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by Walter De la Mare


  This lad in turn attracted the attention of a friend in the butchering line, and after a moment or two – gently at first under their breaths, but presently ever more and more openly they began to chaunt together:

  Here and there and everywhere,

  Nosey, Nosey, stand and stare!

  Somewhere, nowhere, everywhere,

  Nosey, Nosey, stand and stare!

  Night and morning, foul or fair,

  Tail in the dust, and head in the air,

  Stare! Stare! Stare! Stare!

  In a flash Sam had become eight again. In a flash he was back once more in the pepper-and-salts, the speckled straw hat and buttoned kid boots of his early childhood. For a while he was too much confused and overcome to move. Then he abruptly turned on his tormentors. When the Great Duke was out of favour with the fickle mob, they smashed his windows. When they repented and yelled with rapture to see him come riding home, he mutely shook his whip at the mended panes and rode on.

  Sam had as fine a profile as the great Duke, but was less of a philosopher. After all, the very nose which was the object of this ridicule was also a sign of a spirited nature. Brandishing his malacca cane in the air he gave a whoop and at once started in pursuit. The urchins fled – and fled in a direction in which Sam himself had never before ventured. In half-an-hour or so he found himself at length at his last puff – his quarry out of sight – on the very outskirts of the street in which lived who but his old enemy, his great-aunt Keren-Happuch!

  Sam was now a little beyond the town. It was quiet and green here, and, though the trees were leafless and the dahlias and Michaelmas daisies were long since over, a touch of frost in the air gave a lively sparkle to the cottage gardens, and the sun shone out like a red lantern in the rose of the west. If the errand-boys had at this moment reappeared they would have had even better cause than before to mock at their victim. For full five minutes at least Sam gazed up at the two simple words which had been painted on a board nailed to the nearest wall – Lovers’ Walk.

  A handsome prickly holly-tree grew at the street corner – crammed with berries. A robin, as if in imitation of a Christmas card, was whistling from its uppermost spray, and a hundred thoughts had meanwhile flitted through Sam’s odd mind. But though many of them were wistful, and tinged with regret, none was vindictive. For somehow his long years of seclusion, far from souring his nature, had left his inward temper queer but sweet.

  He thought again of his spinster Aunt Dorinda; of her sisters, Sarah, Dora and Isabella; of his father in his black coat and well-filled waistcoat, with that one long last lock of hair sleeked out over the bald expanse of his head. He thought of George and his chilblains, of cold-nosed Mr Hopper at the shirt-counter, and of Mr Hopper’s widow in her frilling and her weeds. And last he thought of his mother.

  Once, long ago, he had vowed he would revenge himself on the old woman who had so grieved that gentlest and most harmless of souls and led his own life so far astray. Just that one malignant couplet muttered into his mother’s ear – ‘though it grows where it grows, the brat has a wax nose’ – had certainly been the cause of extreme unhappiness. It had cost her son endless shame and vexation.

  And yet – well, time at last heals every wound which is not kept open by attention or hatred. And supposing – Sam thought – supposing if by accident he had never discovered the truth – what then?

  Most of all his other relatives were gone – Isabella had married a saddler and was now in New Zealand with a family of five little New Zealanders. Sarah had become a bonnet-maker in Birmingham. Dora was companion to the relict of a wealthy bead-manufacturer, and gay, high-spirited, sharp-tongued Dorinda was dead. How dismal a thing it would be if his great-aunt Keren-Happuch should die too, still believing that her lie had never been found out; still believing that she was responsible for her nephew’s long retirement from the world, his shyness, his seclusion, his solitude!

  Sam’s slow, deep-cut, peculiar smile stole once more over his features. He might, if he wished, look in and give the malignant old woman a piece of his mind. He might call a policeman and confront her with the Law! But, bless me, he could do better than that. And he knew how.

  With a hasty tap on the top of his silk-hat and a whisk of his cane, he at once turned homewards. If indeed he had at that moment met the fishmonger’s boy there is no doubt he would have given him – not a hiding, but – a shilling. For the one thing in his strange noddle just now was to do anybody, everybody, a good turn, even including his wicked old aunt.

