The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon (37 page)

^{"Looker this fer a start, mate," he chuckled. "Right as royalty this is an' the conversion job already done for us! We oughter get twenty-five for this when I've got Blessing to give her a rub with Mansion polish. The dresser base is seventeenth century, an' as fer}

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^{that there 'anging bookcase wi' the fretted shelves, you wait till we got leather books in it. Look as if it had come out o' Blenheim Palace it will! There's money in the bits an" pieces too. No more fammy-rose worse luck, but the pistols is all flintlocks an" there's a Wild West Colt there, that oughter fetch a tenner now all them bang-bang programmes on the telly is startin' a fashion in six-shooters ! I tell you, Perfesser, you on'y made one slip up with this load. Chap said you give him an extra three quid fer them prams! I told him you muster made a mistake but he said no an' loaded 'em on me roof!"}

^{"There wasn't any mistake!" said Sebastian, indignantly. "It was the prams that put me on to all the other stuff."}

^{"But why? Who the 'ell wants prams? Young married couples wouldn't be seen dead pushing one o' them!"}

^{"Good heavens!" exclaimed Mr. Sermon, "they aren't for babies, they're for flowers!"}

^"Flowers?"

^{"Yes-freesias, flowering geraniums, hydrangeas standing outside shops and as centre-pieces in cafes. You've seen wheelbarrows used for that purpose, so I thought we'd have a go at prams. It's a gimmick and a very fashionable one too. The Royal Family are using nineteenth century perambulators and as soon as that gets in the magazines everyone will want one!"}

^{Tapper regarded Sebastian like a father whose favourite son has arrived home with news of a scholarship to University.}

^{"Perfesser!" he said solemnly, "I said it before an' I'll say it again. You're a natchrule! I knew it the minute I picked you up on the road top of the Hangman's! Flowers! Royalty! Outside shops-here-," and he rushed through the baize door and reappeared a moment later staggering under the weight of an orange box containing nine pots of lilies.}

^{"Stick 'em in an* wheel 'em out!" he urged. "Start wi' one an' keep the others in reserve. It never does to show two of anything unless they started life together!"}

^{Mr. Sermon arranged the pots and negotiated the perambulator through the piles of stock to the door where he wedged the handles against the angle of the porch.}

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^{They listed the stock, entered up and priced. Tapper put 'a starter' as he called it, on the witch-doctor's masks, explaining that African curios had been a drug on the market in his earlier days, but, like most things, their turn had come round and collectors were now scrambling for voodoo items. "Pistols is the same," he explained, "time was you could buy a sackful for a fiver but now, lumme, I see duelling pistols fetch sixty and seventy a pair, perviding they match and got all the twiddly bits to go with 'em. It's like I said, you can't never tell in this lark, one day's dustbin is tommorer's safe-deposit box! You seen the prints?"}

^{Mr. Sermon examined the prints, a bunch of five tied up with string and spotted with mildew. He spread them out on the floor and went down on his hands and knees, removing some of the dirt with a duster. Then he sat back on his heels with an exclamation.}

^{"I believe they're Rowlandsons!" he shouted.}

^{"Rowlandsons! The poor man's 'Ogarth? Get on with you, let's have a look!" and he joined Mr. Sermon on the floor where they carefully examined the five prints, setting three aside as doubtful and taking the remaining two to a desk where they could inspect them under electric light. One print was of a naval shipyard in the Medway area and the other was a barrack-room scene, reminiscent of Rowlandson's 'Hussar Barracks'. All the characters had the happily debauched look of the eighteenth-century poor and the firmness of line and general vigour of the scenes indicated the work of a first-class artist.}

^{"We'd never know for certain," said Mr. Sermon, "I can make nothing of the signatures, if they are signatures, but we could try them out at Christie's, couldn't we?"}

^{The profit-look had perched on Tapper's lean face. "We don't 'try 'em out' as you say, mate, we enter 'em as Rowlandsons and 'ope for the best. You got any idea what a Rowlandson print fetches ?"}

