front of us from which rose a dome of irregular sticks crowned with a blunt-muzzled beast that sat upon its haunches.
"Is it catching?" said Pyecroft.
"Yes. I'm seeing beaver," I replied.
"It is here!" said Kysh, with the air and gesture of Captain Nemo, and half turned.
"No – no – no! For 'Eaven's sake – not 'ere!" Our guest gasped like a sea- bathed child, as four efficient hands swung him far out-board on to the turf. The car ran back noiselessly down the slope.
"Look! Look! It's sorcery!" cried Hinchcliffe.
There was a report like a pistol shot as the beaver dived from the roof of his lodge, but we watched our guest. He was on his knees, praying to kangaroos. Yea, in his bowler hat he kneeled before kangaroos – gigantic, erect, silhouetted against the light – four buck-kangaroos in the heart of Sussex!
And we retrogressed over the velvet grass till our hind-wheels struck well-rolled gravel, leading us to sanity, main roads, and, half an hour later, the "Grapnel Inn" at Horsham.
* * * * *
After a great meal we poured libations and made burnt-offerings in honour of Kysh, who received our homage graciously, and, by the way, explained a few things in the natural history line that had puzzled us. England is a most marvellous country, but one is not, till one knows the eccentricities of large land-owners, trained to accept kangaroos, zebras, or beavers as part of its landscape.
When we went to bed Pyecroft pressed my hand, his voice thick with emotion.
"We owe it to you," he said. "We owe it all to you. Didn't I say we never met in pup-pup-puris naturalibus, if I may so put it, without a remarkably hectic day ahead of us?"
"That's all right," I said. "Mind the candle." He was tracing smoke- patterns on the wall.
"But what I want to know is whether we'll succeed in acclimatisin' the blighter, or whether Sir William Gardner's keepers 'll kill 'im before 'e gets accustomed to 'is surroundin's?"
Some day, I think, we must go up the Linghurst Road and find out.
"WIRELESS"
KASPAR'S SONG IN VARDA
(From the Swedish of Stagnelius.)
Eyes aloft, over dangerous places,
The children follow where Psyche flies,
And, in the sweat of their upturned faces,
Slash with a net at the empty skies.
So it goes they fall amid brambles,
And sting their toes on the nettle-tops,
Till after a thousand scratches and scrambles
They wipe their brows, and the hunting stops.
Then to quiet them comes their father
And stills the riot of pain and grief,
Saying, "Little ones, go and gather
Out of my garden a cabbage leaf.
"You will find on it whorls and clots of
Dull grey eggs that, properly fed,
Turn, by way of the worm, to lots of
Radiant Psyches raised from the dead."
* * * * *
"Heaven is beautiful, Earth is ugly,"
The three-dimensioned preacher saith,
So we must not look where the snail and the slug lie
For Psyche's birth … And that is our death!
"WIRELESS" "It's 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 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 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 than 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 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 Christie'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 Christie 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 Rosamund 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 fair 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 – 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 sat 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 recognised that the flamboyant thing was to him a shrine. "What do you take for your – cough?" I asked.
"Well, I'm 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 gov – 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 goose-flesh 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 tunbellied Rosamund jars, flung inward three monstrous daubs of red, blue, and green, that broke into kaleidoscopic lights on the facetted 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.
