‘Why, Sam! Sam, dear, Sam darling, mother’s own own!’ she cried, ‘what is the matter? Why are you shutting your eyes, Sammie?’
‘Oh mother, if only I could never never see myself again!’ he replied, one solitary tear coursing down his face in the shadow of the very organ that had caused him such heartbreak.
Mrs Such, with bursting heart, at once hurried downstairs and sent off there and then, a letter to Sam’s schoolmistress, mentioning by name all the little boys who had treated her son so ill.
Now Miss Moss had only with the utmost reluctance agreed to accept Sam as a pupil at all. For Mrs Such, almost at her wits’ end to preserve her secret and Sam’s nose, had made such absurd conditions. He was never to attend school on days when the sun was shining. He was to be kept at home during the months of May, June, July, August and September. In winter he was never to sit within six paces of the fire. And whenever the temperature of the schoolroom rose above 62° he was to sit in the passage. All this was so fussy that even before his mother’s letter came, Miss Moss was doubtful if Sam was worth his fees. The letter decided the matter.
‘Dear Mrs Such,’ was her reply, ‘I regret to hear of the behaviour of one or two of my pupils this morning. There runs an old proverb, however: “There is no smoke without a fire”. There are, too, black sheep in every school, however well conducted it may be, as there are also in some families. I gather – though no doubt your son never intended it – that Samuel himself was not without blame in the matter. Every new pupil has to endure a little teasing; every popular pupil soon wins an endearing nickname. Little Hubert Macnaughten, for example, the son of our late Mayor, is called “Carrots”. Harold Simpkins, whose uncle is a lawyer, is known as “Simmy”, and little Solomon Abrams, whose father, I believe, is a neighbour of your own, has for patronymic the peculiar name of “Rags and Bones”. Why, then, little Samuel should have attempted to kick and scratch and even to bite some of his class-mates simply because they asked him questions about his nose (a feature for which he at least is in no way responsible), I fail to understand.
‘He is excessively backward, though not, I think, a hopelessly stupid boy, and he is handicapped by having been kept so much at home. He has the pallid waxen appearance of a child who hasn’t enough fresh air, and I am a great believer in air. Samuel cannot be well to be such a weeper. It is the airless boy who is the tell-tale-tit.
‘I feel in the circumstances that a boarding-school would be a more fitting outlet for his temperament, and as he has spent only a single morning with us I am charging only one half-term’s fees.
‘Believe me; Yours faithfully,
‘HANNAH MOSS.’
Mr Such – his face a vivid purple – answered this letter himself. He stayed up till long after midnight doing so. But Miss Moss was experienced in the ways of parents, cashed Mr Such’s cheque, and took no further notice.
Sam’s three brief hours at school, then, served only to make his existence more secluded than ever. Nevertheless he gained in some respects what the other pupils of Miss Moss’s day-school may have missed. Every evening, as soon as the heats of the day were over, he would accompany his mother, arm in arm, on a long gentle walk, during which they talked happily together about everything under the sun – the sun of which our Sam was to see so little in this world. But there never were two more loving companions – walking together there. They might have been sweethearts.
As for reading, the profits of Mr Such’s haberdashery business could hardly keep pace with Sam’s hunger for books. Before he was eleven he had read and all but digested the whole of the works of Thomas Babington Macaulay, Sir Walter Scott, Dr Johnson, Joseph Addison, William Paley, and most of William Shakespeare. He had long known Little by Little and Brewer’s Guide to Knowledge almost by heart. He considered what he had seen of such writers as Ainsworth and Henty and Kingston and Ballantyne and Cooper hardly worth serious notice. By thirteen he had taught himself enough Latin to read Caesar in the original and had mastered a few words of Hebrew, and he was so clever at sums that he helped his mother with her accounts, and his father with his ledgers, and could tell how many yards of calico at 4¾d. you could get for £1 16s. 9d., while most of his customers were getting out a pencil and a piece of paper.
