Short Stories 1927-1956 (33 page)

From ‘Wines’ he made his way through the galleries exhibiting curtains and ‘hangings’ (he shuddered), and china and glass – ‘most discouraging’. His spirits revived a little when yet another defunct and barbaric prince, this time from Abyssinia, supplied him in the Car Department with a vehicle whose only adequate use, to judge from the modesty of its dashboard, the simplicity of its engine and its price, would be a journey from this world into the next. Nevertheless His Highness had left it behind him.

Fleeting visits to counters bristling with ironmongery, turnery, kitchen utensils, and ‘provisions’ – and from motives of principle he omitted all mention of mulligatawny paste, chutney, West India pickles, and similar fierce and barbarous comestibles, vanished out of memory like the patterns of a kaleidoscope. The rather noisy annexe reserved for live stock Philip left unvisited. After deserts of dead stock it sounded inviting, but Philip’s was a dainty nose and he was sorry for orang-outangs. Not so napery and damasks: he revelled.

So too with the books. He had clear convictions of what a gentleman’s library should be without, but decided that it would take more leisure than he could spare this morning to expound them. Even the sight of a Work of Reference, however, is an excellent sedative; he ordered the choicest of obsolete dictionaries, old atlases, encyclopedias, bird, flower, and antique cookery books, ignored the Who’s-who’s – and retired.

As for pictures and statuary, one anguished glance into the dreadful chambers devoted to the fine arts had sent him scurrying on like a March hare. Nor, as he rather sadly realized, had he any need to linger at the portals of the Monumental Masonry Department, and he now suddenly found himself in the midst of a coruscating blaze of the precious metals and the still more precious stones. He had strayed into ‘Jewellery’ – a feast for Aladdin. Gold in particular – goblets and bowls and tankards, plates, platters, and dishes of it; clocks, chronometers, watches – from massive turnips, memorials of the Georges, to midgets like a threepenny-piece in crystal and enamel, many of them buzzing like bees, and all of them intent on the kind of time which is
not
wild or always nectarous, but of which Philip had always supposed there was an inexhaustible supply. But not, alas, for all purposes. Indeed, these officious reminders of the actual hour had for the first time a little scared him.

In the peculiar atmosphere that hangs over any abundant array of sago, cooked meats, candies, biscuits, coffee, tea, ginger, and similar wares, he had been merely a young bachelor on the brink of an establishment. But at sight of this otiose display of gewgaws in the lamplit mansion in which he now found himself, his fancy had suddenly provided him with a bride. She was of a fairness incomparably fair. The first faint hint of this eventuality had almost unnerved him. He lost his head and – his heart being
unconcerned
– his taste also. In tones as languid as the breezes of Arabia he had at once ordered her rings, bracelets, necklaces, pendants, brooches,
earrings
, not to speak of bediamonded plumes and tiaras, that would daunt the dreams even of the complete bevy of musical comedy young ladies on the British stage – not to mention that of Buenos Aires. And then, oddly enough, he had come to himself, and paused.

At the very moment of opening his mouth in repetition of a solo with which he was now entirely familiar – ‘R-O-M’, and so on – he sat instead, gaping at the tall, calm, bald, venerable old gentleman on the other side of the counter. He had flushed.

‘Have you,’ he inquired almost timidly at last, his eyes fixed
on a chastely printed list of cutlery and silver ware that lay on the glass case at his elbow, ‘have you just one really simple, lovely, rare, precious, and, well, unique little trinket suitable for a lady? Young, you know? An
un
-birthday present?’

The old gentleman looked up, looked at, looked
in,
smiled fondly,
reminiscently
, and, selecting a minute key on a ring which he had drawn out of his pocket, opened a safe not half a dozen yards away. ‘We have this,’ he said.

‘This’, at first, was a little fat morocco leather case. He pressed the spring. Its lid flew open. And for an instant Philip’s eyesight failed him. But it was not so much the suppressed lustre of the jewels within that had dazed his
imagination as the delicate marvel of their setting. They lay like lambent dewdrops on the petals of a flower. The old gentleman gazed too.

‘The meaning of the word “simple”,’ he suggested ruminatively, ‘is one of many degrees. This, sir, is a Benvenuto Cellini piece.’ He had almost whispered the last few syllables as if what in workmanship were past all rivalry was also beyond any mortal pocket; as if, in fact, he were telling secrets of the unattainable. The tone piqued Philip a little.

