CHAPTER XIII. THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN
After cursory remarks about the business of the Office and his friend’s contributions to periodical literature, in which he was interested for as long as he had assurance that the safe income depending upon official duties was not endangered by them, Victor kicked his heels to and fro. Fenellan waited for him to lead.
‘Have you seen that man, her lawyer, again?’
‘I have dined with Mr. Carling:—capital claret.’
Emptiness was in the reply.
Victor curbed himself and said: ‘By the way, you’re not likely to have dealings with Blathenoy. The fellow has a screw to the back of a shifty eye; I see it at work to fix the look for business. I shall sit on the Board of my Bank. One hears things. He lives in style at Wrensham. By the way, Fredi has little Mab Mountney from Creckholt staying with her. You said of little Mabsy—“Here she comes into the room all pink and white, like a daisy.” She’s the daisy still; reminds us of our girl at that age.—So, then, we come to another dead block!’
‘Well, no; it’s a chemist’s shop, if that helps us on,’ said Fenellan, settling to a new posture in his chair. ‘She’s there of an afternoon for hours.’
‘You mean it’s she?’
‘The lady. I ‘ll tell you. I have it from Carling, worthy man; and lawyers can be brought to untruss a point over a cup of claret. He’s a bit of a “Mackenzie Man,” as old aunts of mine used to say at home—a Man of Feeling. Thinks he knows the world, from having sifted and sorted a lot of our dustbins; as the modern Realists imagine it’s an exposition of positive human nature when they’ve pulled down our noses to the worst parts—if there’s a worse where all are usefuclass="underline" but the Realism of the dogs is to have us by the nose:—excite it and befoul it, and you’re fearfully credible! You don’t read that olfactory literature. However, friend Carling is a conciliatory carle. Three or four days of the week the lady, he says, drives to her chemist’s, and there she sits in the shop; round the corner, as you enter; and sees all Charing in the shop looking-glass at the back; herself a stranger spectacle, poor lady, if Carling’s picture of her is not overdone; with her fashionable no-bonnet striding the contribution chignon on the crown, and a huge square green shade over her forehead. Sits hours long, and cocks her ears at orders of applicants for drugs across the counter, and sometimes catches wind of a prescription, and consults her chemist, and thinks she ‘ll try it herself. It’s a basket of medicine bottles driven to Regent’s Park pretty well every day.’
‘Ha! Regent’s Park!’ exclaimed Victor, and shook at recollections of the district and the number of the house, dismal to him. London buried the woman deep until a mention of her sent her flaring over London. ‘A chemist’s shop! She sits there?’
‘Mrs. Burman. We pass by the shop.’
‘She had always a turn for drugs.—Not far from here, did you say? And every day! under a green shade?’
‘Dear fellow, don’t be suggesting ballads; we’ll go now,’ said Fenellan. ‘It ‘s true it’s like sitting on the banks of the Stygian waters.’
He spied at an obsequious watch, that told him it was time to quit the office.
‘You’ve done nothing?’ Victor asked in a tone of no expectation.
‘Only to hear that her latest medical man is Themison.’
‘Where did you hear?’
‘Across the counter of Boyle and Luckwort, the lady’s chemists. I called the day before yesterday, after you were here at our last Board Meeting.’
‘The Themison?’
‘The great Dr. Themison; who kills you kindlier than most, and is much in request for it.’
‘There’s one of your echoes of Colney!’ Victor cried. ‘One gets dead sick of that worn-out old jibeing at doctors. They don’t kill, you know very well. It ‘s not to their interest to kill. They may take the relish out of life; and upon my word, I believe that helps to keep the patient living!’
Fenellan sent an eye of discreet comic penetration travelling through his friend.
‘The City’s mending; it’s not the weary widow woman of the day when we capsized the diurnal with your royal Old Veuve,’ he said, as they trod the pavement. ‘Funny people, the English! They give you all the primeing possible for amusement and jollity, and devil a sentry-box for the exercise of it; and if you shake a leg publicly, partner or not, you’re marched off to penitence. I complain, that they have no philosophical appreciation of human nature.’
‘We pass the shop?’ Victor interrupted him.
‘You’re in view of it in a minute. And what a square, for recreative dancing! And what a people, to be turning it into a place of political agitation! And what a country, where from morning to night it’s an endless wrangle about the first conditions of existence! Old Colney seems right now and then: they ‘re the offspring of pirates, and they ‘ve got the manners and tastes of their progenitors, and the trick of quarrelling everlastingly over the booty. I ‘d have band-music here for a couple of hours, three days of the week at the least; and down in the East; and that forsaken North quarter of London; and the Baptist South too. But just as those omnibus-wheels are the miserable music of this London of ours, it ‘s only too sadly true that the people are in the first rumble of the notion of the proper way to spend their lives. Now you see the shop: Boyle and Luckwort: there.’
Victor looked. He threw his coat open, and pulled the waistcoat, and swelled it, ahemming. ‘That shop?’ said he. And presently: ‘Fenellan, I’m not superstitious, I think. Now listen; I declare to you, on the day of our drinking Old Veuve together last—you remember it,—I walked home up this way across the square, and I was about to step into that identical shop, for some household prescription in my pocket, having forgotten Nataly’s favourite City chemists Fenbird and Jay, when—I’m stating a fact—I distinctly—I ‘m sure of the shop—felt myself plucked back by the elbow; pulled back the kind of pull when you have to put a foot backward to keep your equilibrium.’
So does memory inspired by the sensations contribute an additional item for the colouring of history.
He touched the elbow, showed a flitting face of crazed amazement in amusement, and shrugged and half-laughed, dismissing the incident, as being perhaps, if his hearer chose to have it so, a gem of the rubbish tumbled into the dustcart out of a rather exceptional householder’s experience.
Fenellan smiled indulgently. ‘Queer things happen. I recollect reading in my green youth of a clergyman, who mounted a pulpit of the port where he was landed after his almost solitary rescue from a burning ship at midnight in mid-sea, to inform his congregation, that he had overnight of the catastrophe a personal Warning right in his ear from a Voice, when at his bed or bunk-side, about to perform the beautiful ceremony of undressing: and the Rev. gentleman was to lie down in his full uniform, not so much as to relieve himself of his boots, the Voice insisted twice; and he obeyed it, despite the discomfort to his poor feet; and he jumped up in his boots to the cry of Fire, and he got them providentially over the scuffling deck straight at the first rush into the boat awaiting them, and had them safe on and polished the day he preached the sermon of gratitude for the special deliverance. There was a Warning! and it might well be called, as he called it, from within. We’re cared for, never doubt. Aide-toi. Be ready dressed to help yourself in a calamity, or you’ll not stand in boots at your next Sermon, contrasting with the burnt. That sounds like the moral.’