  Now for some time past Sam had realized that his collection of famous nose-casts had somehow lost its old savour. Those old gentle reveries – feather-broom in hand – over the kindnesses which Providence had shown to other men’s physiognomies but had withheld from his own had for Sam lost their impulse. He hadn’t added a single new specimen – wood, brass, marble or alabaster – to his shelves since the 14th of October. His treasures had ceased to charm him. But they must now be worth a handsome sum.

  This sum proved to be not quite so handsome as Sam surmised. Still, when he had called in the Dealer in Antiques from whom he had purchased his finest examples of noble noses, and though he learned from him that nasal appendages of every kind, and even his own, were now out of fashion, the cheque the dealer gave in exchange for what he selected was at least a third as much as Sam had expended on them. ‘Why, sir,’ the hook-beaked creature lisped as he stuffed them into the old Gladstone bag he had brought with him, ‘fashion or no fashion, a nose is still a nose; and yet by any other name, as the poet says, ’twould smell as sweet.’

  Early the very next morning Sam visited his bank and converted the dealer’s cheque into gold. Two large canvas bags were barely capacious enough to contain it, and when Sam lifted them down from the zinc counter they were almost as much as he could carry.

  When, then, that same afternoon he turned once more towards Lovers’ Walk, bound for his great-aunt’s cottage, he had been compelled to leave his malacca cane behind. This deed of mercy was one that needed both hands. Fortunately, it was a Saturday, a day when errand-boys have little leisure for mocking at gentlemen with peculiar habits. Sam hastened along, stooping every now and then to rest his bags on the pavement awhile, while he sat and recovered his breath on any garden railing that afforded him a seat. The perspiration even on this frosty afternoon soon came trickling from under the brim of his high hat, and coursed its way down the deep furrows beneath his eyes. But an errand such as Sam’s is somehow pleasant going, even though one has blisters on one’s heels or a hair-shirt on one’s back. Besides, he intended to heap coals of fire on his old relative’s head – and they would be far hotter than any winter sun.

  About a quarter-to-four Sam arrived within twenty paces or so of his aunt’s cottage. Once more he took a ‘breather’, and looked about him. At first sight the cottage had a neglected look. The garden was a forest of frozen weeds; a twisted old grey-barked apple-tree whose mossy branches showed above the palings was bushed with mistletoe. Only the thinnest plume of smoke was ascending from one of the broken chimney pots. So much the better, thought Sam; he would be the more welcome. Once more he heaved up his money-bags, and as he neared the rustic gate cast a glance at the upper windows. A shiver ran down his spine. He went cold all over. Every single blind in the house was down!

  It is yet another proof of Sam’s habitual absentmindedness that never for a moment had he anticipated his great-aunt Keren-Happuch might be no longer in this world. The marvel was indeed – had he only known it – that she had just managed only the very week before to attain her ninety-ninth birthday. Her hundredth was not for here.

  Sam, as he searched the blank and blinded casements, groaned aloud; both in sorrow at the doleful tidings they conyeyed to him, and in sheer fatigue and disappointment. It is indeed the worst of luck to be cheated of doing any human creature a good turn. Besides, the bags were incredibly heavy by now. Sam was not a camel. He had come along rejoicing in his burden, but the tho
ught of the long journey home was well-nigh insupportable. He would at least knock and enquire. He would venture a word or two with his aunt’s successor. He would ask for a glass of water.

  Pushing open the rickety gate he rapped softly on the door of the cottage. A little woman with an exceedingly small head and skimpy bare arms opened to him. She appeared to have been weeping. Indeed at the very mention of Sam’s aunt’s name she instantly flung her apron over her head and burst into tears. Sam was consumed with self-reproach.

  ‘Hush, hush! my poor poor, good good woman,’ he exclaimed, hastily seizing his money-bags and pushing his way into the dingy little sitting-room that lay beyond. ‘You must not grieve for my dear aunt like this. She has gone to a better world. Pray dry your eyes. I am her nephew, you must understand, and I came but to wish her “Many happy returns of the day” – though I see I am a little late.’