‘It is charming,’ he said. ‘But have you nothing then of Jacques de la Tocqueville’s, or of Rudolph von Himmeldömmer’s, nothing of – dear me, the name escapes me. The earlier Florentine, you will remember, no doubt referred to in
Sordello,
who designed the chryselephantine bowl for the Botticelli wedding-feast. But never mind. Nothing Greek? Nothing Etruscan –
poudre
d’or
?
Are you suggesting that the Winter Palace was thrice looted in vain?’

The old gentleman was accustomed to the airs and graces of fastidious clients and merely smiled. He had not been listening very intently. ‘You will appreciate the difficulty, sir, of keeping anything but our more trifling pieces actually within reach of the nearest burglar with a stick of gun-cotton or an acetylene lamp. This’ – he stirred the little leather case with his finger as lithely as a cat the relics of a mouse, and its contents seemed softly to sizzle in subdued flames of rose and amber and blue – ‘this,’ he said, ‘
happens
not to be our property. It is merely in our keeping. And though to an article of such a nature it is absurd to put a price, we have been asked to dispose of it; and by – well, a client for whom we have the profoundest respect.’

‘I see’; Philip pondered coldly on the bauble, though his heart was a whirlpool of desire and admiration. He swallowed. The remote tiny piping of a bird that was neither nightingale nor woodlark, and yet might be either or both, had called to him as if from the shores of some paradisal isle
hidden
in the mists of the future. He glanced up at the old gentleman, but his bald, long, grey countenance was as impassive as ever.

‘I’ll take it,’ Philip said, and for a while could say no more. When speech was restored to him, he asked that it should be delivered not ‘with the other things’, and not to any butler or major-domo or other crustacean that might appear in answer to a knock at No.444, but by special messenger into his own personal private hands.

‘Precisely, at half-past four, if you please.’ The old gentleman bowed. As there was not enough room in the money column of his order-book for the noughts, he had written in the price in longhand, and was engaged in
printing
the figures 444 in the place reserved for the customer’s address, when a small but clearly actual little voice at Philip’s elbow suddenly shrilled up into his ear —‘Mr Philip Pim, sir?’ At echo of this summons Philip stood
stock-still and stiff, his heart in his ears. ‘The sekkertary, sir,’ the piping voice piped on, ‘asks me to say he’d be much obliged if you would be so kind as to step along into his office on your way
hout,
sir.’

The tone of this invitation, though a little Cockney in effect, was
innocence
and courtesy itself; yet at sound of it every drop of blood in Philip’s body – though he was by no means a bloated creature – had instantly
congealed
. This was the end, then. His orgy was over. His morning of
mornings
was done. The afflatus that had wafted him on from floor to floor had wisped out of his mind like the smoke of a snuffed-out candle. Yet still the bright thought shook him: he had had a Run for his money. No – better than that: he had had a Run
gratis.

He must collect his wits: they had gone wool-gathering. At last he
managed
to turn his head and look down at the small, apple-cheeked,
maroon-tunicked
page-boy at his side – apple-cheeked, alas, only because he had but that week entered the sekkertary’s service and his parents were of country stock.

‘Tell Sir Leopold Bull’ – Philip smiled at the infant – ‘that I will endeavour to be with him in the course of the afternoon. Thank you. That, apart from the rest,’ he added for the ear of his friend on the other side of the counter, ‘that will be all.’

But Philip was reluctant to leave him. The last four words, as he had heard himself uttering them, sounded on in his ear with the finality of a knell. He was extremely dubious of what would happen if he let go of the counter. His knees shook under him. A dizzy vacancy enveloped him in. With a faint wan smile at the old gentleman, who was too busily engaged in returning his treasures to the safe to notice it, he managed to edge away at last.

Every mortal thing around him, gilded ceiling to grand-father clock, was at this moment swaying and rotating, as will the ocean in the eyes of a
seasick
traveller gloating down upon it from an upper deck. He felt ill with foreboding.

But breeding tells. And courage is a mistress that has never been known to jilt a faithful heart. Philip was reminded of this as he suddenly caught sight of a sort of enormous purple beef-eater, resembling in stature a Prussian dragoon, and in appearance a Javanese Jimjam. This figure stood on duty in the doorway, and appeared to be examining him as closely as if he were the heir to the English throne (or the most nefarious crook from Chicago). As Philip drew near he looked this monster full in his fish-like eye, since he was unable to do anything else. But try as he might he couldn’t pass him in silence.

