“It’s gone upstairs!” he cried, presently, for the information of anybody within hearing; which was nobody.
For the whistle was attracting stragglers to the house where its possessor, with distended countenance, was blowing it from the first-floor window, and Mr. Dowdall, in the doorway of a neighbor opposite, was dispatching a stream of telegrams to Padgebury, like minute-guns.
And in the midst of all this arrived Padgebury’s van, with the great Padgebury himself and half a dozen stalwart retainers, and much tackle of iron and rope. Padgebury had started out immediately on the report of his canary-tamer, and so had escaped the fire of telegrams which Mr. Dowdall was still maintaining.
The wild beast dealer shook his head when he learned the state of affairs. “You didn’t say he was loose in the house when you offered to sell him,” he observed, solemnly.
“Well, I was thinking of allowing a discount in consideration of that,” replied Mr. Dowdall; “a moderate discount.”
Padgebury shook his head again. “In our trade,” he said, “you’ll find there’s a deal of difference between a loose tiger and one in a cage. Loose tigers don’t command any price to speak of. There’s no demand for ‘em.”
Nevertheless, he consented to reconnoitre, with a view to securing Mr. Dowdall’s specimen, on the understanding that if no deal resulted he should charge for his services. And so, slowly, with many precautions, the front door was opened, and Padgebury and his staff, listening anxiously, approached the stairs a few steps at a time.
After a pause of careful peeping Padgebury, greatly daring, crept up the stairs and listened on the landing. Then he beckoned silently to his men, who followed with as little noise as possible, and found their principal pointing significantly at a bedroom door, standing ajar, from beyond which came distinct sounds of heavy breathing.
The men gathered on the landing, awaiting orders. And then suddenly there arose from within the room the sound of a loud, horrible yawn, and following that, in a thick but cheerful voice, the chorus —
“Put me among the girrls!. Put me among the girrls!. Do me a favor, do!. I’ll do the same for you,. If you’ll put—”
Padgebury bounced into the room, and the chorus broke off; and his men, crowding behind him, saw the tiger lying at length on the bed, fur and teeth and whiskers complete, with a decanter hugged under one paw.
“Whirroo!” cried the tiger. “Get out! ’Tis enough to give a man the palpitations to have yez jumpin’ out av nowhere like that, an ugly crowd! An’ me that unwell an’ all! Get out wid yez!”
Padgebury turned one glance of amazement on his staff, and then, being a prompt man, seized the tiger by the jaw, forced it open, and peered into the cavernous skull. “Why, I believe it’s Lanigan!” he said.
“What, Misther Padgebury!” cried the tiger. “’Tis the blessin’ av the wurrld to see ye, Misther Padgebury. Oh, Mr. Padgebury, ’tis moighty lonely I am! Nobody loves me in this — this — this here outrajis integument. They trate me like a leper; an’ ’tis drouthy work, growlin’ like a tiger two days together, an’ moighty poor conversation, wid no provisions but wan bag av biscuits. Misther Padgebury, is all av ‘em you, or is there a dirthy crowd av ruffins in this room?”
“There’s enough of us here to see you safely to the police-station, anyhow,” answered Padgebury, grimly. “What’s this game?”
“Misther Padgebury, dear, if ye shpake to me like that I’ll cry like a babby, an’ me that broken-hearted too. Take a drop from the decanther— ’tis good stuff in this house. An’ where’s that gallows-hoppin’ thief, Filer?”
“Filer? I don’t know.”
“Filer’s Circus started for the Continent the day afore yesterday, so I heard,” observed one of Padgebury’s men.
