Short Stories 1895-1926 (17 page)

‘I'm not so sure,' her visitor replied vaguely, almost stubbornly. ‘Where else, after all, knowing all that, why, where else
could
he go?'

‘Mr Eaves, Mr Sully? Him? oh, no!'

Mr Sully, in the intense clear quiet of the bar, continued to stare at her in a manner something like that of an over-glutted vulture. He nodded.

Miss Lacey's kind brown eyes suddenly darkened as if with a gust of storm. ‘But, then, what about us?' she cried piteously, and yet with the tenderest generosity.

‘Well,' said Mr Sully, opening the door, and looking out into the sunny evening air, ‘if you ask me, that's merely a question of time.'

Lispet, Lispett and Vaine

Lispet, Lispett and Vaine
1

Maunders's little clear morning town was busy with dogs and tradesmen and carriages. It wore an almost child-like vivacity and brightness, as if overnight it had been swept and garnished for entranceable visitors from over the sea. And there – in the blowy sunshine, like some grotesque Staffordshire figure on a garret chimney-piece – there, at the street corner, sat so ludicrous an old man that one might almost have described him as mediaeval.

A peak cap, of a slightly marine, appearance, was drawn down over his eyes. Beneath it, wisps of grey hair and a thin beard helplessly shook in the wind; and before him stood a kind of gaping wallet, of cracked American cloth, held yawningly open by its scissor-legs. From this receptacle, ever and again, he extracted a strand of his dyed bast, or dubiously rummaged in its depths for his scissors. Whereupon he would gingerly draw the strand between his lips – a movement that positively set one's teeth on edge – and at the same moment he would cast a bleared, long, casual glance first down the street to his right – High Street; and then up the street to his left – Mortimer Street; as the bast drew him round.

I had watched him awhile from under the canvas window-blind of Lister Owlett's, the Curio Shop, in which my friend Maunders was chaffering with a dark sardonic-looking man over a piece of Sheffield plate, and, at last, with that peculiar mixture of shame, compassion, amusement, and horror which such ineffectual (though possibly not unhappy) beings produce on one, I had crossed the road and had purchased an absurd little doll bast marketing basket. Oddly, too,
after
I had actually selected my specimen, and had even paid its price, the queer remote old creature had insisted on my taking a rather more ornate example of his wares …

‘You know, Maunders,' I said, when we were a hundred yards or so beyond the old gentleman's pitch, ‘this thing isn't at all badly made. The pattern is rather pretty, and there's a kind of useless finish to it. There's still something to be said for the amateur. Anyhow, Bettie will like it.'

Maunders turned his long, large, palish face of his and looked at me with his extraordinary eyes. For the ninety-ninth time at least I noticed that their faint blue and his necktie's azure called each to each, as deep calls to deep.

‘Amateur!' he echoed blandly, though a peculiar fixity of attention had gathered into his gaze; ‘why, that old gentleman is the last of – of the Lispets.' He turned his head away – a queer-shaped, heavy head – and added: ‘Quite the last.'

‘Lispets, Maunders; what are they?'

“My dear K —, believe me,' said Maunders almost mincingly, ‘not everything is a jest. You must now have trodden the streets of this small town at least a dozen times. The Works – what remains of them – are not seven miles off. And yet, here you are, pleasantly fluting that you have lived a life of such obscurity as never to have heard of Lispet, Lispett and Vaine's. It's an affectation. I can scarcely forgive you. Nor will Henrietta.'

He was – as usual – gently thrusting-out before him his handsome malacca cane in a manner which frequently persuaded approaching pedestrians that he was blind. And he repeated
sotto voce,
and as if out of an ocean of reflection,' “Lispet, Lispett and Vaine; Mercers to Their Majesties …” I wish I could remember exactly how the old title went. In latter times, I mean.'

‘Who were “their Majesties,” then?'

