There was a great effervescence of rumor in Cubitt Town when Ted Munsey, came into money. Ted Munsey, commonly alluded to as Mrs. Munsey’s ‘usband, Was a molder with a regular job at Moffatt’s; a large, quiet man of forty-five, the uncomplaining appurtenance of his wife. This was fitting, for she had married beneath her, her father having been a dock timekeeper.
To come into money is an unusual feat in Cubitt Town; a feat, nevertheless, continually contemplated among possibilities by all Cubitt Towners, who find nothing else in the Sunday paper so refreshing as the paragraphs headed “Windfall for a Cabman” and “A Fortune for a Pauper,” and who cut them out to pin over the mantel-piece. The handsome coloring of such paragraphs was responsible for many bold flights of fancy in regard to Ted Munsey’s fortune, Cubitt Town, left to itself, being sterile soil for the imagination. Some said that the Munseys had come in for chests packed with bank-notes, on the decease of one of Mrs. Munsey’s relations, of whom she was wont to hint. Others put it at a street full of houses, as being the higher ideal of wealth. A few, more romantically given, imagined vaguely of ancestral lands and halls, which Mrs. Munsey and her forebears had been “done out of” for many years by the lawyers. All which Mrs. Munsey, in her hour of triumph, was at little pains to discount, although, in simple fact, the fortune was no more than a legacy of a hundred pounds from Ted’s uncle, who had kept a public-house in Deptford.
Of the hundred pounds Mrs. Munsey took immediate custody. There was no guessing what would have become of it in Ted’s hands; probably it would have been, in chief part, irrecoverably lent; certainly it would have gone and left Ted a molder at Moffat’s, as before. With Mrs. Munsey there was neither hesitation nor difficulty. The obvious use of a hundred pounds was to put its possessors into business — which meant a shop; to elevate them socially at a single bound beyond the many grades lying between the molder and the small tradesman. Wherefore the Munseys straightway went into business. Being equally ignorant of every sort of shopkeeping, they were free to choose the sort they pleased; and thus it was that Mrs. Munsey decided upon drapery and haberdashery, Ted’s contribution to the discussion being limited to a mild hint of green-grocery and coals, instantly suppressed as low. Nothing could be more genteel than drapery, and it would suit the girls. General chandlery, sweetstuff, oil and firewood — all these were low, comparatively. Drapery it was, and quickly; for Mrs. Munsey was not wont to shilly-shally. An empty shop was found in Bromley, was rented, and was stocked as far as possible. Tickets were hung upon everything, bearing a very large main figure with a very small three farthings beside it, and the thing was done. The stain of molding was washed from the scutcheon; the descent thereunto from dock timekeeping was redeemed fivefold; the dock timekeeping itself was left far below, with carpentering, shipwrighting, and engine-fitting. The Munseys were in business.
Ted Munsey stood about helplessly and stared, irksomely striving not to put his hands in his pockets, which were low; any lapse being instantly detected by Mrs. Munsey, who rushed from all sorts of unexpected places and corrected the fault vigorously.
“I didn’t go for to do it, Marier,” he explained, penitently. “It’s ‘abit. I’ll get out of it soon. It don’t look well, I know, in a business, but it do seem a comfort, somehow.”
“Oh, you an’ your comfort! A lot you study my comfort, Hedward!”— for he was Ted no more —“a-toilin’ an’ a-moilin’ with everything to think of myself, while you look on with your ‘ands in your pockets. Do try an’ not look like a stuck ninny, do!” And Hedward, whose every attempt at help or suggestion had been severely repulsed, slouched uneasily at the door, and strove to look as businesslike as possible.
“There you go again, stickin’ in the door-way and starin’ up an’ down the street, as though there was no business doin’.” There was none, but that might not be confessed. “D’y’ expect people to come in with you a-fillin’ up the door? Do come in, do! You’d be better out o’ the shop altogether.”
Hedward thought so too, but said nothing. He had been invested with his Sunday clothes of lustrous black, and brought into the shop to give such impression of a shop-walker as he might. He stood uneasily on alternate feet, and stared at the ceiling, the floor, or the space before him, with an unhappy sense of being on show and not knowing what was expected of him. He moved his hands purposelessly, and knocked things down with his elbows; he rubbed his hair all up behind, and furtively wiped the resulting oil from his hand on his trousers, never looking in the least degree like a shop-walker.
The first customer was a very small child who came for a ha’porth of pins, and on whom Hedward gazed with much interest and respect, while Mrs. Munsey handed over the purchase, abating not a jot of his appreciation when the child returned, later, to explain that what she really wanted was sewing cotton. Other customers were disappointingly few. Several old neighbors came in from curiosity, to talk and buy nothing. One woman, who looked at many things without buying, was discovered after her departure to have stolen a pair of stockings, and Hedward was duly abused for not keeping a sharp lookout while his wife’s back was turned. Finally, the shutters went up on a day’s takings of three and sevenpence farthing, including a most dubious threepenny bit. But then, as Mrs. Munsey said, when you are in business you must expect trade to vary; and of course there would be more customers when the shop got known, although Hedward certainly might have taken the trouble to find one in a busier thoroughfare. Hedward, whose opinion in that matter, as in others, had never been asked, retired to the back-yard to smoke a pipe — a thing he had been pining for all day; but was quickly recalled (the pipe being a clay) upon Mrs. Munsey’s discovery that the act could be observed from a neighbor’s window. He was continually bringing the family into disgrace, and Mrs. Munsey despaired aloud over him far into the night.
The days came and went, and trade varied, as a fact, very little indeed. Between three and sevenpence farthing and nothing the scope for fluctuation is small, and for some time the first day’s record was never exceeded. But on the fifth day a customer bought nearly seven shillings’ worth all at once. Her husband had that day returned from sea with money, and she, after months of stint, indulged in an orgy of haberdashery at the nearest shop. Mrs. Munsey was reassured. Trade was increasing; perhaps an assistant would be needed soon, in addition to the two girls.
Only the younger of the girls, by the bye, had as yet taken any active interest in the business, Emma, the elder, spending much of her time in a bedroom, making herself unpresentable by inordinate blubbering. This was because of Mrs. Munsey’s prohibition of more company-keeping with Jack Page. Jack was a plumber, just out of his time — rather a catch for a molder’s daughter, but impossible, of course, for the daughter of............