“What?” wailed the tiger. “The day before yesterday? Then I’m robbed to the skin an’ bones av me! Sivin months have I been doin’ the wrestlin’ tiger an’ makin’ the fortune av the show, an’ not two months’ pay have I got out av it! An’ now he’s given me the shake afther all! The curse o’ the wurrld on the ugly head av him! I’ll tell ye, Misther Padgebury. The wrestling tiger was the only thing that brought the show a pinny, though ’tis meself that says ut. Night afther night I towld Filer I’d give the swindle away in the middle av the show if I didn’t get my money, an’ night afther night he blarneyed me into goin’ through once more. Ye see, we’d thumpin’ thick bars to the cage, an’ ’twasn’t likely anybody not b’longing to the show was comin’ investigatin’ too close, let alone goin’ wrestlin’ with a tiger; so we faced it out aisy enough till I threatened, an’ thin Filer blarneyed me. But at last I’d be blarneyed no more, an’ I got a rale paper summons for him; an’ thin says Filer, frightened by the paper summons; ‘I’m at the bottom av my finances, Lanigan, me boy, an’ what I haven’t got I can’t pay. But we’ll raise some,’ says he, ‘if ye’ll tear up that nasty summons an’ do as I tell ye. Now, there’s a troublesome ould parrty as calls himself a shareholder,’ says he, ‘an’ I’ll put ye in a close-nailed case and sind ye to him. An’ I’ll be along there as soon as you will an’ sooner,’ says Filer, ‘bekase I’ll go by passenger thrain an’ you by goods. An’ whin the ould man’s terrified into fits with havin’ a rampin’, ragin’ tiger brought to his peaceful risidence, why, I’ll get him to pay a call on his shares on conditions av takin’ you away again. Thin,’ says Filer, ‘I’ll pay every cint av your money and a present to the top av it!’ Misther Padgebury, I did ut; an’ afther that niver again ask me to be a tiger, nor a package on any goods thrain! I’m bruised all over me like a toad, and the lovely featherbed itself is hard to me bones.”
“Well,” remarked Padgebury, “you don’t seem to have done much good for yourself since you left me, and you’re in a bigger scrape now than ever. There’s Mr. Dowdall and a policeman at the front door.”
“Misther Dowdall’s a jintleman,” said the tiger. “He’s the only man that iver gave me whisky out av a garden squirrt. Plensheous whisky. It was the whisky, an’ nothing but ut, that gave me the courage to open the padlock and come to look for some more. Give my compliments to Misther Dowdall an’ tell him he’s a betther man than his partner, an’ I’d rather dale with him. The firrm owes me thirty-wan pound ten an’ six.”
And the tiger pulled its mouth open with its right paw, and thrust the neck of the decanter once again between the cruel fangs.
THE ABSENT THREE
THERE was never a more popular man in Essex than Dan Fisk, whom I have heard called the biggest liar in the county. But that was said in the old days of innocence, when there were no newly built parts, where liars now flourish exceedingly among the other improvements.
If Dan were a liar (a thing I expressly decline to admit), he had the excuse — the justification, rather — of the artist. Thick and round of body, with a face whereon a vast grin and a dazzling squint perpetually struggled for mastery, Dan was a humorist, first and Iast. A solemn person was Dan Fisk’s natural prey, and with subtle art and unchanging feature Dan would urge his solemnity over the edge of unseemliness into the abysm of the ridiculous; and any archer of the long-bow found in Dan an ever-ready abettor and puller of the unconscious leg.
Dan is gathered to his fathers long since, and so long that his tombstone has acquired a rollicking inclination to the left, and moss and weather have so painted it that the fat cherub’s face that overlooks the inscription meets the gaze with a permanent wink; which is the properest accident in the world, and exactly as Dan Fisk would have had it.
He was a sober man, yet at this distance of time I can never call up the memory of his jolly face without a background from the parlor of the Castle Inn; either the enormous geraniums that stood in the bow-window at the front, or the settle in the corner, or the wide fireplace and its blazing embers, stuck with black extinguisher-shaped beer-warmers. And it was a very good background, too, being also excellently suitable to Sam Prentice, Roboshobery Dove, and Abel Pennyfather, with his big walking-s
tick made out of a thistle-stem from Burton’s farm; the tale whereof Abel Pennyfather told nightly in this place, beginning with a mighty bang of the stick itself on the table, and a challenge to everybody to guess what the timber was.
It was a challenge that nobody accepted, well known as the stick and its story were. For Abel Pennyfather instantly began to shout the tale over again in the voice of a contentious bull, so that every other sound was drowned till the tale was told.
“Ha! ha!” Abel concluded on one such night; “‘How d’ye like my walkin’-stick?’ says I. ‘fine bit o’ timber, ben’t it? Much obliged to ye for it,’ I says. ‘Got it out of a wheatfield o’ yourn, an’ left plenty more behind. Why don’t ye grow walkin’-sticks for reg’lar crop?’ Lord, that mad he were!”
And with that Abel Pennyfather took a vast drink from the fullest mug on the table, which chanced to be the mug of Banham the carrier.
Banham stared at Pennyfather and the mugs, and began: “Why, ben’t that—”
“Better sarve him out next time,” observed Dan Fisk, squinting into Abel Pennyfather’s own mug. “This ain’t wuth reachin’ for.”