‘“Their Majesties”?' said Maunders. ‘Oh, mere kings and queens. In the Firm's heyday they were, of course, the crowned heads of practically the whole barbaric globe. But what is history – mummified fact; desiccated life; the irretrievable. You are merely one of the crowd who care not tuppence for such things. The present generation – with its Stores and Emporiums and Trusts and “Combines” – is blind to the merest inkling of what the phrase Merchant Prince implies. We are not even conscious of irony in little Tommy Tucker's
Nation of Shopkeepers
. Other times, better manners. The only “entirely honest merchant” of late years – so far as I have definitely heard – is bones in Shirley graveyard. Still, the Lispet tradition was not one of mere honesty.'

‘What, then,' said I.

‘Well, in the first place,' replied Maunders, sliding me a remote ruminative glance, ‘it rambles back almost to prehistoric times. You may hunt down the aboriginals of the Firm for yourself, if you feel so inclined. They appear to have been Phoenicians. Tyre, maybe, but I gather non-Semitic. Some remote B.C. glasswork in the Egyptian galleries of the British Museum bears their “mark” – two inverted V's with a kind of P between. There are others – a cone “supported by” two doves; a running hound, a crescent moon, and a hand – just a slim, ungrasping hand. Such marks have been discovered, they say, woven into mummy linen, into Syrian embroidery, Damascus silks, and tapestry from the Persian Gulf.

‘The priestesses of Astaroth, according to Bateson, danced in gauze of L. L. & V.'s handiwork. They exploited the true bombyx ages before Ptolemy; their gold thread gleamed on the Ark of the Covenant; and it was fabric of their weaving in which the Queen of Sheba marvelled before Solomon. The shoes of his apes, sewn-in with seed pearls and splinters of amethyst were — But what's the good of chattering on like this? I'm not,' groaned Maunders with a muffled yawn, ‘I'm not a perambulating encyclopaedia. Some old pantaloon of a German, long before Bateson, burrowed in true German fashion into the firm's past. You may go to bed with his book, if you like – this very night. And then, of course, there are one or two of their old ledgers and curios in the local museum. But I'm not an antiquarian. My only point is that the past even of a soapboiler is none the worse for being the distant past. What's more, they knew in those days that objects are only of value when representative of subjects. Has it never occurred to you (no, I suppose not) that the Wisest's apes, ivory, and peacocks were symbolical? The apes representing, of course —'

‘
Of course,
' I interruped hurriedly. ‘But what I'm after, Maunders, is something faintly resembling matter-of-fact. These Lispet people – what is
really
their history? Subsequent, I mean, to the Apocrypha on which you have already drawn. Honestly, that pathetic old guy with the pouch of bast at the corner rather interested me.'

‘“Drawn on!” he says,' drawled Maunders. ‘When I have not even distantly referred to Joseph's Coat, or that she-devil Jezebel's head-dress, or to the Grand Khan, or to the Princess Assinimova, or to the tanned Barbary kid cuirass of steel and emeralds in which Saladin met his end. A Firm that, apart from clients celebrated in Holy Writ, once happily wrote off bad debts incurred with such customers as Semiramis, Sappho, Paris, and the Arch – or, as we amused moderns suppose, the exceedingly arch – Druids, might well boast – though it didn't – not only of its repute but also of its catholicity.

‘No, no'; he mooned slowly about him. ‘Your precious old “matter-of-fact”! As if you were a clerk in unholy orders, as if you bought your boots in Scotland Yard, as if you were a huckster of hardware. By all means you shall have the facts. But for heaven's sake – for heaven's sake, precocious K —, be careful with them. A friend of mine (an earnest man) was once given a fact, and it exploded – in his bathroom.'

Dangling the last-of-the-Lispet's little basket on my forefinger, I awaited the facts.

‘The point is,' Maunders murmured on, ‘what of the slightest interest to you can there be to say of a firm that is now dust, and that followed a tradition which in these days would within six months clap its partners into Bedlam or the Bankruptcy Court? You must confess that that kind of sweet reasonableness, hardly less than the modern variety, is at last death to any decent humanity. At long last, maybe. And how divine a decay! Anyhow, there they were – and there, too, are the ruins of them, edging the smooth sloping crest of Adderley Hill, on the other side of the town. Henrietta shall take you there tomorrow, if you're a polite guest. She loves to expatiate on that kind of rubble – the Failures.

