If you look back at one of the chapters of these reminiscences of the ‘Stretford Arms,’ I forget which, you will find at the end that I was interrupted by the arrival of Mr. Saxon. He came without having sent a letter or a telegram to say that he was coming, and, of course, knowing what a dreadful fidget he was, that made me a little nervous, and I had to throw down my pen, and rush downstairs to see him myself, and make things as pleasant as possible. I was very glad that he had come again, because that showed he was pleased with our place, and had appreciated the attention shown to him; and that is one thing I will say for him, with all his odd ways, and his violent tempers, and his rages and fads, he was always deeply sensible of any little kindness shown to him. Poor man, he suffered dreadfully from his infirmity of temper; but I quite believe what he always told me—that it was nervous irritability, and that it was caused by his constant ill-health, and that awful liver of his.
“Mary Jane,” he has said to me often, when we’ve been talking, “if I’d only had decent health and a pennyworth of digestion I should have been an angel upon earth. I should have been too good for this world, and died young.”
“Well, sir,” I said, “then, under these circumstances, your liver has been a blessing to you instead of a curse, because it has prolonged your life.”
“Good heavens! Mrs. Beckett,” he almost shrieked. “Is it possible that you, you who have witnessed my awful sufferings, you who have seen me tear my hair and bite the{264} chair backs and kick the wall and hurl the coals out of the coal-scuttle at my own grinning demoniacal image in the looking-glass, can say such a thing as that? A blessing to prolong my life! Why, if the doctor had taken me away when I was born and drowned me in a pail of warm water, like they do the kittens, he would have been the best friend I ever had.”
“Oh, Mr. Saxon,” I said, “how can you say such dreadful things? I’m sure you have much to be thankful for. Many people envy you.”
“Do they?” he said. “Then more fools they. Look at me, Mrs. Beckett. Do you see how yellow I am? Do you know I go to bed at night half dead, and get up the next morning three-quarters dead, having spent the night in dreaming that I’m being hanged, or pursued by a mad bull, or having my chest jumped on by a demon? Do you know that I can’t open a letter without trembling, lest it should tell me of some awful disaster? That I’m so nervous, that if I see anybody coming that I know, I bolt round a corner to get away from them, and that I’m so restless that I can never stay in one place more than a week together, and that I’ve had the same headache for ten years straight off?”
“Yes, sir,” I said; “I know that you do get like that sometimes, and it must be very unpleasant; but if you’d take more care of yourself, and not work so hard, and take more exercise, perhaps you’d be better.”
He laughed a contemptuous sort of laugh.
“Oh, of course, it’s all my own fault. Everybody tells me that. When I was a boy, the doctors said I should outgrow it; when I was a young man, they said after thirty I should be better. When I was thirty, they said it was a trying age; but by the time I was forty I should be all right. Well, I’m forty now, and look at me. I’m a wreck—a perfect wreck.”
“Oh, come, sir,” I said; “I don’t see where the wreck comes in. You’re broad and upright, and you look as strong as a prize-fighter. Everybody who sees you says, ‘Is that Mr. Saxon? Why, I expected to see a cadaverous skeleton, by what I’ve heard about his being such an invalid.{265}’”
“Oh yes, I know,” he said; “people say the same thing to me. I never get any sympathy. I dare say when I’m in my coffin people will come and look at me and say, ‘What a humbug that fellow is! Why, he looks as jolly as possible.’”
I tried to turn the conversation, because when Mr. Saxon begins to talk about himself and his wrongs and his ailments he will go on for hours if you’ll let him, so I asked him if he was writing anything new.
“Yes,” he said; “I’m writing my will. I’ve come down here to be able to work at it quietly, without anybody coming and putting me in a rage, and making me say something in that important document, in my temper, that I may be sorry for afterwards. Mrs. Beckett, I’ve left instructions that I’m to be cremated. If you’d like to be present at the ceremony I’ll drop in a line to say that you are to be invited. It is a very curious spectacle, and well worth seeing.”
It was a nice thing, wasn’t it, for him to ask me to come and see him cremated? But it was no good taking him seriously when he was like that, so I said, “Thank you, sir; you are very kind; but I’d very much sooner see you eat a good dinner. What shall I order for you?”