“Why,” cried Abel, with wide eyes, “I han’t a-drunk o’ the wrong mug, hey I? Well, well, now, ’tis wonnerful how absent I be, a-thinkin’!”
“Wonnerful deep thinkin’ it be, too,” pursued Dan Fisk, transferring his squint to the outraged mug, and tilting it the better to peep. “Wonnerful deep. Nothin’ could make it deeper but a bigger mug.”
“But ’tis my way, neighbors,” Pennyfather went on loftily. “You might scarce believe as I walked past my own gate the other day, think-in’ hard about a sick cow. Ay, an’ when I remembered, an’ turned back, danged if I den’t get a-thinkin’ agen, an’ walk past the gate a second time, just as far as fust. Danged if I den’t!”
“If I couldn’t shorten my thoughts, I’d widen the gate,” commented Dan. “Ben’t proper to hey ordinary furniture for such an extraordinary man.”
Sarcasm was not a thing that Abel Penny-father understood. “’Tis like not,” he replied, with plain gratification. “And anyhow, I count I can claim there ben’t so absent a man as me, one time or another, no, not in arl Essex.”
For it was a failing of Abel Pennyfather to claim pre-eminence, at the top of a very large voice, in anything whatsoever that might come under discussion in his presence — anything in the world, even if it were only bunions.
“Ah,” Dan Fisk replied with a shake of the head and an almost imperceptible brightening of the squint, “you be absent-minded enough, I make no doubt. I don’t call to memory many with mind more absent from their heads than you, sarten to say.”
“No, not one, I say,” Abel pursued, with growing pride. “Never one in arl Essex.”
“Ah, but you can be beat. There’s the three Brewitts.”
“I dunno no Brewitts, but I uphold they ben’t a touch to me. Why, I tell ‘ee, t’other day, an’ none so long ago neither, I sat an’ made up my market cipherin’ with my lighted pipe, a-smokin’ my pencil all the time. Ah, I did that!”
“‘Twere a true notable feat, that, no doubt, but it were only once. Now, oad Tom Brewitt, he never lit a candle but what he hulled it out o’ winder and set up the match to read by.”
“Allus did it?”
“Ay, allus. Oad Sim Cloyse paid a boy two shillun a week to sit outside of evenings an’’ pick up candles. Rare eye to business had oad Sim Cloyse.”
“That there’s a yarn. Not that it’s anythin’ particular. I’ve a-done many a more highly absent-minded thing myself, so I don’t count it much. But I never heard o’ that Tom Brewitt. Who were he?”
“Tom Brewitt? Why, he were Bob Brewitt’s brother, surely.”
“Well, an’ who were Bob? I s’pose you’ll say he were Tom’s brother?”
“No,” Dan replied; “that wouldn’t be a straightforard answer. Bob were brother to Sam, an’ Sam were brother to both on ‘em. You may disbelieve in Tom by hisself, an’ ’tis arl a possibility you might cast doubts on Bob; but you can’t get away with Tom, Bob, and Sam together; ‘taren’t logic.”
“’Tis a true word, an’ a very reasonable argyment,” observed Banham the carrier, with a judicial shake of the head. And the company murmured agreement.
Abel Pennyfather stared blankly for five seconds. Then he said: “Well, well, I’m not sayin’ ‘taren’t. I only said I never heared tell on ‘em. An’ I don’t think so overmuch of Tom Brewitt’s absent-minded doin’s, nayther.”
“There again,” Dan went on, “you mightn’t think much of Tom’s absent-mindedness, an’ maybe you might doubt the quality of Bob’s; but when you come to Sam’s, an’ more especial when you come to Tom’s an’ Bob’s an’ Sam’s all together, then there aren’t no more argufyin’. They be too many for any argufyer.”
“Well, that may be,” persisted Abel Penny-father, “but I hoad a shillun, man for man, they den’t beat me. Now I tell ‘ee, when we putt the four-acre field down to grass, I were a-goin—”
“Did your absence o’ mind ever keep your sister an oad maid all her life?” demanded Dan.
“Why, no,” Abel admitted, “seein’ as you know she’s been married three times a’ready. But—”
“Then you’re beat,” interrupted Dan. “You’re beat all to crumbles, as anybody can tell you as knows the story o’ the three Brewitts an’ their sister Jane. An’ who don’t know that?”