  Sam hoped to comfort the poor creature with these words; they merely made her tears course down anew. But at last her fit of weeping began to subside, and with Sam seated before her on a horse-hair chair, the little woman sobbingly explained to him precisely what the position was. It was not exactly grief, he learned, that was the cause of her lamentations. It was not grief, but bitter disappointment.

  She had been in his aunt’s service, she told him, since she was a mere child of twelve, and during the thirty-two years that had since elapsed she had been paid in wages exactly £2 8s. 4½d. in all. For this simple creature of so tender an age had scarcely set foot in the house when her crafty mistress had begun to persuade her that a fat bird in the bush is worth a complete flock in the hand. ‘Wait, Sallie, till I die,’ she would say; ‘and that won’t be long. Then you shall see what you shall see. What’s wages, you silly chit – what’s wages, compared with a snug little cottage like this, a garden full of gooseberry bushes, and a nest-egg in the Bank?’

  Bolt upright on his chair, his eyes fixed on either side his high-arched nose, Sam listened to this doleful story. Doleful indeed, for not only had his aunt gone to her last resting-place the day before, but her last Will and Testament had been read, and she had left her faithful servant not even a halfpenny. ‘Not so much as an ole scrubbin’-brush or a snub of soap,’ the poor creature exclaimed with a sob from the very depths of her being. ‘Lor, sir, I ain’t even had the strenth to hoise up the blinds!’

  Sam listened and listened and thought and thought. He then placed the tips of his long fingers together and stooping his sallow lean face over them he began to tell the one and only lie he had ever told in his life. But – as if to make up for it – it was a pretty long lie.

  ‘Ah, but my dear madam,’ he began, ‘we must not always judge by appearances. I grant you, things in this world often seem to be what in truth they are not. I am not blaming you, heaven forbid! You naturally thought that my poor dear deceased relative was nothing but a skinflint, if not a miser and a cheat. Nothing of the sort. Nothing of the sort. She was the gentlest, kindest, fairest, justest, generousest, magnanimousest great-aunt man ever had! She was a blessing – a thousand blessings – in disguise.

  ‘What’s more, I have known of your patience and industry and self-sacrifice ever since I was a little lad but so high: but scarce in breeches. “When and that I was but a little tiny boy,” you know, and so on. And you must understand that my poor dear aunt – little though my looks may suggest such a thing – believed me to be a business-man, and prudent. Every Lady Day, Midsummer Day, Michaelmas Day, Christmas Day for the last thirty-two years – punctual as the rent collector himself – she has made over to me no less a sum than £3 sterling, and on Boxing Day she habitually added what she called a little makeweight as well. “Keep it safe for me, my dear Samuel,” she would entreat me, “keep it as safe as you would the apple of your eye. It is intended at last for the most amiable creature in the world. Her name is Sallie – Sarah, you know. She has been with me since she was a pretty blushing slip of twelve. Not if I were the old lady of Threadneedle Street herself could I ever hope to leave behind me anything resembling a true token of my lifelong affection and gratitude. Still, when I am myself no more, she will know I have never forgotten her.” These, I assure you, were my aunt’s very words. Only last week, my dear madam (and pray continue to dry your eyes) – only last Thursday she sent me a postcard bidding me visit the Bank and bring these trifles along. Death, Sallie, is no respecter of times or persons. It grieves me to the heart that my aunt herself was unable to present you with this small tribute of her thanks. Still, I am her only nephew and here it is.’

  With that he stooped low, hoisted his two bulging bags from the floor and placed them on the table.

  ‘Oh sir, oh sir,’ Sallie cried at sight of them. ‘And them all for the likes of me!’ and could say no more.

  Extreme happiness is almost as difficult a thing to face as the bitterest of disappointments. Sam rose to his feet and hastily withdrew. A mist blurred his eyes; he could but follow his nose.

  The darkness of a December evening was now down upon the streets. The lamplighter had long since gone his way. Even the robin had hopped into cover for the night. Sam felt a little faint after so many revulsions of feeling. That long ‘story’ – so blameless in intention that it hardly deserved to be called even a white lie, had tired him out. The consequence was that five minutes after leaving behind him Lovers’ Walk – a sight of wonder with its hoarfrost in the starshine – Sam ventured to make yet another precedent in his strange see-saw life, for he sidled into The Three Jolly Wagoners – a cosy little ale-house that stood on the outskirts of the town, and called for a stone bottle of ginger-beer.

