I do not remember much of my journey to Wimblehurst with my mother
except the image of her as sitting bolt upright, as rather disdaining
the third-class carriage in which we traveled, and how she looked away
from me out of the window when she spoke of my uncle. “I have not seen
your uncle,” she said, “since he was a boy....” She added grudgingly,
“Then he was supposed to be clever.”
She took little interest in such qualities as cleverness.
“He married about three years ago, and set up for himself in
Wimblehurst.... So I suppose she had some money.”
She mused on scenes she had long dismissed from her mind. “Teddy,” she
said at last in the tone of one who has been feeling in the dark and
finds. “He was called Teddy... about your age.... Now he must be
twenty-six or seven.”
I thought of my uncle as Teddy directly I saw him; there was something
in his personal appearance that in the light of that memory phrased
itself at once as Teddiness—a certain Teddidity. To describe it in and
other terms is more difficult. It is nimbleness without grace, and
alertness without intelligence. He whisked out of his shop upon the
pavement, a short figure in grey and wearing grey carpet slippers; one
had a sense of a young fattish face behind gilt glasses, wiry hair that
stuck up and forward over the forehead, an irregular nose that had its
aquiline moments, and that the body betrayed an equatorial laxity, an
incipient “bow window” as the image goes. He jerked out of the shop,
came to a stand on the pavement outside, regarded something in the
window with infinite appreciation, stroked his chin, and, as abruptly,
shot sideways into the door again, charging through it as it were
behind an extended hand.
“That must be him,” said my mother, catching at her breath.
We came past the window whose contents I was presently to know by
heart, a very ordinary chemist’s window except that there was a
frictional electrical machine, an air pump and two or three tripods and
retorts replacing the customary blue, yellow, and red bottles above.
There was a plaster of Paris horse to indicate veterinary medicines
among these breakables, and below were scent packets and diffusers and
sponges and soda-water syphons and such-like things. Only in the middle
there was a rubricated card, very neatly painted by hand, with these
words—
Buy Ponderevo’s Cough Linctus _now_.
NOW!
WHY?
Twopence Cheaper than in Winter.
You Store Apples! why not the Medicine
You are Bound to Need?
in which appeal I was to recognise presently my uncle’s distinctive
note.
My uncle’s face appeared above a card of infant’s comforters in the
glass pane of the door. I perceived his eyes were brown, and that his
glasses creased his nose. It was manifest he did not know us from Adam.
A stare of scrutiny allowed an expression of commercial deference to
appear in front of it, and my uncle flung open the door.
“You don’t know me?” panted my mother.
My uncle would not own he did not, but his curiosity was manifest. My
mother sat down on one of the little chairs before the soap and patent
medicine-piled counter, and her lips opened and closed.
“A glass of water, madam,” said my uncle, waved his hand in a sort of
curve and shot away.
My mother drank the water and spoke. “That boy,” she said, “takes after
his father. He grows more like him every day.... And so I have brought
him to you.”
“His father, madam?”
“George.”
For a moment the chemist was still at a loss. He stood behind the
counter with the glass my mother had returned to him in his hand. Then
comprehension grew.
“By Gosh!” he said. “Lord!” he cried. His glasses fell off. He
disappeared replacing them, behind a pile of boxed-up bottles of blood
mixture. “Eleven thousand virgins!” I heard him cry. The glass was
banged down. “O-ri-ental Gums!”
He shot away out of the shop through some masked door. One heard his
voice. “Susan! Susan!”
Then he reappeared with an extended hand. “Well, how are you?” he said.
“I was never so surprised in my life. Fancy!... _You!_”
He shook my mother’s impassive hand and then mine very warmly holding
his glasses on with his left forefinger.
“Come right in!” he cried—“come right in! Better late than never!” and
led the way into the parlour behind the shop.
After Bladesover that apartment struck me as stuffy and petty, but it
was very comfortable in comparison with the Frapp living-room. It had a
faint, disintegrating smell of meals about it, and my most immediate
impression was of the remarkable fact that something was hung about or
wrapped round or draped over everything. There was bright-patterned
muslin round the gas-bracket in the middle of the room, round the
mirror over the mantel, stuff with ball-fringe along the mantel and
casing in the fireplace,—I first saw ball-fringe here—and even the lamp
on the little bureau wore a shade like a large muslin hat. The
table-cloth had ball-fringe and so had the window curtains, and the
carpet was a bed of roses. There were little cupboards on either side
of the fireplace, and in the recesses, ill-made shelves packed with
books, and enriched with pinked American cloth. There was a dictionary
lying face downward on the table, and the open bureau was littered with
foolscap paper and the evidences of recently abandoned toil. My eye
caught “The Ponderevo Patent Flat, a Machine you can Live in,” written
in large firm letters. My uncle opened a little door like a cupboard
door in the corner of this room, and revealed the narrowest twist of
staircase I had ever set eyes upon. “Susan!” he bawled again. “Wantje.
Some one to see you. Surprisin’.”
There came an inaudible reply, and a sudden loud bump over our heads as
of some article of domestic utility pettishly flung aside, then the
cautious steps of someone descending the twist, and then my aunt
appeared in the doorway with her hand upon the jamb.
“It’s Aunt Ponderevo,” cried my uncle. “George’s wife—and she’s brought
over her son!” His eye roamed about the room. He darted to the bureau
with a sudden impulse, and turned the sheet about the patent flat face
down. Then he waved his glasses at us, “You know, Susan, my elder
brother George. I told you about ’im lots of times.”
He fretted across to the hearthrug and took up a position there,
replaced his glasses and coughed.