‘Still, try to imagine it, my dear K —, in its green and early days. A long range of low buildings, part half-timbered Tudor, with a few wombed-in bits of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century work, and a fringe of excellent eighteenth-century – weathered and lovely moulded brick. In its prime it must have been a ravishing sight, with its hanging sign of faded blue and gold, its walls and thatch, and shingles, cobbled alleys and water-conduits, worn and mellow with the peace of a thousand thousand sunsets, the mosses and rain-stains and frost-flowerings of centuries of autumns and winters – just England's history, moral and actual, in antique stone and gable and mullion.

‘That's as it may be. I have no wish to exaggerate. There is no particular virtue in mere age – except to the imagination. Still, your mere “facts” are something I suppose. The fact that they were spinning silk – here in England – before the Conqueror came over. The fact that they were worldrenowned glovers long before Elizabeth's time. The fact that their Egyptian cotton must have been abob on the Mediterranean when Lancashire, please God, was a verdant solitude, and
your
forefathers, my poor dear, were gadding about in woad.

‘They had their foreign agents, of course, netting in handiwork from all over the globe, on which they themselves set the final seal. I won't labour the point. All I suggest is that you should ask a Bond Street dealer to supply you with a Persian rug of L.L. & V. workmanship. But avoid the First of April for the enterprise. And yet, do you know, there was really nothing at the root of them but – well, a kind of instinct: to keep themselves clean. Animals share it. That, and the pride with which a single virtue darkens and suffocates a man if he isn't for ever toiling to keep its growth under. The one secret of their stability, of their being, and, in times past, of their success, was simply this – that nothing they should, would, or could ever conceivably offer for sale need disturb for a breath of a sob or the weight of a dewdrop the ashes of their sleeping forefathers in Adderley Churchyard. The like of which their forefathers had done by
their
forefathers.

‘Why, if the ancient Hebrew Jews bequeath the very droop of their noses, why shouldn't an old English “House” bequeath its tradition? They believed – not Athanasian fashion but in their insides, so to speak – they believed in that perfect quality and consummate workmanship which, naturally, only exorbitant prices can assure. Exorbitant prices, mind you, not profits. They valued their fair fame. Only what was good enough for a Lispet could hope to satisfy a partner who spelt his name with two t's, and only what satisfied a Lispett left unashamed the conscience of a Vaine.

‘In plain Anglo-Saxon, the whole thing in decent practical moderation was merely the positive forecast of a Utopian dream. If ever you pass that way, rest for a moment at the mouth of the Well at the World's End. And drink, pretty creature. Perhaps you will discover a cone supported by two doves scrawled on the bottom of its bronze bucket.'

‘Perhaps,' I echoed, as cheerfully as possible.

‘At an extreme, of course, this tradition became the very devil. I don't say they made any claim to be gentry, or that they refused any kind of exalted alliance if nicely and unostentatiously proffered. There's an old tale of one of their apprentices who went sightseeing in the fourteenth century. Among other little romantic adventures, he hunted the Unicorn, got a siren with child, fought a demon in Babylon, and bartered tiaras with the reigning Pope in Avignon – very much at that precise moment at a loose end.

‘Still a tale's only a tale, though none the worse for that. You want naked facts – a most indecorous variety; and one of them is that during the nearer centuries the three families riotously intermarried, making the green one red, as the poet says. They were self-sufficient – like Leonardo. Except, of course, that they were artists only in the sense that they designed and distributed objects of flawless craftsmanship; while he was a consummate craftsman only by degree of his supreme art. And that was – or was not – between himself and the infinite, so to speak.'

‘I love your “so-to-speaks,” Maunders.'

‘It's very nice of you,' said Maunders. ‘But what I really want to say is that gradually the “standing” of the Firm lost everything in the nature of the precarious. Then, enter Beelzebub. Their only conceivable corruption could come from within, in one or two forms, putrefaction or petrifaction. Well, you shall see. In their earlier annals they can never so much as have tasted temptation to sink to trade devices. Progress, on the other hand, was practically denied to them. Their monopoly was the only one to be had for the asking – their integrity.