He thought a minute, and then he said, “Let me see, I have four hours before dinner. I can get my will finished in three, so you can order me for dinner some salmon and cucumber, some roast pork and apple sauce, and a nice rich plum-pudding, and, I think, if I have a bottle of champagne with it, and after that some apples and some Brazil nuts, and a bottle of old port, the chances are that I shan’t linger long.”
“Oh, Mr. Saxon,” I said, “the idea of your eating such a dinner as that, and you complaining of indigestion! Why, it’s suicide!”
“Of course it is,” he said, with an awful grin. “That’s what I mean it to be. It’s the only way I can do it without letting the blessed insurance companies have the laugh of me.”
I only give you this conversation just to show you the sort of mood he was in when he came on his second visit. He hadn’t brought the Swedish gentleman with him to{266} get into a temper with, and as he could not well go on at me and Harry, he went on the other tack, and turned melancholy.
I felt as if I should like to give him a good shaking; but, of course, I was obliged to be polite, so I said, “If you are dull when you’ve done your work, sir, I hope you will come downstairs and sit with us; my husband will be very pleased, I’m sure.”
“Thank you,” he said; and then he went upstairs, and presently when I passed his door I heard him giggling to himself, and presently he laughed right out loud.
I thought to myself, “I wonder what he’s so merry about all by himself,” so I knocked at the door, and made an excuse to go in.
He had several sheets of paper in front of him, and he was chuckling and writing, and grinning all over his face.
“Here, Mrs. Beckett,” he said, “what do you think of this for a will?”
“Good gracious, sir!” I said, “you’re not laughing over your will, are you?”
“Yes, I am. I can’t help it. It’s so jolly funny. Ha, ha, ha!”
He began to read his will to me, and presently, I couldn’t help it, I was obliged to laugh too. It was so utterly ridiculous. He had actually gone and made a comic will leaving the oddest things to people, and cracking jokes about everything, just as if it was the funniest thing in the world to say what’s to be done with your property when you’re dead.
“I say, Mrs. Beckett,” he said, “won’t it be a lark when the old lawyer reads this out? I hope he’ll be a good reader, and make the points. I’d give something to see the people when they hear it read. I hope they’ll be a good audience.”
When he saw that it amused me, he was as pleased as Punch, and quite jolly. All his melancholy had gone. He read that will over and over again to himself, and seemed thoroughly to enjoy it; and I’m quite sure that he felt awfully sorry that he couldn’t get all the people called together and have it read to them without his being dead,{267} so that he could hear them laugh at what he called his “wheezes.”
He said that he was sure his will would be a great success, and it put him in a good humour for the rest of the day, and he quite enjoyed his dinner, which, you may be sure, wasn’t roast pork or salmon, as he had ordered; but a nice fried sole, and a boiled chicken, and a semolina pudding, which I knew wouldn’t hurt him, and I wouldn’t let him have the champagne, pretending that we were quite out of the only brand he cared for.
After dinner he smoked a cigar by himself, and then he came down into our bar-parlour and smoked a pipe.
Several of our regular customers knew him, through his having been with us before, and they remembered him, so he joined in the conversation, which got on foreign parts; and, as he was known to travel abroad a good deal, they asked him questions about the places he had seen.
I will say this for Mr. Saxon: he never wanted much encouragement to start him off talking, and when he did begin he went on.
I’m quite sure that it wasn’t all true what he told the people in our bar-parlour. He couldn’t help exaggerating, if it was to save his life; but I believe the stories he told were founded on fact, only he made them as wonderful as he could.
He had been in the winter to Africa, and he told us of a very wonderful adventure he had with a lion. It seems he was very anxious to kill a lion and bring it home with him. So one day that he heard a lion had been seen in the mountains near where he was, he went off on a hunting expedition and camped out in the open air. The first night he thought it was very jolly; but when he woke up in the morning he found he had got the rheumatics so fearfully that he could hardly move. So he told the Arabs, who were with him, to go hunting, and he would stop in the tent and rub himself with liniment, as he couldn’t walk till the rheumatics went off.