  And as he sipped it, ruminating on his afternoon’s work, his eye chanced to wander to the mirror that backed the row of gaudy holly-decked bottles behind the bar; and there he saw a human being in a high hat, with two wisps of silvering black hair descending on either side his cheeks, a full black cravat, two piercing black eyes, and a nose of a shape and magnitude that might have been the pride and glory of Charlemagne himself.

  It was a figure you might first have mistaken for the great Cinquevalli and next for Nicolo Paganini. In fact, he saw our Sam. And yet once more he smiled – a long, genial, indefatigable smile – and lifting his frothing glass to his lips he solemnly and silently drank both Noses’ health.

  The Three Sleeping Boys of Warwickshire*

  In a long, low-ceiled, whitewashed room on the upper floor of a red-brick building in Pleasant Street, Cheriton, ranged there in their glazed cases, is a collection of shells, conchs, seaweeds, sea-flowers, corals, fossils, goggling fish, stuffed birds – sea and land – and ‘mermaids’. Coffers, chests and anchors, and old guns, and lumps of amber and ore and quartz. All sorts of outlandish oddities, too, curiosities and junk. And there for years and years – the narrow windows, with their carved brick fruits and flowers and old leaden gutters, showering the day’s light upon their still retreat – there for years and years slumbered on in their great glass case the Three Sleeping Boys of Warwickshire. The tale of them goes a long way back. But so, too, do most tales, sad or merry, if only you will follow them up.

  About the year 1600, when Queen Elizabeth was sixty-seven, and William Shakespeare was writing his play called Julius Caesar, there died, twenty-four miles from Stratford-on-Avon, a rich miller – John James Nollykins by name. His was the handsomest mill in Warwickshire. But none of his neighbours – or none at least of his poorer neighbours – could abide the sight of him. He was a morose, close-fisted, pitiless old man. He cheated his customers and had no mercy for those whom he enticed into his clutches.

  As he grew older he had grown ever more mean and churlish until at last he had even begun to starve his own horses. Though he died rich, then, few of his neighbours mourned him much. And as soon as he was gone his money began to go too. His three sons gobbled up what he had left behind him, as jackals gobble up a lion’s left supper-bones. It slipped through their fingers like sand through a sieve. They drank, they diced, they gamb
led high and low. They danced, and capered and feasted in their finery; but they hardly knew offal from grain. Pretty soon they began to lose not only their father’s trade but also all his savings. Their customers said that there was not only dust but stones in the flour; and tares too. It was fusty; it smelt mousy. What cared they? They took their terriers rat-hunting, but that was for the sake of the sport and not of the flour. Everything about the Mill got shabbier and shabbier – went to rack and ruin. The sails were patched. They clacked in the wind. The rain drove in. There were blossoming weeds in the millstream and dam where should have been nothing but crystal water. And when their poorer customers complained, they were greeted with drunken jeers and mockery.

  At length, three or four years after the death of the miller’s last poor half-starved mare, his sons were ruined. They would have been ruined just the same if, as one foul windy night they sat drinking and singing together in the Mill-house, the youngest of them had not knocked over the smoking lamp on the table, and so burned the Mill to the ground.

  The eldest – with what he could pick up – went off to Sea, and to foreign parts, and died of yellow fever in Tobago. The second son was taken in by an uncle who was a goldsmith in London. But he was so stupid and indolent that he broke more than he mended; and at last, by swallowing an exquisitely carved peach-stone from China, which had been brought back to Italy by Marco Polo, so enraged his master that he turned him off then and there. He went East and became a fishmonger in Ratcliff Highway, with a shop like a booth, and a long board in front of it. But he neglected this trade too, and at last became a man-of-all-work (or of none) at the old Globe Theatre in Southwark, where he saw Shakespeare dressed up as the ghost in Hamlet and was all but killed as if by accident while taking the part of the Second Murderer in Macbeth.

 

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