In reading too the plays of William Shakespeare he had discovered all by himself that the words sound very much better if they are said aloud. And, better still, if one has an audience. For this reason he delighted in creeping down to the shop after closing hours. With the immense blue calico blinds drawn down over the sheeted glass, he would unfasten the little door by which Mr Hopper sidled in when he dressed the windows, and standing with his back to the street outside, would march up and down as far as the space permitted, taking the parts now of Hamlet, now of Othello and now even of Sir John Falstaff or King Lear, while the staring wax dummies in their doeskin, broadcloth, serge and cashmere gazed unmovedly on.
Their smirking glossy faces, it is true, were at best not very expressive, and at worst were as vacant as a mangel-wurzel or a pumpkin. Nor had they any hands, poor things, with which to applaud. But what mattered such trifles to Sam? If his nose was of wax, he could at least to that extent share his sympathy with creatures made wholly of that substance. And never having tasted the flatteries of the public, he never so much as noticed the profound hush that greeted even his wildest sallies.
What cared Sam indeed? ‘My kingdom for a horse!’ he would cry at the top of his voice, lifting his long-nosed face into the dusky air, and stalking up and down with humped-up shoulders and a scowl far more cruelly ferocious than could ever have distorted the royal countenance of Richard Crookback. He was at least as happy with his father’s secret dim-lit shopfront for stage and his dummies for audience as ever Edmund Kean or David Garrick had been on theirs, with all the world of rank and fashion in the stalls and boxes.
And his father and mother, having crept on tiptoe into the inner recesses of the shop, or stooping behind the counter, would, all unbeknown to himself, listen enthralled to the marvellous speeches flowing from his lips, and watch every strutting pace and animated gesture; convinced that their son was a genius of the first water.
Not that Mr and Mrs Such, even if he had tried to persuade them, would ever have consented to Sam’s becoming an actor. Even if they had approved of miming and mummery, there was the heated air, the paint, the footlights to consider. One single torrid midnight hour of such an existence might wreck all the loving care they had lavished on him since his infancy.
Sam indeed never did become an actor. When the saddest days of his life overtook him; when, having lost his dear father and mother he became an orphan, he was thirty-five, and though his rather lank hair was still as black as a raven’s wing against the intense pallor of his face, he looked to be a good deal older.
He was tall but very narrow at the shoulders. Like his father, he usually attired himself in a long black frock-coat and (unlike his father) in quiet-patterned trousers. With one sweeping lock of ink-black hair descending on each side of his high rounded forehead, he might have been taken for a musician or a poet or a statesman or a barber.
Indeed in looks and deportment he in many respects resembled Mr Cinquevalli, the juggler, and that famous fiddler, Signor Niccolo Paganini.
In figure he was singularly elegant and gentlemanly and, being accustomed to dark rooms (and he could read even moderate-sized print by starlight), his eyes had an unusual brilliance. His piercing glance darted to and fro when he talked even to himself, and his nose, now come to its fullest maturity, was a feature which (if any chance had been given of observing it) not even the most careless passer-by could fail to mark or to respect. It would at any rate have passed even in the most genteel conversazione or soirée without suspicion.
If only his Aunt Dorinda could have seen him now! Not for a moment would she have regretted that her nephew had not been brought up in full daylight or in the common sheepish fashion. He seldom suffered from any ailment exce
pt a slight nervous cough, due to breathing through his mouth, and an occasional twinge of neuralgia between his eyes. He had the most modest of appetites, and perhaps for this reason consisted (though maybe with one trifling exception) of skin and bone. But these were skin and bone of the finest quality.
His father had all his life been a prudent and sagacious haberdasher, and so had saved a comfortable little competence from the profits of his business. Sam inherited every penny of it. He sold the shop, he sold the business. He allowed Mr Hopper’s widow two guineas a week, and paid her pigtailed daughter’s fees for lessons on the pianoforte at the Royal Academy of Music. He bestowed on George a round £100 down – and then made it guineas. He retired to a small villa on the outskirts of the town, furnished it by night, and settled down as a private – a very private – citizen.
Books were still his hobby. In a snug little attic at the top of his villa he put up a quantity of shelves (apart from more substantial book-cases), and on these he displayed his library. There were considerably more than seven hundred books in the neat catalogue he compiled, the authors in red ink, the titles in black. Most of his treasures were in the brightest of cloth bindings, some were in calf, mottled or plain, and a few even in vellum and morocco. Books, indeed, were all but his only company, for he had very few acquaintances and not one intimate friend.
