LITMIR.BIZ

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days, falling about anyhow and doubling up tightly, and whackings of the stomach, and tears and cries of anguish. I never in my life heard my uncle laugh to his maximum except at her; he was commonly too much in earnest for that, and he didn’t laugh much at all, to my knowledge, after those early years. Also she threw things at him to an enormous extent in her resolve to keep things lively in spite of Wimblehurst; sponges out of stock she threw, cushions, balls of paper, clean washing, bread; and once up the yard when they thought that I and the errand boy and the diminutive maid of all work were safely out of the way, she smashed a boxful of eight-ounce bottles I had left to drain, assaulting my uncle with a new soft broom. Sometimes she would shy things at me – but not often. There seemed always laughter round and about her – all three of us would share hysterics at times – and on one occasion the two of them came home from church shockingly ashamed of themselves, because of a storm of mirth during the sermon. The vicar, it seems, had tried to blow his nose with a black glove as well as the customary pocket-handkerchief. And afterwards she had picked up her own glove by the finger, and looking innocently but intently sideways, had suddenly by this simple expedient exploded my uncle altogether. We had it all over again at dinner.

      “But it shows you,” cried my uncle, suddenly becoming grave, “what Wimblehurst is, to have us all laughing at a little thing like that! We weren’t the only ones that giggled. Not by any means! And, Lord! it was funny!”

      Socially, my uncle and aunt were almost completely isolated. In places like Wimblehurst the tradesmen’s lives always are isolated socially, all of them, unless they have a sister or a bosom friend among the other wives, but the husbands met in various bar-parlours or in the billiard-room of the Eastry Arms. But my uncle, for the most part, spent his evenings at home. When first he arrived in Wimblehurst I think he had spread his effect of abounding ideas and enterprise rather too aggressively; and Wimblehurst, after a temporary subjugation, had rebelled and done its best to make a butt of him. His appearance in a public-house led to a pause in any conversation that was going on.

      “Come to tell us about everything, Mr. Pond’revo?” some one would say politely.

      “You wait,” my uncle used to answer, disconcerted, and sulk for the rest of his visit.

      Or some one with an immense air of innocence would remark to the world generally, “They’re talkin’ of rebuildin’ Wimblehurst all over again, I’m told. Anybody heard anything of it? Going to make it a reg’lar smartgoin’, enterprisin’ place – kind of Crystal Pallas.”

      “Earthquake and a pestilence before you get that,” my uncle would mutter, to the infinite delight of every one, and add something inaudible about “Cold Mutton Fat.”…

III

      We were torn apart by a financial accident to my uncle of which I did not at first grasp the full bearings. He had developed what I regarded as an innocent intellectual recreation which he called stock-market meteorology. I think he got the idea from one use of curves in the graphic presentation of associated variations that he saw me plotting. He secured some of my squared paper and, having cast about for a time, decided to trace the rise and fall of certain lines and railways. “There’s something in this, George,” he said, and I little dreamt that among other things that were in it, was the whole of his spare money and most of what my mother had left to him in trust for me.

      “It’s as plain as can be,” he said. “See, here’s one system of waves and here’s another! These are prices for Union Pacifics – extending over a month. Now next week, mark my words, they’ll be down one whole point. We’re getting near the steep part of the curve again. See? It’s absolutely scientific. It’s verifiable. Well, and apply it! You buy in the hollow and sell on the crest, and there you are!”

      I was so convinced of the triviality of this amusement that to find at last that he had taken it in the most disastrous earnest overwhelmed me.

      He took me for a long walk to break it to me, over the hills towards Yare and across the great gorse commons by Hazelbrow.

      “There are ups and downs in life, George,” he said – halfway across that great open space, and paused against the sky… “I left out one factor in the Union Pacific analysis.”

      “DID you?” I said, struck by the sudden chance in his voice. “But you don’t mean?”

      I stopped and turned on him in the narrow sandy rut of pathway and he stopped likewise.

      “I do, George. I DO mean. It’s bust me! I’m a bankrupt here and now.”

      “Then – ?”

      “The shop’s bust too. I shall have to get out of that.”

      “And me?”

      “Oh, you! – YOU’RE all right. You can transfer your apprenticeship, and – er – well, I’m not the sort of man to be careless with trust funds, you can be sure. I kept that aspect in mind. There’s some of it left George – trust me! – quite a decent little sum.”

      “But you and aunt?”

      “It isn’t QUITE the way we meant to leave Wimblehurst, George; but we shall have to go. Sale; all the things shoved about and ticketed – lot a hundred and one. Ugh!.. It’s been a larky little house in some ways. The first we had. Furnishing – a spree in its way… Very happy…” His face winced at some memory. “Let’s go on, George,” he said shortly, near choking, I could see.

      I turned my back on him, and did not look round again for a little while.

      “That’s how it is, you see, George.” I heard him after a time.

      When we were back in the high road again he came alongside, and for a time we walked in silence.

      “Don’t say anything home yet,” he said presently. “Fortunes of War. I got to pick the proper time with Susan – else she’ll get depressed. Not that she isn’t a first-rate brick whatever comes along.”

      “All right,” I said, “I’ll be careful”; and it seemed to me for the time altogether too selfish to bother him with any further inquiries about his responsibility as my trustee. He gave a little sigh of relief at my note of assent, and was presently talking quite cheerfully of his plans… But he had, I remember, one lapse into moodiness that came and went suddenly. “Those others!” he said, as though the thought had stung him for the first time.

      “What others?” I asked.

      “Damn them!” said he.

      “But what others?”

      “All those damned stick-in-the-mud-and-die-slowly tradespeople: Ruck, the butcher, Marbel, the grocer. Snape! Gord! George, HOW they’ll grin!”

      I thought him over in the next few weeks, and I remember now in great detail the last talk we had together before he handed over the shop and me to his successor. For he had the good luck to sell his business, “lock, stock, and barrel” – in which expression I found myself and my indentures included. The horrors of a sale by auction of the furniture even were avoided.

      I remember that either coming or going on that occasion, Ruck, the butcher, stood in his doorway and regarded us with a grin that showed his long teeth.

      “You half-witted hog!” said my uncle. “You grinning hyaena”; and then, “Pleasant day, Mr. Ruck.”

      “Goin’ to make your fortun’ in London, then?” said Mr. Ruck, with slow enjoyment.

      That last excursion took us along the causeway to Beeching, and so up the downs and round almost as far as Steadhurst, home. My moods, as we went, made a mingled web. By this time I had really grasped the fact that my uncle had, in plain English, robbed me; the little accumulations of my mother, six hundred pounds and more, that would have educated me and started me in business, had been eaten into and was mostly gone into the unexpected hollow that ought to have been a crest of the Union Pacific curve, and of the remainder he still gave no account. I was too young and inexperienced to insist on this or know how to get it, but the thought of it all made streaks of decidedly black anger in that scheme of interwoven feelings. And you know, I was also acutely sorry for him – almost as sorry as I was for

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