The Arabs went off to look for the lion, and soon after they had gone Mr. Saxon heard a curious noise, and looking up, he saw a great big lion coming stealthily towards him.
He was awfully frightened, and picked up his gun and{268} went as white as death, and waited for the animal to come on. When it began to move, he noticed it was rather lame, and moved very slowly, so he aimed at it and fired; but not being a good marksman, the shot went a long way over the lion’s head.
Then he felt so frightened, he said, that he was quite paralyzed, and he fired again; but the bullet didn’t go near the lion.
Then he dropped his gun and tried to run away; but the rheumatism was so dreadful that he couldn’t move, and still the lion crept nearer and nearer. He gave himself up for lost, and thought he should never see anybody again, when the animal, who was evidently in pain, limped into the tent.
He thought it would jump on him and eat him, but instead of that it only sat down on its haunches by his side in the tent and groaned, and held up one of its paws.
All of a sudden, he having a lot of experience with dogs, guessed that the lion was suffering from rheumatism, and so he thought he would try an experiment. He got out his bottle of liniment, and took the lion’s leg and rubbed the liniment well into it, the lion sitting quite still all the time, only holding its head on one side, as the liniment was very strong, and it got up its nose and made its eyes water.
After he had rubbed it well the lion seemed to be better, and wagged its tail, and would have licked his hand, he said, only he didn’t like the liniment that was on it. And presently it got up and went away, walking much easier than before.
Mr. Saxon said the relief to his feelings was so great that he felt quite exhausted, and fell asleep, and when he woke up, to his horror he saw three lions in his tent—it was the lion he had rubbed, who had brought his wife, the lioness, and his eldest son, a very fine young lion, and it was evident that he had brought them to be rubbed with the liniment, as they held out their legs towards him.
Mr. Saxon said that evidently all the family had slept in a damp place and got rheumatic. He rubbed the lioness and the young lion till all his liniment was gone, and then they went away.{269}
When the Arabs came back in the evening they said they had had no sport, as they found the lions gone from their lair. “Yes,” said Mr. Saxon, “they have been here.” At first the Arabs would not believe him, but he showed them the footsteps of the lions, and then they did, and said it was very wonderful.
They had to camp in the same place that night, as Mr. Saxon was not well enough to go on. The next morning when they got up it was found that they were short of provisions, and they were wondering what they would do, when one of the Arabs said, “Oh, look there; there is a lion coming. Let us shoot him!” “No,” said Mr. Saxon, “perhaps it is one of my friends.” And so it was—it was the old lion, and he had a very fine sheep in his mouth. He marched into the tent, laid the sheep at Mr. Saxon’s feet, and then, nodding his head to the Arabs, turned round and walked away again.
He had brought Mr. Saxon a present of a sheep, to show his gratitude for being eased of the rheumatism with the liniment.
Mr. Saxon said it was one of the most wonderful instances of gratitude in a wild beast that had ever been known, and we all thought so too.
Some of the people in our parlour believed it was all gospel truth; but Harry laughed, and so did I. I had heard Mr. Saxon’s wonderful stories about his travels before.
I knew it was true about his suffering with rheumatism, though, because I had seen him; and I’ve heard the Swedish gentleman tell how, when Mr. Saxon was in Rome, he had it so bad that he could hardly move, and the twinges used to make him yell out. And one day one of the Pope’s chamberlains came to take him to the Vatican, and he couldn’t crawl across the room. He was in an awful state, because he was to be introduced to the Pope, and it was a great honour, and it made him very upset to think he should have to lose it. The Pope’s chamberlain, who was an Englishman, recommended a very hot bath. So Mr. Saxon had one put in his bedroom; and, in his hasty, impulsive way, got into it without trying the heat. It was so hot that he was nearly boiled alive, and he jumped out{270} in such a hurry that the bath was tilted over, and boiled all the pattern out of the carpet, and went through the ceiling, and Mr. Saxon danced about, and swore, and went on dreadfully—like he can if he’s put out. It cost him ten pounds for the damage; but his rheumatics had gone quite away, and he was able to be introduced to the Pope that afternoon; so he didn’t mind the ten pounds. But the Swedish gentleman told us that he was the colour of a boiled lobster for a............