He was less sensitive now about his little secret. But never having enjoyed any society but that of his father and mother, their old servant, the two shop-assistants, and his four aunts, he was unlikely to miss it now. He realized that his nose had cut him off from many of the interests and pleasures which other haberdashers’ sons enjoy. Unlike his father, for example, he would never have a little Sammie Wax-Nose of his own. On the other hand, this unfortunate organ had brought him delights which many people miss altogether – solitude and his own company (of which he never wearied), his play-acting and his books. He taught himself other little amusements – to saw out a pretty air or two on the fiddle, and to jig for indoor exercise to his own whistling. He kept a cat of the name of Tom, and he delighted in modelling little pots and dishes and even faces in clay which he dug up from a foot or two below the surface of his small backyard.
One other hobby was Sam’s. Above his chimneypiece was displayed a collection of casts and models of all the world’s most famous noses. If the price was within his means he could not resist buying any head or bust or torso, whether in stone or wood or bronze or earthenware, the midmost feature of which was of an unusual size, shape or appearance. So, too, with engravings, etchings, mezzotints; for oil he could not afford. The dealers in such things sent him their catalogues. They knew his fancy, and kept him well supplied. And since, as is well known, the majority of the great men in history have been finished off with unusual noses, this end-side of his attic-library was a perfect hornet’s-nest of these organs.
By far the larger number of them were high-arched, or long, or massive, or aquiline, or hooked, or noble, or haughty, or formidable, or indomitable noses. There were a few others – delicate, fastidious, feminine, witty, neat, eloquent, or jimp. Noses of ladies Sam had no interest in. Besides the rest, he possessed a plaster-cast or two – that of Mr Sayers, the prize-fighter, for example, that of Socrates, the philosopher, and that of Mr Thackeray, the author – whose noses had by some mischance been irreparably broken at some crisis in their careers. He prized these specimens by no means the least, realizing what a tragedy such an event must have meant to their owners and their friends – a tragedy such as he himself had escaped solely by keeping well out of the summer sun and at a stoical distance from the winter fire.
Strangely enough, Sam had been unable to procure a single specimen of a nose which, like his own, as he supposed, consisted solely of some foreign material – some material, that is, other than skin, gristle and bone – such as wood or marble or cork or china, or – above all – wax. Not that Sam now suffered much from his own drawback, or even thought about it. He would stalk up and down his small library, reciting to a far more intelligent-looking audience than in his young days his father’s shop-window had been able to display, his favourite passages from Shakespeare, from the poets, even from Seneca, even from Molière, whom, by reason of some little freak of mind, it was his custom to think of only by his actual name – Jean Baptiste Poquelin.
Sam seldom now indulged in any fire at all, even in the coldest weather, except in the kitchen. There he cooked his frugal but tasty meals in a mask he had made out of layers of paper, by steeping them in water and moulding them with his fingers over his face. He was as neat as an old maid. He could have shaved in his frying-pan; and his brass candlesticks were so brightly burnished he hardly needed a candle. These candlesticks, indeed, were the unfailing admiration of his friend, Mr John Jones, the Sweep – for Sam was no respecter of persons.
Mr Jones was a man of the world. He went about in the early hours in houses great and small – boudoir and banqueting chamber, attic and pantry, and maybe because of his black face was less noticeable than most men. Even if he had been by nature as silent and taciturn as he was hoarse by trade; even if he had had no tales to tell about the rich and the gentry, and of the strange things he had found hidden away in his chimneys – mummies and bags of money and wigs and birds’ bones and magpies’ hoards, Sam would have delighted in his company. For Sam had an inexhaustible horror of fire. He would wake yelling Fire! He would dream he was a tallow candle – and alight; that he was all of wax – and shut in an oven!