^{Mr. Sermon had not neglected to read sales catalogues since his entry into The Trade and he remembered exactly. "They're not terribly valuable," he said, "but one fetched a hundred and fifty at Sotheby's a month or so ago, I remember thinking it wasn't enough!"}

^{"Well, it ain't bad in the circumstances, is it?" said Tapper,}

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^{tolerantly, "we stand to get three-quarters of our outlay back on one item!" and he placed a fatherly hand on Sebastian's shoulder. "I'll tell you what we do," he went on, "I was gonner pay you the usual commission on this lot an" refund the two hundred now but seein' it's come out so well I don't reckon that's square. We'll go halves on the outlay and fifty-fifty on the profits!" and before Mr. Sermon could object he pulled out his customary roll of bank notes and peeled off exactly one hundred and one pounds, ten shillings. 'He may be sharp,' reflected Mr. Sermon, pocketing the money, 'but he's got his standards. How many dealers would have remembered the odd three pounds laid out on the prams?'}

^{The next moment they had confirmation of success for a big car stopped outside and a prosperous-looking couple got out and rattled the door on which the 'Closed' sign was displayed.}

^{"Open up, Perfesser," said Tapper, casually, "there's no such thing as overtime in this lark. I daresay we shall have to lissen to a description of her Aunt Matilda's log-box in Alabama but you never know, do you?"}

^{The woman wasted no time on preliminaries. "That pram," she said briskly, "how much is it?"}

^{"With or without the plants?" said Tapper, before Mr. Sermon could reply.}

^{"Without them," said the customer, "I've got plants. That's what I want the pram for."}

^{"Well, it's not reely for sale," said Tapper slowly, "it's part o' my shop window."}

^{"I'm sorry, but I must have it!" said the woman and turned to her so-far-silent husband: "We must have it, mustn't we, Barry? I mean, it's a ducky! It's just what we need for the conservatory!"}

^{Barry neither confirmed nor denied this claim but smiled a little fatuously and Mr. Sermon, who was learning fast, knew that he was a man sadly resigned to sudden stops in High Streets all over the the country.}

^{"Come now, I know you people," said the woman, "you'll take a profit if I offer you one."}

^{Tapper rubbed his blue chin and Sebastian heard the stubble rasp under his palm.}

^{"You don't see many of'em, do you?" he asked, almost piteously, and the woman said no you didn't and that was the reason she wanted to buy.}

^{"I ferget what it cost us," said Tapper, guardedly, "it was so long ago. Sling over the stockbook, Perfesser, an' let's see if we can oblige the lady. I know one thing, my missus isn't gonner like it, she sets a big store be that there pram!"}

^{Mr. Sermon gave him the book, his face betraying nothing of the blatancy of Tapper's sales-talk. 'I wonder if she would still buy if someone told her that the pram had been there five minutes, that it wasn't even entered in the stockbook, and that Tapper's wife had been dead for years?' he mused. Tapper thumbed slowly through the pages of the ledger and Sebastian wondered whether he should begin lifting the plants from the pram, for there could be but one end to the incident.}

^{"Ah, here we are," said Tapper, presently, "one early Victorian per-am-bew-later! Eighteen-ten, ten bob on the carriage!" He snapped the book shut. "Stands us in at nineteen, m'm. It'll cost you twenty-four!"}

^{"Twenty-two ten!" said the woman unexpectedly and Tapper shivered as though someone had doused him with cold water.}

^{"Can't do it, m'm, worth more'n that to me as a 'bringer in'. It brought you in, didn't it now?"}

^{The woman relaxed and smiled. She was, thought Mr. Sermon, accustomed to this kind of thing but was not nearly so good at it as she imagined herself to be.}

^{"You look like a sport," she said, "I'll toss you twenty-two-ten or twenty-four!"}

^{Tapper cheered up a little. "I never could resist a gamble," he said, "but either way I got some explaining to do to the missus!" and he took a half-crown from his trouser pocket and without attempting to spin it whacked it down on the back of his hand. "You call, m'm!"}

^{"Heads!" she said.}

^{It was tails and Tapper showed her the coin. "Will you take a cheque?" asked the woman.}

^{"From a sport like you? "Course I will!" said Tapper, "so long as you write your name and address on the back!"}