It seemed that nobody knew it, a discovery whereat Dan expressed profound surprise. “Why,” he said, “the three Brewitts kep’ farm up there beyond Thundersley — I’ll call the very name to mind, presently, maybe — long enough ago. There was Tom, Bob, an’ Sam, like as I’ve told you. They was bachelors all, by reason of absence of mind. Tom forgot to go to church on his weddin’-day, and was clawed down the face an’ forsook for that reason. Bob was all arranged for, by the other party an’ her relations, but when they got him there he forgot to ask her the question, so the fam’lies was enemies henceforth, an’ his absence of mind saved him. Sam forgot about marryin’ altogether, an’ died at eighty-fower without having remembered it. Their sister Jane, she were a single woman at forty for a different reason. What prevented her weren’t so much the absence of her mind as the presence of her face. ‘Twere a face o’ vinegar, an’ no mistake.”
“Was it as ugly as yours, Dan?” Prentice asked, with much show of interest.
“Wuss than that, a mile,” Dan resumed, unperturbed. “‘Twere as bad as any man’s face in this here room, though you’d scarce believe it. ’Twould ha’ kep’ a regiment out o’ gunshot; and there’s no guessing how her brothers lived in the same house with it, ‘cept they were too absent-minded to notice. Little boys used to go the other way round to school for fear o’ seeing Jane Brewitt, and ‘twere said nothing could be made o’ the milk on that farm ‘cept cheese.”
“Talkin’ o’ cheese,” interposed Abel Pennyfather, “I’ve made as much as—”
“We won’t talk o’ cheese, then!” shouted Dan, and the company supported him with clamor sufficient to quell Abel. “We won’t talk o’ cheese, but come back to Jane Brewitt. She were a good enough housekeeper, spite of her face, an’ a good housekeeper were needful in a place with three sich moonin’ gapesters about. She were a good housekeeper, and, what with one thing an t’other, business were good an’ good again at Brewitts’; an’ Bob Brewitt, he had a safe let into his bedroom wall, and a good full cashbox was snug inside the safe. Why that should be few could understand, with three chaps as were like as not to go an’ plough a meadow ‘stead o’ mowin’ it, or sow a young wheatfield twice over with carrots. But so ’twas howsomedever, an’ ’tis like Jane had her share in keepin’ things square.
“But ugly as she were, and forty as she were, Jane were still the youngest o’ the family, an’ den’t forget to publish the fact abroad nayther, without goin’ into the ‘zact arithmetic o’ the years. An’ she wore a bonnet that made the church look like a penny show. An’
so at last what nobody expected came to pass, an’ a man went a-courting to Brewitts’; an’ not a blind man, nayther.
“He were so far from blind that folk swore he could see, quite distinct, through Brewitts’ brick wall and iron safe into the cashbox, afore he made up his mind to go a-courtin’ to Jane. ’Tis sarten he were more than half her age, but none so much more, if you den’t count the time he’d been in gaol. Bates were his name, an’ the poor friendless chap hadn’t a soul in arl Essex to say a good word for him, consekence of his havin’ lived in the county arl his life. ’Twasn’t that he ever took another man’s job away from him, either, for if there was one thing in the world he’d never take it was work.
“The three brothers weren’t so absent-minded as to overlook a thing like this, an’ they pitched Jim Bates out o’ doors reg’lar, whenever the sight of him reminded ‘em. But Jane, she stood up for him through thick an’ thin, as was natural. The more the folks were down on Bates the better she thought him, an’ as for him, the more he saw of the Brewitts’ house, and the more he heard of the cashbox, the deeper in love he got. But Tom and Bob, an’ Sam, they got so mighty objectionable that Jim Bates had to take to meetin’ Jane by dark in the lane, which had two advantages: first, the brothers couldn’t see him; an’ second, he couldn’t see Jane.
“Things got desprit. The brothers swore that if she were such a fool as to go to church with Jim Bates, she should take what belonged to her an’ no more; which, put in round numbers, was nothin’. But she was quite game for this, an’ she told Jim Bates as much, an’ openly admitted she was full aged an’ could do as she liked. But Jim Bates was that thoughtful he wouldn’t part she an’ the cashbox, an’ at last he persuaded her that all three should make a bolt together in the dogcart. ’Tis like she might have doubted about bringing the cashbox; but Jim Bates he told her it was good as hers, seein’ she’d kep’ house for her brothers so long, an’, rather than she should be done out of her rights, he’d take care of it himself.
Delphi Complete Works of Arthur Morrison Page 245