Nothing pleased him better than to hear Mr Jones’s broom rattling its way up his empty chimney, and to hear its faint plff as it issued into the sky. Mr Jones, that is, meant safety to Sam and to Sam’s nose. He came often; did little; stayed long; and though Sam made a point of concealing his cooking-mask from observation, he would talk with Mr Jones – if not exactly nez-à-nez – at least face to face, while he drank his glass of ale and duskily recounted what the World was now at. Mr Jones never had the smallest suspicion or mistrust of Sam’s nose. He thought him a quiet, liberal gentleman, and would have cleaned his chimneys three times a day if Sam’s anxieties against fire had carried him to lengths so extreme.
Sam, indeed, was the gayest and cheerfullest of beings when safe within his own walls; sprightly and nimble, in spite of his long black coat and rather melancholy visage; and especially when with his cat, Tom, for company, he would sit for a full hour or more over his supper talking now to this unanswering yet not irresponsive animal, now to himself.
No less contented was he when, of mornings, out of sight of prying eyes, his rooms swept, his bed made, his books and noses dusted, he could dream at ease over his Keats or Shelley, his Smiles or his Felicia Hemans; sit scraping at his fiddle; or – attired in a handsome Paisley-patterned dressing-gown presented to him on his twenty-first birthday by his wine-merchant godfather, Mr Tobias Slant – once more forget himself and his queer fate by feigning in fancy to be the sorrowful Lear, the doubtful Hamlet, dreadful Prospero in his enchanted island, or young Orlando under the green beeches in the forest of Arden.
When the heat and curiosity of the daytime kept him indoors, he would stand for an hour at a time, stock still, his face edged forward – peering out between the curtains from so far within the room that not a bee at the window could have seen him. Thence he would stare into the street. And though he knew so few human creatures to talk to, a wonderful affection grew up in Sam for all kinds of people, young, old, prosperous, poor, odd, ugly, lovely and sad, who had never so much as dreamed of his existence; though he himself had watched their comings and goings, and their to’s and fro’s, with the closest heed and with unwearying interest again and again. He had discovered, too, a little flaw in one of the panes of his window which magnified all that he saw through it. And he dearly liked to kneel down when a stranger was passing so that he could thus see that stranger’s nose – immensely elongated or broadened out. It amused and comforted him.
There wasn’t a four-footed beast eithe
r, frequenting his parts of the town, that Sam in this window-gazing had not come to know by sight, if not by name. Indeed, he gave them names of his own – ‘Ah, here comes Rover!’ or ‘Softly now, Slyboots!’ or ‘Now’s your chance, Scuttletail!’ – and would smile and even laugh out at their ways and customs and antics. He would dearly like to have kept a cockatoo or even a canary: but then, there was Tom to consider; and besides, he might in his affection one day approach his face too close to the bars, and beaks peck! When the shades of dusk were fallen, unless the night were dangerously sultry and torrid, Sam would venture out on his daily walk, muffled up to the eyes in winter in a sombre comforter, and in late spring and autumn in one that had belonged to his grandmother Such, made of Spitalfields silk. With hands thrust deep into the pockets of his skimpy overcoat, in his patent-leather shoes, he would stalk in rapture through the lamplit streets, drinking in the romance of night, muttering over long fragments of the books he loved best, pausing to hearken after squawking owl or squeaking bat, at ease with himself, his retiring and unknown neighbours, the world, and the universe.
What mattered it to Sam no human ear could share these transports? He had for company the peering moon, the midnight stars, the wandering planets; and now and then for music the flutes and fiddles of a distant festivity, or maybe a May-time nightingale or a churring nightjar. But however late the hour his last duty was never scamped. With a partridge feather broom he carefully dusted every bust and nose that was his before retiring in peace and blessing to his truckle bed.
How strange, Sam would think to himself at such moments, are the caprices of fortune! Even in the history of our own small island there are heroes and poets by the score and statesmen by the hundred. And yet how few of their famous or notorious noses are to be seen in our picture-shops. Where is King Alfred’s? Where the Lion-hearted’s? Where valiant Drake’s, unhappy Chatterton’s, wild Turpin’s? Where else but in our Wax-works! It was a jest after Sam’s heart. He roared with laughter whenever it recurred to him.
Short Stories for Children Page 15