It was pretty late when we went to bed the night that Mr. Saxon got telling stories, because after everybody had gone he sat on with Harry, and he and the Swedish gentleman didn’t seem to be inclined to go to bed at all, till at last I had to say it was long past twelve o’clock, and we should all lose our beauty sleep, and at last I got them to take their candles and go up to bed. There weren’t any letters for Mr. Saxon next morning, so they both went out for a walk, asking me the nicest walk to go.
They were quite jolly, Mr. Saxon being full of jokes, and insisting upon going behind the bar before they started and pretending to serve the customers, and asking questions about everything he saw; and when I told him anything, the Swedish gentleman had to put it down in the little black book he carried in his pocket, and I noticed he was always making notes in it—whenever Mr. Saxon thought of anything the other having to put it down for him. If a customer came in with a curious manner, Mr. Saxon would say, “Put that down;” and out came the book. If Harry told about something that had happened to him on a voyage, it was, “Put that down;” and I noticed the Swedish gentleman always pulled out about a dozen papers before he found the book. It seems Mr. Saxon picked up handbills, and cut things out of the paper, and wrote things on bits of paper, and everything had to go into the Swedish gentleman’s pocket, till he looked quite bulged out.{100}
Mr. Saxon, when he came in, wrote till dinner-time, and the Swedish gentleman had to copy all he wrote, and when he couldn’t read the words Mr. Saxon went on at him and said his common sense ought to tell him what they were, but there wasn’t anything to attract attention till they had their dinner. They had a very good dinner, and the air had evidently given them an appetite; but Mr. Saxon kept chaffing all the time, and saying the Swedish gentleman would have to be lifted out of his chair by a steam-crane if he ate any more, and begging him not to make us bankrupt, because we were young beginners.
And he told me while they were travelling abroad they had gone to an hotel where the meals were fixed price, and after staying two days the landlord came and offered them a pound to go somewhere else because the Swedish gentleman was ruining him. But I noticed that Mr. Saxon ate quite as much as the other; perhaps not so much meat, but he ate nearly all the apple-pie and three-quarters of a cold jam tart, and the Swedish gentleman didn’t touch the pastry at all.
And after Mr. Saxon had eaten all the pastry, if he didn’t tell me never to put such things on the table again for him, as they were poison; so the next day I only made a milky pudding, and then, if he didn’t say, “What, no pastry! Oh dear me! Here, Mrs. Beckett, go and make us half-a-dozen pancakes.”
What are you to do with a man like that?
The second day, in the morning, I saw that Mr. Saxon had got out of bed the wrong side.
He was groaning when I went to lay the breakfast, and he said his liver was bad, and his life was a burden to him; and certainly he did look green and yellow. And he was looking at himself in the glass, and going on because his hair wouldn’t lie down; and he kept banging it and saying he looked like a death’s-head, and he should be glad when he was in his grave.
I had put his letters—a dozen, I should say—on the table; but just as he was going to open them the Swedish gentleman came in and snatched them away.
“No, sir,” he said; “you have your breakfast first. I see how you are this morning; and there’s sure to be{101} something in the letters to annoy you, so have your breakfast first. I know you won’t eat any if you open them.”
He was right, for when I went to clear the things away Mr. Saxon was walking up and down the room in a dreadful rage, and the perspiration was streaming down his face.
“The wretches, the fiends!” he said, “to dare to say this to me! The scoundrels! but I’ll teach them a lesson; I’ll tell them what I think of them.”
And directly the cloth was off he seized the pen and ink and began writing page after page on letter-paper, and then tearing it up and groaning, and then beginning again.
“There!” he said, “that’s the sort of thing to say to wretches like that. Take that to the post at once.”
The Swedish gentleman took it and put it in his pocket, and went outside the door.
I followed him with the crumb-brush, and I said, “Shall I send the boy to the post with it, sir?”
He said, “Oh no; it’s all right. I sha’n’t post it at all.”
“What!” I said; “not post it?”
“No, bless you; if I were to post all the letters he writes to people when he’s in a rage he wouldn’t have a friend left in the world. I burn them instead. Why, when he’s put out like he is now he writes the most awful things to people. They don’t understand him, and might think he meant it; but I do understand him, and I don’t post the letters.”
“But don’t you tell him?”
“Oh yes; when he’s cooled down a bit, and had time to think; and then he’s very glad. He’s made no end of enemies through writing in a rage when I haven’t been by to stop the letters going; but he sha’n’t make any more if I can help it.”
“What a pity it is he has such a hasty temper,” I said.
“It is, because it gives people a wrong impression of him. But he can’t help it; it’s nervous irritability, and rages and furious letter-writing are only the symptoms.”
“Ah,” I said, “I know. He used to be like that when I was with him; but he’s all right when you know him.{102}”
“Yes,” he said, “he’s like the gentleman in the song—
‘He’s all right when you know him;
But you’ve got to know him fust.’”
When I told Harry about the bromide and about the letters that weren’t posted, he said—
“I say, missis, do you think he’s all right?”
“What do you mean, Harry, by ‘all right’?”
“Why, all right here,” and he touched his forehead.
“Why, of course he is. It’s only his curious way.”
“Well,” said Harry, “if you say so, I suppose it’s right. You know more about him than I do; but if I’d met him without being introduced I should have said that he was a lunatic, and the big foreigner was his keeper.”
That was a nice idea, wasn’t it? But, of course, a character like Mr. Saxon isn’t met with every day; and perhaps it’s a good job it isn’t. Too many of them would make things uncomfortable.