My aunt Susan seemed to be taking it in. She was then rather a pretty
slender woman of twenty-three or four, I suppose, and I remember being
struck by the blueness of her eyes and the clear freshness of her
complexion. She had little features, a button nose, a pretty chin and a
long graceful neck that stuck out of her pale blue cotton morning
dress. There was a look of half-assumed perplexity on her face, a
little quizzical wrinkle of the brow that suggested a faintly amused
attempt to follow my uncle’s mental operations, a vain attempt and a
certain hopelessness that had in succession become habitual. She seemed
to be saying, “Oh Lord! What’s he giving me _this_ time?” And as came
to know her better I detected, as a complication of her effort of
apprehension, a subsidiary riddle to “What’s he giving me?” and that
was—to borrow a phrase from my schoolboy language “Is it keeps?” She
looked at my mother and me, and back to her husband again.
“You know,” he said. “George.”
“Well,” she said to my mother, descending the last three steps of the
staircase and holding out her hand! “you’re welcome. Though it’s a
surprise.... I can’t ask you to _have_ anything, I’m afraid, for there
isn’t anything in the house.” She smiled, and looked at her husband
banteringly. “Unless he makes up something with his old chemicals,
which he’s quite equal to doing.”
My mother shook hands stiffly, and told me to kiss my aunt....
“Well, let’s all sit down,” said my uncle, suddenly whistling through
his clenched teeth, and briskly rubbing his hands together. He put up a
chair for my mother, raised the blind of the little window, lowered it
again, and returned to his hearthrug. “I’m sure,” he said, as one who
decides, “I’m very glad to see you.”
V
As they talked I gave my attention pretty exclusively to my uncle.
I noted him in great detail. I remember now his partially unbuttoned
waistcoat, as though something had occurred to distract him as he did
it up, and a little cut upon his chin. I liked a certain humour in his
eyes. I watched, too, with the fascination that things have for an
observant boy, the play of his lips—they were a little oblique, and
there was something “slipshod,” if one may strain a word so far, about
his mouth, so that he lisped and sibilated ever and again and the
coming and going of a curious expression, triumphant in quality it was,
upon his face as he talked. He fingered his glasses, which did not seem
to fit his nose, fretted with things in his waistcoat pockets or put
his hands behind him, looked over our heads, and ever and again rose to
his toes and dropped back on his heels. He had a way of drawing air in
at times through his teeth that gave a whispering zest to his speech
It’s a sound I can only represent as a soft Zzzz.
He did most of the talking. My mother repeated what she had already
said in the shop, “I have brought George over to you,” and then
desisted for a time from the real business in hand. “You find this a
comfortable house?” she asked; and this being affirmed: “It looks—very
convenient.... Not too big to be a trouble—no. You like Wimblehurst, I
suppose?”
My uncle retorted with some inquiries about the great people of
Bladesover, and my mother answered in the character of a personal
friend of Lady Drew’s. The talk hung for a time, and then my uncle
embarked upon a dissertation upon Wimblehurst.
“This place,” he began, “isn’t of course quite the place I ought to be
in.”
My mother nodded as though she had expected that.
“It gives me no Scope,” he went on. “It’s dead-and-alive. Nothing
happens.”
“He’s always wanting something to happen,” said my aunt Susan. “Some
day he’ll get a shower of things and they’ll be too much for him.”
“Not they,” said my uncle, buoyantly.
“Do you find business—slack?” asked my mother.
“Oh! one rubs along. But there’s no Development—no growth. They just
come along here and buy pills when they want ’em—and a horseball or
such. They’ve got to be ill before there’s a prescription. That sort
they are. You can’t get ’em to launch out, you can’t get ’em to take up
anything new. For instance, I’ve been trying lately—induce them to buy
their medicines in advance, and in larger quantities. But they won’t
look for it! Then I tried to float a little notion of mine, sort of an
insurance scheme for colds; you pay so much a week, and when you’ve got
a cold you get a bottle of Cough Linctus so long as you can produce a
substantial sniff. See? But Lord! they’ve no capacity for ideas, they
don’t catch on; no Jump about the place, no Life. Live!—they trickle,
and what one has to do here is to trickle too—Zzzz.”
“Ah!” said my mother.
“It doesn’t suit me,” said my uncle. “I’m the cascading sort.”
“George was that,” said my mother after a pondering moment.
My aunt Susan took up the parable with an affectionate glance at her
husband.
“He’s always trying to make his old business jump,” she said. “Always
putting fresh cards in the window, or getting up to something. You’d
hardly believe. It makes ME jump sometimes.”
“But it does no good,” said my uncle.
“It does no good,” said his wife. “It’s not his miloo...”
Presently they came upon a wide pause.
From the beginning of their conversation there had been the promise of
this pause, and I pricked my ears. I knew perfectly what was bound to
come; they were going to talk of my father. I was enormously
strengthened in my persuasion when I found my mother’s eyes resting
thoughtfully upon me in the silence, and than my uncle looked at me and
then my aunt. I struggled unavailingly to produce an expression of meek
stupidity.
“I think,” said my uncle, “that George will find it more amusing to
have a turn in the market-place than to sit here talking with us.
There’s a pair of stocks there, George—very interesting. Old-fashioned
stocks.”
“I don’t mind sitting here,” I said.
My uncle rose and in the most friendly way led me through the shop. He
stood on his doorstep and jerked amiable directions to me.
“Ain’t it sleepy, George, eh? There’s the butcher’s dog over there,
asleep in the road-half an hour from midday! If the last Trump sounded
I don’t believe it would wake. Nobody would wake! The chaps up there in
the churchyard—they’d just turn over and say: ‘Naar—you don’t catch us,
you don’t! See?’.... Well, you’ll find the stocks just round that
corner.”
He watched me out of sight.
So I never heard what they said about my father after all.