‘Ask Sir Leopold Bull, please,’ he said, ‘to send an official to show me the way to his office. He will find me somewhere in the building.’

‘I can take you there meself,’ replied the giant hoarsely. He could indeed – bodily.

‘Thank you,’ replied Philip. ‘I have no doubt of it. But I should be much obliged if you would at once deliver my message.’

He then groped his way to yet another wicker chair not many yards along a corridor festooned with knick-knacks from Japan and the Near East, and clearly intended for speedy disposal. He eyed them with immense distaste and sat down.

‘Nothing whatever, thank you,’ he murmured to a waitress who had approached him with a card containing a list of soft drinks. Never in his life had he so signally realized the joys of self-restraint And though at the same moment he thrust finger and thumb into his waistcoat pocket in search of his Uncle Charles’s last sovereign, it was with a view not to material but to moral support. Years before he had often tried the same
device
when as a small boy deadly afraid of the dark he had managed at last to thrust his fevered head up and out from under his bedclothes, and to emit a dreadful simulacrum of a croupy cough. He had never known it to fail of effect, and it was always nice to know his mother was
there.

So, too, with his Uncle Charles’s sovereign. It was nice to know it was there, though it
was not the dark Philip was now afraid of but the light. Resting the ivory handle of his walking-stick on his lower lip, he began to think. What would his sentence be? A first offender, but not exactly a novice. Not, at any rate, he hoped, in taste and judgment. Months or years? Hard labour or penal servitude? So swift is the imagination that in a few seconds Philip found himself not only – his sentence served, the smiling governor bidden farewell –
out
and a free man again, but fuming with rage that he had not managed to retain a single specimen of his spoils. The Jobbli dressing-bag, for instance, or that tiny, that utterly and inimitably ‘unique’ little Sheraton Sheridan writing-desk.

He came back a little stronger from this expedition into the future. For reassurance, like hope, springs eternal in the human breast. His one regret was not so much that he had been found out (that might come later), but that he had been found out so soon. How much bolder, less humiliating, nobler, to have actually bearded that old curmudgeon of an uncle of his, swapp or bogey in hand, in his den!

That in any event he would have been ‘found out’ on the morrow, as soon, that is, as the first van arrived at No.444, he had realized long ago. He certainly would not have been found ‘in’! But even one brief night in May seems, in prospect, a long interval between being a Croesus and a felon in Pentonville.

He was recalled from these reflections by a young man whose sleek black hair was parted as neatly in front and in the middle as his morning coat was
parted behind. A few paces distant, like a mass of gilded pudding-stone, stood the giant from the Jewellery Department. Were they in collusion? Philip could not decide.

‘If you would step this way, sir, to the secretary’s office,’ said the young man, ‘Sir Leopold Bull would be very much obliged.’

Philip mounted to his feet and, though he flatly refused to step
that
way, followed him – to his doom. That, however, was not to be instantaneous, for on his arrival Sir Leopold Bull, rising from his roll-top desk with a brief but thrilling smile, first proffered a plump white hand to his visitor and then a chair. It seemed to be a needlessly polite preamble to the interview that was to follow. Philip ignored the hand but took the chair.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I do hope you will some day take my advice, Sir Leopold, to
sim
plify the arrangement of this building. It is a perfect labyrinth, and I always miss my way.’ With a sigh he sank down into the cushions. He was tired.

‘My uncle, Colonel Crompton Pim,’ he continued, ‘is unable to spare a moment to see you this morning. I regret to say he strongly disapproved of the Bombay ducks, or was it the Clam Chowder, you sent him on Friday. They were beneath contempt.’

Sir Leopold smiled once more, but even more placatingly. ‘I had the privilege of seeing Colonel Crompton Pim only yesterday afternoon,’ he replied. ‘He then expressed his satisfaction, for the time being, at the golf balls – the new
Excelsior
brand – with one of which we had the pleasure of supplying him
gratis
a week or two ago. The Bombay ducks shall be withdrawn immediately. I must apologize for not seeking you out in person, Mr Pim, but what I have to say is somewhat of a private nature and —’