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^{The husband wrote the cheque and they helped him stow the pram into the boot, wedging it with wads of newspaper. While they were occupied with this the woman found a Staffordshire poodle and paid for it with cash. The profit on the poodle was ten shillings.}

^{"Well, there you are, mate," said Tapper, rubbing his hands as the car roared off up the hill, "you bin proved right an' I bin proved wrong but who cares so long as we shift the stuff!"}

^{They spent a pleasant evening sorting the stock and when it was dusk Sebastian said good night and strolled down the High Street and along the front to The Coombe. His mind was chiefly occupied with Tapper's offer of a permanent partnership which had, he was bound to admit, considerable financial advantages. If the stock sold well and the prints did turn out to be Rowlandsons, he stood to make something like three hundred pounds on this deal alone and obviously he had a flair for this profession. On the other hand, did he really want to drift to that extent ? Was it a full life for a man who still had something creative to give in a profession for which he had been trained and for which he still felt he had a calling? He would have very much liked to have discussed the matter with Olga and when he arrived home he was pleased to find a fat letter from her, posted in Athens a few days before.}

^{He took the letter into the kitchen and read it over supper but his pleasure soon changed to disappointment. As he unfolded the sheets a sheaf of snapshots fell out, coloured pictures taken in brilliant sunshine and he looked at them incuriously until he came upon one of Olga standing against the rail of the ship beside a lean, saturnine man about his own age. The man, who wore a yachting cap not unlike Sebastian's official headgear, had his arm about Olga's neat waist and there was in Olga's expression an archness that Sebastian associated with wedding pictures in a local paper. He studied the snap with disapproval. Somehow it seemed almost indecent that Olga Boxall, shy and virginal all these years, had progressed as far and as fast as the snap seemed to indicate. Who was the man in the yachting cap ? How came she to let herself be taken in a quasi-honey-moon pose and have the nerve to send him evidence of her emancipation? He read the letter sulkily, skimming through two or three pages of descriptive matter until he arrived, with a nasty jolt, at the}

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^{operative paragraph. "I think one of the reasons I kept putting off this trip," she wrote, gaily, "was the feeling that I should find travel of this kind lonely. I had the idea that I might be shut up on board with a crowd of people who weren't
'me
and from whom there was no escape but quite the reverse is true. I've rather surprised myself with the ease with which I've made friends among the passengers and in the pictures you'll see one or two of them, particularly Andrew, taken on board as we got into Naples. He is a very charming man and reminds me very much of you in some ways, a publisher from Boston making his first trip to Europe which I thought odd because he's very comfortably off and the kind of man one would imagine was often over here on business. His wife died a year or so ago and he has a daughter about nineteen. I think they were a very happy family and after his wife's death he forced himself to make the trip because he couldn't readjust himself. He's like you inasmuch as he's a very interesting talker and you know what a good listener I am! We had a wonderful time ashore in Naples and went to Pompeii, where I always wanted to see those naughty pictures on the walls but they wouldn't let the women in! We've all been teasing him ever since to tell us what they were like but he. . ." and suddenly Mr. Sermon found that he was unable to read on for irritation choked him as he pictured Andrew, the rich, widowed publisher, surrounded by a giggling group of English spinsters giving their inhibitions an airing at the expense of a few 2,ooo-year-old paintings on the wall of a brothel. It was all too silly and schoolgirlish, he thought, and he was surprised and disappointed that a woman possessing her kind of commonsense and dignity should subscribe to such a scene. It was very clear that a few weeks on board ship in the Mediterranean were having a distressing effect upon her.}

^{Moodily he finished the letter and then drifted into the little sitting-room where he stood leaning on the mantelshelf a moment, studying the theatrical photographs of Olga Boxall during her brief and improbable stage career. He found nothing to confirm the idea that a kittenish spinster had lain dormant in the shy-looking girl who had looked back at him from the frames. He could relate this girl to the woman who lay in his arms in this very room barely a month ago but not with the author of the letter, the coy voyager who let herself be photographed in the cuddly embrace of a middle-aged American publisher 'very comfortably off'!}