All that day Mr. Saxon was very excited, and I could see it was his liver by the look of him; and he kept groaning and saying his head ached, and he felt as if he’d been beaten black and blue.
He said he couldn’t write and he couldn’t read, and he couldn’t sit still, and so he came downstairs into our parlour and made Harry come and sit and talk with him. But he talked so much himself, Harry never had a chance. Harry did manage to say once what a fine thing it must be to be able to make money, and have your name stuck about the hoardings; and that was enough—that started him.
“A fine thing!” he said; “why, I’m the most miserable wretch that ever trod the earth! For twenty years I haven’t known what it is to be well for a single day. I’m always doubled up, I’m always in pain, I can’t go anywhere, I shun society, and I can’t eat anything without being ill for a week.”
“But you manage to write a good deal,” said Harry.
“Ah! I used to, but that faculty’s gone now. I’m too ill. I shall have to give up soon. Then I shall be ruined, and die in the workhouse. It’s an awful thing, Beckett, after working hard all your life, to die in the workhouse.{103}”
“Can’t say, sir,” said Harry jokingly; “I never tried it.”
But Mr. Saxon wouldn’t joke. He kept on talking in such a melancholy way that at last we all began to feel miserable. He said that life was all a mistake—that it was no good trying to be anything in the world, because death was sure to come, and that misery and trouble were our portions from the cradle to the grave. Then he began to tell the most dreadful stories about people he’d known, and the awful things that had happened to them; and Harry, who wasn’t used to that sort of thing, got up and said, “Excuse me, Mr. Saxon, I’ll go and get a little fresh air. If I listen to you much longer I shall begin to believe that I’d better take the missis and the baby and tie them round my neck and jump into the canal, before anything worse happens to us.”
“Oh, don’t mind me,” said Mr. Saxon; “I’m always like that when I’ve got dyspepsia—and I’ve got it awfully this afternoon.”
“Well,” said Harry, “the best thing for that is exercise. Come and have a good walk.”
They went out, Harry and Mr. Saxon and the Swedish gentleman, and when they came back they were all roaring with laughter. Mr. Saxon had forgotten all about his ailments, and Harry told me Mr. Saxon and the Swedish gentleman had been pretending that they were two agents from London, who were down to look for the next heir to a John Smith, who had died in Australia worth a hundred thousand pounds, and they’d been into all the cottages making inquiries and questioning the people about their great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, and Harry said that they’d set the whole village agog, and that half the people in it had tried to make out that they once had a relative named Smith. Harry laughed when he told me, because it was so droll, the way all the people began to tell Mr. Saxon their family histories, the Swedish gentleman taking it all down, as grave as a judge, in his note-book.
He said it was as good as a play. But it was an awful nuisance when people kept coming in and wanting to see the two gentlemen, and leaving bits of paper with the names of their ancestors written on, and old samplers, and{104} I don’t know what. And one old gentleman from the almshouses, who hadn’t been out of his room for three months, was brought down in a wheelbarrow, with his family Bible to show his mother’s maiden name was Smith; and he was so disappointed not to find the hundred thousand pounds waiting for him, that Harry had to give him a shilling and a bit of tobacco to comfort him.
It really was too bad of Mr. Saxon to have played a joke like that, because people in a country place always have an idea that they are “next of kin,” or whatever you call it, to rich people, and that there is unclaimed money waiting for them.
You have only to mention that somebody of their name is advertised for or inquired for, and they are certain that they are coming into a fortune. Almost every old lady in a country place believes that there is a fortune left to her somewhere, if she only knew where to look for it.
But Mr. Saxon got nicely paid out for his joke. There was an old lady who lived in the village, a regular character, called Mrs. Croker, though her real name was Mrs. Smith—Croker having been the name of her first husband and Smith of her second; but she went back to her first husband’s name when her second ran away. She was an awful tartar if all they say of her was true, and no wonder the first one died and the second ran away. She was married from the village, her family living there for centuries, and that’s how her history was so well known.
She married a very quiet, middle-aged man first, and went to live in London with him, where he worked at his trade; but she was the master, it seems, from the first. They had a little house over Lambeth way. She made him scrub the stairs and clean the steps, and do all the house-work that a woman generally does, before he went to his work and after he came home from it; and he had to give her all his money, and she allowed him so much a day, just enough for his fare and his dinner that he had to get out. And woe betide him if he didn’t come home to his tea to the minute he ought to be home!
He was due home at half-past five from his work, and{105} at five-and-twenty minutes to six the tea was all cleared away, and he had to go without for being late. Then she used to set him to do cleaning or whatever had to be done, and she always found him a job, because she said it wasn’t good for a man to be idle.
Once a friend called to see poor Mr. Croker, I was told, but she answered the door and gave the friend a bit of her mind. She said when a man came home he belonged to his wife, and she wasn’t going to have any dissolute companions coming there after him luring him into bad ways.
You can guess what a nice sort of woman she was; perhaps being over forty when she married had something to do with it.
Poor Mr. Croker was a very mild little man who daren’t say his soul was his own, and he obeyed like a lamb, and was very kind to her with it all, and I dare say loved her very much—for I’ve heard, and I dare say it’s true, that men do love women like that sometimes much better than women who let themselves be trodden on.
On Sunday Mr. Croker had to work harder than ever, because his wife went to church in the morning, and left him at home to do the cooking and get the dinner ready, and when she came home she sat down and let ............